Bi Luo Chun green tea from China

Visited a friend last week who mentioned her current favorite green tea is a Bi Luo Chun (Spring Snail Shell).  Easily influenced, I found my eye landing on some Bi Luo Chun in my tea drawer.

The stuff I have is truly a beautiful looking tea.  From an arm's length it's a sage green-grey but when you look more closely it is a mix of dark grey with dark green small twisted leaves and flecks of brighter green dusted with the pekoe of the many teeny buds.  It's from Tao's wonderful tea shop and the label tells me it from the East Mountain of Dong Ting Lake in the Jiangsu Province of China.  According to the Tea Drinker's Handbook, this tea in Jiangsu is only harvested once a year at the end of March.

Bi Luo Chun is considered one of the Ten Famous Teas of China.  It's also known as Dong Ting or Pi Lo Chun and, in English, Green Snail Spring.  To truly appreciate the work involved in making 500 grams of this tea, have a look at Chinese Tea 101 which has a wonderful series of photos of the process from plucking to baking.

The beautiful, pekoe-covered leaves of the Bi Luo Chun from Tao's.

The Tea
3.8 grams in 7 oz of 80C water for 1 minute.  Second steep 1 minute.

Can you see the little flower bud
in the lower right quadrant?

When I open the jar the first pleasure of this tea is a rush of fresh clean green aroma, abit like a fresh mown lawn.  The tiny, tiny leaves are whole, tightly wound and tend to curl into little "U's" or spirals.  There's also alot of silvery and pale yellow furry pekoe.

The wet leaves area a bright green and the leaves are a uniform size, tiny and narrow, an indication of its high quality.  Some show a slight rusty brown and I don't know if that is from a little oxidising on the bush or during the withering.  The first aroma is of the "fire" from its processing -- so different from all the Japanese steamed green teas I've been enjoying.  This is followed by rich fried greens and/or nuts (chestnut?) along with a slight sweetness and finished off with just the lightest tang which gives it a nice clean profile.

Bi Lo Chun liquor

The liquor is a mid-golden yellow.  It has good astringency which gives me a slight furring on the tongue, and abit of a pucker.

The flavour is beautifully balanced between a light floral sweetness, a clean lemony snap, fresh raw green bean and abit of bitterness on the sides of the tongue.  (To my tongue, one of the integral flavour notes of tea is bitterness, like another popular beverage -- beer.)  I do love that tang -- so charactertistic of baked green teas, perhaps mostly chinese green teas; it's like the raw green leaf.

My first second brew at 2 minutes was quite bitter -- like slightly burnt fried onions or chinese greens, and I realised I should not have increased the brewing time.  Actually, the best subsequent steeps were all at 1-minute, which continued to give me good flavour and pleasure in the cup.  BTW I got quite a caffeine buzz from this tea which makes sense since it's all buds.

I've made this a number of times over the past few days and I keep thinking that if this were a wine it would be one of my favorites, an excellent Chablis -- crisp and bright with a minerally finish. 

Later:  I made a small pot of this tea a couple weeks ago for some friends and we did three very flavourful steeps from the same leaves.  This is a wonderful example of this tea type and one that just keeps on giving.

Spices in a soup

Spinach soup with cumin, cloves, nutmeg, lemon zest and lemon juice.

It's a bright very cold wintry day here in the great white north.  Minus 15C.  Some home-made hot soup is in order and thus this lovely spinach soup seasoned with cumin, cloves, nutmeg, lemon zest and lemon juice.  Oy! It's absolutely delicious if I do say so myself.  Thought I'd include it here since the spices are really waking up the taste buds and making them smile.  The warmth and exoticness of the cumin always does it for me and today the small hint of clove and nutmeg add a wonderful dark note of heat way in the background.  The lemon zest, well what's better for adding zing to the flavour of anything?  And the lemon juice itself adds abit of astringency which makes the broth very refreshing. 

Recipe Note: found in the marvelous The Greens cookbook.

TWO CEYLONS, ONE A 2010....

My current constant quest is to find really fresh, current year or, if possible, current season tea.  On the very rare occasions that I've had the pleasure of  tasting such fresh tea the flavour has been down on your knees astounding.  So much more breadth of flavour profile it's revelatory.  The first time was a Kenyan tea that a classmate (who had recently admitted he was a tea blender/importer) provided which had been made just three weeks earlier.  Wow.   High notes, bottom notes, fuller middle notes.  Huh.  Who knew.

Not that most tea one buys at a reputable place isn't quite splendid but, really.   You know when you pick fresh basil from your summer garden and you get the greeness, the fresh-air quality, the exotic, almost bitter full spicyness of basil as compared to perfectly good dried basil that gives you that, well, basil flavour....?  That's the difference between really fresh tea and just regular good tea here in North America.  I saw a short film on Japanese tea at the recent Coffee & Tea Show here in Toronto and one of the short scenes that struck me was of a corner tea store (booth, really) in an urban residential area offering it's seasonal fresh tea for tasting by the local residents as if it was apples or lettuce.  Shoppers came and sampled the teas and then bought their weekly tea.  Fresh tea comes in almost every week.  A far, far cry from our situation here in North America where my sense is that most tea is container-shipped by sea which takes several months, then it's often stored before being sold to our local tea merchants where it may sit for many months before it's all sold.  Sigh.

However, my lovely local tea shop Tealish has recently stocked several late spring 2010 teas and I've just discovered that my local Japanese grocery store, Sanko, imports fresh senchas, gyokuro, hojichas, etc (more on that later!) for their discerning Japanese clientel and anyone else lucky enough to stumble upon it.  Like me, two weeks ago.


I decided to taste the 2010 Berubeula Ceylon next to another from Tealish called Golden Garden Ceylon (reviewed here on August 26/10) because sometimes contrasting the taste and texture helps focus the tastebuds. 

Wet and dry leaves of the Golden Garden Ceylon on the left
and the 2010 Berubeula Estate Ceylon on the right.

BERUBEULA CEYLON
Berubeula  is in the Galle district of Sri Lanka and being generally under 2000 feet in altitude their teas are classified as low-grown Ceylons.

The dry leaves are long and wiry and a dark charcoal grey -- there is a handsome evenness to the look of this tea. After brewing in just-off-the-boil water for two minutes, the large broken leaves have opened and show some green in the coppery brown.  Oddly, there are a lot of what I think are leaf centre-ribs ie: no leaf on it -- they're definitely not buds and there was little gold or silver tipping in the dry leaves.  The leaves' aroma is full and sweet off the top, like a sweet bun baking really -- with a very light vegetal note, perhaps a hint of dark, dark chocolate and finally a nice light tang of bitter sharpness in the nose to finish it off.

The liquor is a bright ruby-red-brown and, surprisingly, light to medium bodied and smooth in the mouth.  Being low-grown I was expecting a really full bodied, rather rough tea but that is definitely not the case.  The flavours hinted by the leaves come through and the cup gives a lovely, smooth, full, balanced sweet-bitter cup with lots of flavour.  Milk smoothes the edges (although there were no really sharp edges here) and sweetens it slightly.  If you're someone who finds the classic, high-grown Ceylon's zingy lemon briskness too harsh this could be for you -- this is a really nice, smooth Ceylon that, being fresh, delivers great flavour.

GOLDEN GARDEN CEYLON

In August when I originally tasted this tea I couldn't find any information on the Estate and it's altitude, etc.  However I came across a list of the Sri Lankan tea estates with links to satellite views of each one, and noticed a number have names in Sinhalese.  Aha!  In the Sinhalese language Ran means golden and Watte means garden and when I googled that I finally found some information on the estate.  It's in the Uva district which has both medium and high-grown tea estates as it's altitude ranges from 2000 to 3500 feet so this tea could be either.

This Ceylon is very different from the Berubeula, starting with the look of the tea:  the dry leaves are small and fine and quite black with an occasional gold tip.  Used just-off-the-boil water for a two-minute steep and the wet leaves are a uniform dark copper brown, showing no green and the liquor is clear, bright reddish brown.  The wet leaves give off a strong, slightly smokey, dark earthy aroma with a nice bitter tangy follow through and the liquor has, no surprise with those aromas I suppose, a pretty full body without being very brisk.   

Unfortunately this is the moment that I realise that my nose and taste buds must still not up to 100% since the cold/cough of weeks ago!  It's not possible (is it?) that this tea has dried out and faded in flavour that much since August 26 when I last did a tasting.....?  (I store my tea in glass jars with an airtight rubber seal.  The glass is clear but they're kept in a dark drawer.)  Ah life.

Well despite, and perhaps because of, my apparently still-compromised taste buds, the Golden Garden is a very nice afternoon tea but I will choose the Berubeula, at least for a few more months, for the extra breadth of flavour and aroma, as well as its smoothness.  It's not offering the revelation of flavour that I got from the ultra-fresh Kenyan tea (which will forever stand as a benchmark for me), but it is offering more, and would be even more rewarding on fully functioning taste buds. ;)
 

"ASSAM DELIGHT" from My Tea Brew

This is a tea from my fellow tea sommelier, Donna Sikora, who, in her own words focuses on "tootie fruitie" tea blends.  She is aiming to start a tea store and as part of her research has taken a booth at the Port Credit Farmer's Market for the summer to test out the tea blends, the public interest, the types of questions they ask, etc.  Myself I'm not fond of blends, particularly fruity blends (not in shampoos, not in teas) since I find such a breadth of flavours in tea all on its own.  But my own local tea store, Tealish, also tells me their blends do better than the straight teas.  Go figure.

TEA NAME: "Assam Delight"

WATER TEMPERATURE:  80 C
STEEPING TIME: 1 minute
The package recommends a teaspoon in 7 or 8 ozs of just off the boil water for 2 to 3 minutes but I've opted for cooler water and a short steep since it is mostly green tea. 

Click to enlarge

DRY LEAF:
Small folded balls of dark green tea leaves, a few very thin, black wiry bits and lightly sprinkled with 1/2" pieces of yellow lemon grass.  From the folded leaves this is a baked green tea in the Chinese style of production, as opposed to a steamed green in the Japanese style.

I assumed the black wiry bits were a black Assam tea -- given the tea's name but this is not so.  It's an entirely green tea blend. 

Click image to enlarge.

WET LEAF:
Appearance: The wet leaves have partially unfurled and are a lovely yellowy-moss green. When I uncurl the leaves all the way they are small and fairly yellow. The lemon grass stems are now pale straw colour.  Since all the wet leaves are green it's clear there is no Assam black tea in this mix at all!

Aroma: There's a very strong lemony aroma -- it's so intense I'm guessing scented oil was added to the tea, either to its constituent parts or by Donna.  There's also the soft grassy undertone of the green tea which is very pleasant. 

Slightly cloudy, beautiful yellowy green.

LIQUOR:
Appearance: - a fairly rich yellowy-green liquor which is slightly cloudy due, I presume, in part to the lemon grass.

Flavour, etc:  This is quite pleasant and refreshing although I do find it a bit heavy on the lemon flavour -- but you probably guessed I'd find that, didn't you.  Mmm -- it's a very hot muggy summer day here today and this is going down well.  In fact, I suspect that when left to cool it will be a really nice summer afternoon iced tea.  It has a nice mouth feel - smooth and soft, (how do I say "oily" in a good way?)  Light to medium viscosity -- not too thin nor too big and thick.  The aroma in the cup still has lemon as the top note, but it's much softer than on the dry leaves when you open the packet.

Donna with Suzanne (in hat) at her "My Tea Brew" stand

at the Port Credit Farmer's Market today.