The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [16]
GUNPOWDER
When I tell tea brokers in China that I sell Gunpowder in the United States, they usually laugh; they assume this charred green tea makes its way only to North Africa and the Middle East. For centuries, Gunpowder has served as the base for Arabian mint tea, sweetened with plenty of sugar. Its strong, charred flavors taste wonderful with mint, but the tea is also delicious on its own.
Gunpowder is the only tea in this chapter that is not a Qing Ming, or spring, tea; since it gets all its flavors from its processing methods, the tea does not require leaves with much inherent strength. It is made from tougher and less tender later-season leaves, foliage that has grown almost twice as long as the leaves plucked earlier in the spring. The leaves are fixed and then fired for an extended period in a hot oven until they become shiny and slightly burnt. The oven is designed like a Laundromat dryer, tumbling the leaves over and over in a hot metal cylinder.
Gunpowder is produced almost entirely for export. For many years one of the only green teas available in the United States, it has been produced for more than two hundred years near coastal trading ports like Ningbo and in its ancestral home of Zhejiang province. The tea most likely gets its name from the shape of its leaves, so tightly rolled that they resemble the pellets soldiers once used as musket shot. (To those who have never seen a musket, the shiny gray green pellets also look like dried peas.) With its balled form and heavy firing, Gunpowder is among the most stable teas for transport, ideal for export in the age before vacuum packaging and airplanes. Unlike delicate, lightly fired Qing Ming teas, which lose their flavors quickly if not sealed, this tea arrived in good condition even after a year’s sailboat journey from China to Great Britain. If the tea held any defects, its intensely smoky aromas usually covered them up.
Today, the tea is made in most provinces of China. Indeed, after the Qing Ming harvest, many tea farmers turn the rest of the year’s new leaves into Gunpowder. As a result, there are many styles and many quality levels. The worst Gunpowder is bright yellow and acrid with smoky flavors; the best has charred but assuredly green, vegetal flavors.
JAPANESE GREEN TEAS
1. Matsuda’s Sencha
2. Kakegawa Ichiban Sencha
3. Kagoshima Sencha
4. Bancha
5. GenMaiCha
6. Hojicha
7. Gyokuro
8. Tencha
9. Matcha
With their vivid dark leaves and intensely green liquors, Japanese green teas have the heft of a thick vegetable broth and the deep, vegetal flavors of steamed spinach, sautéed green bell peppers, and sometimes nori seaweed. Before World War II brought an end to the trade, Japanese green teas made up an incredible 40 percent of all the tea imported by the United States. That trade has never resumed; today the Japanese drink almost all the teas made in Japan. It’s a shame so little makes it off the islands, because these teas are delicious.
These teas are wonderful palate builders if only because the differences among them can be so subtle. They require a taster’s full attention. In every way Chinese green teas vary, Japanese green teas can be remarkably alike. Indeed, the very phrase Japanese green teas is redundant, because green is the only color of tea found in Japan.
Whereas China’s tea industry has experienced perennial innovation and upheaval, tea makers in the small nation of Japan have adhered to the same production methods for almost the last two hundred years—in the case of Matcha tea, for the last five hundred. Some tea companies around the Japanese city of Uji have been producing tea since the 1600s. That kind of continuity doesn’t exist in China or anywhere else in the world.
If anything has changed since tea first arrived from China in the ninth century, it is that the teas have become more uniform. While today the Chinese make tea from