The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [49]
Black puerhs have plenty of charm, but they lack the nuance and depth of true aged green puerhs. While this tea has strong earthy, ashy flavors, it has a thinner body and a sharper edge than the aged Tuo Cha, following.
TUO CHA 1991 YUNNAN TEA IMPORT & EXPORT CORPORATION Bowl Tea
Although Tuo Cha has recently become all the rage in France and Spain as European women drink it to keep from getting fat, Tuo Cha also provides all the rich flavors of a true aged green puerh. At the time I tasted it for this chapter, it was fifteen years old.
Fifteen years in a cool, dry room have given these tea leaves pleasurable earthy flavors, with no trace of the fruit sweetness of the young Ban-Zhang Green Ping Cha (page 177). The time has also turned the once fixed green leaves a solid, mesmerizingly deep and shiny black color. The tea has a seductive mellowness, a smooth, rounded quality from its years sitting quietly fermenting. Its leaves are almost impenetrably dark, its liquor equally so.
This tea can be rebrewed as many as a dozen times. The later brews are mellow but thin in body, lighter in color but with sweeter notes, especially in the finish.
THE FUTURE OF TEA
From puerhs to white teas, from tobacco to honeysuckle: I hope by now you have relished the spectacular range of flavors of pure tea, and feel confident to call yourself a connoisseur. My goal has been to guide you through the incredible variety that’s become available to tea drinkers since I entered the business, to help you enjoy tea that much more. Few of these teas were available in the West when my family started working in the industry forty years ago. Since then, high-mountain oolongs have emerged from Taiwan and white teas from Sri Lanka. Darjeelings brightened, Assams lightened; how could the tea world possibly get any better? All that remains is to continue supporting these innovative tea makers by drinking their creations.
The best tea is a miracle of Mother Nature and of human ingenuity. We can treat tea as we would cherish a good summer tomato or a ripe peach. We can drink it when it’s in season: spring teas when they come ready in the summer, summer teas in the fall, and autumnal teas in the winter to tide us over to spring again. In Japan, tea stores stretch banners across their storefronts in the early summer proclaiming the arrival of the Sencha harvest. I have a banner to display in my store—but it’s in Japanese. I’d love to see more versions in English.
We can study tea the way we research fine wines and get to know its terroir. We can make it a priority to know exactly where it’s made and the people who make it. We can speak of Yoshihiro Matsuda with the same reverence we reserve for the makers of great wines. We can encourage the incipient movement toward sustainable tea cultivation, supporting tea makers who nurture their plants using organic methods. Tea currently lags behind other agricultural products in this area, but more gardens convert to organic each year.
Cultivating a palate for better tea can also help protect the beverage. These teas often come from poorer areas of the world threatened by development. The hills south of Taipei in Taiwan were once carpeted in tea fields; today, they’re stacked with office buildings. In the British Legacy areas, tea makers can often make more money in industries like banking and software. The same pressures exist in China: It can be more rewarding to trade widgets in Shanghai than to run a tea plantation in Anxi, a poor and rural part of the country.
China in particular is at a real crossroads. In the last ten years, the Communist regime has moved