The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [15]
TAIPING HOUKUI Taiping Best Monkey Tea
Fitting Taiping HouKui’s long, slender leaves into a brewing vessel feels like sliding spaghetti into a pot. Shaped like no other tea, the leaves yield a brew characteristic of the middle range of Chinese greens—slightly evocative of steamed cabbage, but with a sweet finish like spring honey. Taiping HouKui comes out of Anhui province, one of the few teas in this book from China’s interior. The best comes from the town of Taiping, set on the steep banks of the river that flows from Taiping Lake, in the shadow of the Yellow Mountains, where Huangshan Mao Feng comes from.
This special tea is made from its own cultivar, bred for long leaves. The leafsets are plucked as late as possible, usually in late April, to give the leaves plenty of time to grow. After a quick fixing to retain the bright green color, the leaves are layered between yards of canvas, then weighted to compress the tea and flatten it into thin ribbons. In the process, the leaves pick up the imprint of the fabric. If you look carefully, you will see elegant small hatch marks on the leaves.
DRAGON PEARL JASMINE
Now that you are familiar with pure Chinese green teas, having tasted a spectrum of them, you can experience the effect a classic addition can have on the brew. Dragon Pearl Jasmine draws most of its flavors not from the tea, but from the jasmine blossoms that perfume it.
For centuries, the Chinese have scented teas with fruits and flowers like dried lychees, rose petals, and osmanthus blossoms (see “Osmanthus,” page 88). Tea makers generally fold in the additives to burnish teas lacking charms of their own. Cheap jasmine teas of this sort are ubiquitous at American Chinese restaurants. Dragon Pearl Jasmine is no cheap tea, but a haute version much beloved, in which jasmine flowers subtly infuse a tippy green tea full of character—and plenty of prized tips, or buds.
This tea is made in northern Fujian province, outside of the industrial city of Fu’an. The tea is made from the Da Bai (“big white”) cultivar, famous for its large buds (see “Yin Zhen,” page 21). The tea is harvested in early spring, when its large white tips are flush with flavor compounds the plant has stored over the winter. The leaves are fixed green, then dried and stored until around June, when the fragrant tiny jasmine flowers bloom. The blossoms are so fragrant, gathering them is a job I would happily accept. As soon as they are harvested, the flowers are rushed to the factories in Fu’an.
What happens next depends upon the factory. I had the chance to visit one factory in Fu’an; though I had to leave before the tea had finished infusing, I loved watching the preparations. At many tea factories, men work the tea wearing T-SHIRTS and flip-flops to stay cool in the heat of the woks and dryers. Here, about twenty women in neat uniforms sat at tables equipped with bright lights. The women took small handfuls of the dried tea, which had been humidified to make the leaves pliable. They rolled the bud sets of a few leaves and a tip between their palms to form neat little pearls. Then they spread out the pearled leaves on trays. The trays were slid onto racks, alternating with trays of fresh-picked jasmine blossoms. The racks were stored in a small enclosed space for several days, with fresh flowers brought in every day, until the pearls were suffused with jasmine flavor. The tea would not be ready until several weeks after my departure, but I looked forward to receiving samples of the pearls when I purchased the tea later that spring.
Dragon Pearl Jasmine has recently become a very popular tea, and so it should be, as it represents the finest in Chinese handmade tea traditions. The tea is beautiful just to look at, with its small, dark green balls accented by light gray strands. The pearls contain a delicious floral aroma and sublime sweet flavor that cannot be compared with the artificial flavor of most jasmine teas. Just as vanilla extract cannot compare with the depth and butteriness