All tea (and by “tea” I mean tea, not the many and various herbal infusions of other sorts) comes from one plant: Camellia sinensis thea. There are several strains of this bush, and they are noticeably different as far as the character of the resulting tea, but the processing that tea undergoes during its manufacture has at least as much influence, if not more.
I’m not here to talk about that, though, except as it bears upon my subject, which is one of the traditional Chinese ways of coaxing tea from leaf.
I should also make a bit of a disclaimer here: I’m not Chinese, and my information comes at second hand. This means I’m likely to make some mistakes, both of omission and commission, so please take this page with a grain of salt.
Having said that, however, I get to point out that I have been learning from several people, one of whom is Chinese (Roy Fong), one of whom is married to someone who is Chinese (Richard Brzustowicz), and one of whom is running the International Tea Masters’ Association and working for Roy Fong (Justin Burke). Also, to a lesser extent, the redoubtable Joshua Lerner and Scott Searer, both of whom are likewise married to people who are Chinese. (I won’t even mention the astonishing Liralen Li.)
This doesn’t make me an expert, but at least it says my sources are on the side of the goddess of mercy (as it were). Nonetheless, if you find errors here, you must lay them at my feet, not at Kuan-Yin’s, nor at Roy’s, Richard’s, Justin’s, Joshua’s, nor Scott’s. (...And don’t even think about putting my goofs onto Liralen. It won’t wash.)
It seems that many people in China make tea in teapots about the same way many people in the US, Canada, England, France, Japan, and other heavy tea-drinking areas do. ...But not all. I’m not about to go into the joys and rigors of the Tea Ceremony of Japan here; that is extensively covered elsewhere, and my knowledge of it is meagre at best. There are, however, at least two other ways in which tea is frequently prepared, especially in China and Taiwan. One of these is simply to put the leaf in a glass or cup and pour hot water over it. When the water level gets low, more hot water is added. One presumably learns to avoid ingesting the leaves.
Another way that tea is prepared is in a sort of tea ceremony, which seems to be of Taoist origins. The most diluted form of this is a sort of tea-and-conversation ritual that is sometimes referred to as “Gong Fu Cha”. My aim here is to give you enough of an explanation of Gong Fu Cha to permit you to make tea this way yourself. (Another disclaimer: I'm trying to find out whether the term "Gong Fu Cha" refers to the full ceremony, or only to the milder everyday form.)
To do a real job of this will take photographs, which I am hoping to provide eventually. In the meanwhile, I will merely attempt a rough explanation that will permit you to have a pleasant conversation over tiny cups of steaming liquid.
The minimum you will need is a very small teapot (or a gaiwan, if you happen to have such a thing), and a few tiny cups. This method generally uses those bitty little unglazed pots from Yixing that you can see in museums, in various places on the Web (and, somewhat to my surprise, even in Starbuck’s outlets). Gaiwan are another issue; but if you use one the steps are the same.
The first problem is to find a pot that is worth making tea in. Unless you’ve dealt with these, you won’t know what to look for; and if you don’t know what to look for, there is only a modest chance that you’ll actually find it. Also, the price range is astonishing. My workaday pot cost me $48 or so, from Imperial Tea Court, but a random fifty buck pot is likely to be a mistake. (I was able to buy half-decent pots for as little as $2.50 in China, but that isn't going to happen in the US unless you luck out at a garage sale.)
By the same token, however, a fancy-looking and even well-made $500 pot may not be a good choice for this purpose, especially if you are just getting started, or if you like several kinds of tea and are therefore obliged to acquire several pots. (NOTE: It is a really good idea to use any given pot for only one kind of tea. Because the clay is somewhat porous, the flavor of the tea does get into the pot, and you can get some pretty weird results if you make a white tea in a pot that you've been making, say, pu-erh in. Better not to mix; get one pot for each type of tea.)
Your best bet is to find someone who really knows and loves these pots, and ask them for guidance. If you can’t find such a person, go for pots that are relatively plain, quite small, and only a tiny bit porous. They'll do for a start, and are preferred for certain types of tea. It's a good idea to look for largish lids, which give you more room to get the leaf into and out of the pot. A pot with a tiny opening on top is going to be difficult to work with. A tall pot or one that is very large is more likely to be suited to making tea "the ordinary way" than the way I'm discussing here. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with such a pot -- I've made quite a bit of Yunnan "black" tea in one that I own, and I like it very well indeed. It just isn't what we're discussing here. (In fact, the pot on the right in the second photo is probably a bit on the large side.)
For the sake of comparison, here are two Yixing pots. The one on the left makes a scant cup, and is much too large for Gong Fu Cha; it's also not a really great shape. There's nothing wrong with it for ordinary tea, though. The one on the right is smallish, but quite serviceable.
The following teapot photos were taken by Justin Burke, of Imperial Tea Court. The coin that Justin has included as an indication of scale is one of the new Sacagawea dollars; it is somewhat larger than a quarter. (For those who are not familiar with US coinage, this coin is 26.5 mm [about 1 & 1/16 inch] across.) If you click the first image, you’ll get a rather crisp image of one of the pots, again showing the coin for scale.
Here’s an indication of the texture of the clay on that
same pot (second from left in the overview). Some Yixing
pots are like this, some are smooth. (The larger photo,
btw, is about 45 kBytes.)
If you click the next image, you’ll get a slightly
closer view of two of the pots (the rightmost one from
each set, I think). You can see that these both have
considerably smoother texture than the orangy one.
Cups and saucers may not be quite so easy to find; sake cups are perhaps the best compromise, though they are on the large side.
There are other tools as well (see photo), but if your guests don’t mind spoons and fingers, you can do without them. I've arrayed the tools in the photo so you can see them a bit better; there's a scoop, a funnel, a pair of tweezers for picking up cups, and a tool with a point at one end and a small scoop or spoon at the other, for clearing recalcitrant spent leaf out of the spout.
Considerably larger view, if you want more detail and have the bandwidth
One crucial thing, which you must provide, is a scoop that lets you get the tea out of its container and into the pot. Remember that the opening in the top of the pot is rather small. (One characteristic of a good working pot, in fact, is a relatively large mouth. When one is looking at pots that are less than 10 cm across themselves, however, even "relatively large" is pretty small.)
If you have few guests, you’ll probably want a pitcher. In fact, a pitcher is convenient in any case. It should, if possible, be large enough to take all the tea that the pot is going to deliver, but not much larger.
Another important piece of equipment is some sort of tray, or a catch-basin if you have one. Quite a bit of water is going to flow here, not all of it into pots and cups, and you want to prevent it from going all over the table. The traditional implement here can be made from the same Yixing "purple sand" clay as the pot, or from wood, bamboo, metal... whatever works. I am currently using a nonstick baking dish, for lack of anything better.
Before you actually make tea in a new pot, there is a bit of preparation you should do. First, brush any loose bits of clay out of the inside. Then steam your pot and its lid (with the pot open and the lid next to it) for at least 20 to 30 minutes, to open up the pores in the clay and to remove any wax that may have been rubbed into the surface. (Surprisingly many pots, even some rather good ones, are waxed when they arrive from the factory. Why this should be, I do not know.)
Let the pot cool. Take some decent tea (dry leaf, of the type you expect to be making in your pot), perhaps two Tbs, and put it into the pot. Steam the pot and lid again for at least 20 minutes, perhaps as long as an hour depending on the type of tea. Then pour clean hot water (filtered, if your tap water is hard or smells at all like chlorine) into the pot, put the lid on, and leave them for several hours. (You can even submerge the pot in the hot water after you fill it, if you want to.)
Rinse pot and lid in clean water, and they are ready to use. In general, you should always avoid making tea or even rinsing your pot with water that has any kind of “off” taste, and you should always use a given pot for only one type of tea unless you are very certain that you (and any guests) cannot taste the difference.
Do not use a Yixing pot for Jasmine or other flavored tea. The oils that make up the flavoring will get into the pores in the pot, and will almost certainly change in character. Many will oxidize and will taste and smell very different after they've been sitting for a while. ("Very different" is frequently equivalent to "wrong".) Jasmine tea is usually okay for regular teapots, and can be very nice in a gaiwan, if it's good enough tea.
Now we come to the nub of the thing: how do you actually make tea in one of these pots, or in a gaiwan? Let's take the Yixing pot first...
Before you start, it helps to have a Russell Hobbs or other water-boiling device at the table. This lets you work without constantly getting up and running to the stove. It also gives you fair control over the temperature of the water, which is really necessary for this method. It may sound overly chi-chi to say it, but if you just pour boiling water on these teas, you are going to get something that doesn’t taste good. Period. This is not to say that your boiler has to be hijjusly ’spensive, just that you want one, and you want it right at hand.
You also need to develop a sense of how much leaf is right for a given tea in a given pot. This comes only with practice, so get ready to drink a lot of tea. In general, you are likely to fill the pot roughly 1/3 to 1/2 full of dry leaf; when the leaf expands in the water, it will typically fill the pot quite full. A few teas may take more or less leaf than this; take it as a very loose general guideline and have fun learning.
Now: bring some water almost to a boil. Fill the pot with it, and pour some into the cups and the pitcher to preheat them. (You can pour from the pot into the cups or not; doesn’t make much difference at this stage, as long as everything gets hot.)
Empty the pot as thoroughly as you can, and put some leaf into it. Shake the leaf about, gently, then lift the lid a bit and sniff. You will find that the fragrance of the leaf is enhanced considerably by even modest wetting, and that some kinds of tea change a lot at this stage.
Bring the water up to a little short of a boil. Here we reach another branching point. Some teas want water at 85 or 90 celsius; others want it at 65 or 70. Some will tolerate a much wider range than others. My current sense of this is that the green teas want cooler water and, with some exceptions, tolerate less variation in temperature than the oolong or red teas. (One exception is Yunnan Yin Hao, which is fairly robust.) I strongly suspect that a reasonably good tiêguanyin is much easier to learn with than, say, $280/lb Dragon Well.
I don’t have a thermometer, but some people swear by them. They certainly make it easy to tell how hot the water is. As I say, though, I haven’t got one, and I’m learning to judge by the sizes of the bubbles and the sound they make as the water gets hotter. I tend to brew relatively easygoing tea, which helps.
When the water is ready, we reach another branching point. For a few kinds of tea, you want to pour water into the pot until the pot is full, put the lid on, and immediately pour all the water out into the catchbasin. This starts the leaves opening up. Unfortunately, just at the moment I don’t recall which teas want this kind of treatment. (Best information as of late 2000 is that few of them actually require it, so you can skip this step if you want to. If you do want to have a "rinse" step, fill at least one cup with the rinsewater so you can look at it and smell it. It will begin to inform you of the quality and character of the tea.)
Leaving the issue of rinsing aside, at least for now, pour water into the pot until it is quite full. Put the lid on, and pour a little water on top of the pot to warm the outside. At this point you must make a judgement call: How long do you leave the water on the leaf? Here again, only experience can give you the answer. In general, the darker the tea or the cooler the water, the longer you can let it sit.
There is, by the way, at least in ordinary pots and probably also here, a special case: a later brewing of almost any pû-êrh can sit on the leaf literally for hours. I didn’t believe this until Richard Brzustowicz demonstrated it at a class I took from him. He did a second steeping of some pû-êrh that cost a whopping $3.98/lb, and casually put the pot on a shelf for well over two hours. The tea was heavenly. We were all astounded.
Pû-êrh aside, however, you probably want to leave the water on the leaf for a period of no less than half a minute and no more than three or four minutes, again depending on the tea and the temperature of the water. As a starting point, if the water is steaming nicely but not boiling, and if you are using mediocre to decent tieguanyin to learn with, try about two minutes.
At the end of the steeping period, pour out all of the tea in one smooth motion. You can upend the pot into the top of the pitcher, or just arrange the cups in a tight array and pour back and forth until the pot is empty. (If you fill the pitcher and still have tea, you can always fill the cups; once you've filled the available receivers, however, pour any remaining tea into the catchbasin unless it's pû-êrh. You do not want to leave the tea sitting on the leaf.)
Once again, lift the lid and sniff the leaf. It may have changed character, and the intensity of the aroma is certainly likely to be greater. (This, in fact, is a general prescription: whenever you aren’t doing anything else, sniff either the pot or your cup. You will almost always get some sort of information, and occasionally you’ll be rewarded with small pleasant surprises.)
This first steeping is likely to be fairly mild (unless you are brewing black tea). In fact, some people look at it, sniff it, and pour it into the catchbasin. It all depends on the tea and on how you feel. I generally drink it, though there are exceptions.
Proceed to steep the tea again. You may get as many as six or seven steepings unless it is what we in the West describe as black tea. (The Chinese seems to be Hóng Chá, which translates to "red tea".) About the only really dark teas that tolerate repeated steeping are some of the richer darker pû-êrhs. (You can make some regular "black" teas by this method, and you will probably find that a few of them are really good this way, but aside from the pû-êrhs already mentioned and a few truly outstanding things like Imperial Gold Yunnan, it mostly isn’t particularly pointful. This method is well suited to a few greens and a fairly broad spectrum of oolongs, many of which will tolerate as many as 6 or 7 steepings before they start to become really thin.)
The gaiwan can be used in a manner essentially identical, except that there are adept ways to hold it and clumsy ways. The amount of tea you use depends mostly on the size of the gaiwan, though I did see someone in China stuff a large gaiwan absolutely full to the brim with tea and then proceed to pour water into it about 20 times. She never let the water stay on the leaf for more than about 15 seconds. The tea, something called "Water Golden Turtle", which I'd never heard of and still know next to nothing about, was excellent, even the last steeping.
I urge you to think of this page as a general set of guidelines provided by a relative novice for relative novices. I hope that leaves you plenty of room to explore. If I can get the information, I’ll try to put up a set of water-temperature guidelines, but I also encourage you to take an ordinary teapot and some extremely green tea and try using boiling water. Wait two or three minutes and taste the result. It should have a distinctly wretched, almost metallic burnt aspect.
You can also try leaving hot water on some tea of almost any sort for about six minutes. The result should be bitter and astringent. These are both faults you want to avoid when making tea of any sort, but they are particular important in gong-fu cha, perhaps because we are working with lots of leaf in small pots. One way or the other, I hope you enjoy your tea and conversation. If you have comments or questions, please send me a msg.
Pseudo-mailto: jon (at) bazilians (you know) org
Last modified: Tue Oct 31 08:33:05 PST 2000