The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [11]
Up until even five years ago, few of these teas made it to the West. Most are made for local markets and in tiny quantities. The more Westerners have learned about fine teas and gained a willingness to pay for them, the more these teas have made their way across the oceans. The health benefits of green tea in particular have helped boost their popularity; like white teas, green teas have plenty of antioxidants (polyphenols), which have been shown to help fight chronic illness. In black teas, some of these polyphenols degrade into other compounds—indeed, into the very chemicals that turn black tea brown. Hence green teas have more antioxidants than black teas.
Chinese green teas can be brewed fairly consistently. The filtered water or spring water should be around 175 degrees Fahrenheit, so as not to scorch the delicate tea. It is best not to rinse the teapot with hot water, as this would raise the brewing temperature too high. Brewing time is from two to three minutes; these teas yield their flavors much more quickly than black teas do.
PAN LONG YING HAO Dragon Silver Hair
We start with Pan Long Ying Hao because it is the “whitest” of the green teas in this chapter. It most resembles a white tea with its large buds, fuzzy tips that give the tea light, sweet flavors of steamed spring leeks.
The coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang is famous for its green teas, particularly Gunpowder and Lung Ching. As many as fifty other teas are made in the province’s hinterlands. An amazing bounty, but nearly impossible to obtain, as most are grown for such a confined local market. Pan Long Ying Hao is one exception, a local tea invented for local drinkers perhaps thirty years ago, but now available in the West.
Pan Long Ying Hao is such an obscure tea, it is difficult to learn how it is made. It likely gets its tip from a particular cultivar bred for large, downy sprouts. Given its lightly sweet, roasted flavors, it is probably fixed in a hot wok. The leaves are so loosely shaped, they must be rolled only very delicately. The rolling also teases out the down in the buds, to make the tips soft like pussy willows. The final drying presumably creates the tea’s lovely cocoa notes. This is a calming tea, whose flavors evolve in the mouth like a slowly moving stream.
JIN SHAN Jin Mountain
Full of personality, Jin Shan brings us closer to characteristic Chinese green teas with its citrusy, vegetal, and roasted flavors. The tea has smaller white tips than Pan Long Ying Hao and is more heavily fired. As a result, it offers a more assertive, classic green tea flavor.
Jin Shan is both a tea and an ancient tea-growing region. The bushes thrive in the cool mountains that separate Zhejiang from Anhui province. Surrounded by stately pine and bamboo forests, like many of China’s earliest tea-growing regions, Jin Shan is located just outside a large Buddhist monastery. The monks here developed the tea for their own consumption, for tribute to the emperor, and for sale to support the monastery. Monks in Jin Shan may well have also played a tremendous role in tea history, introducing Japan to green tea when in the ninth century they gave Jin Shan tea to monks visiting from that smaller island. Recent genetic tests have shown that Japanese green teas derive from the teas grown in this region.
Jin Shan monks also taught local farmers their methods, and this time-refined knowledge was passed down through the centuries—until the twentieth century, when the Communist regime shut down these religious institutions. Happily, the monastery has recently been rebuilt, and tea producers are expanding and modernizing both