Something interesting about the appealation of tea
Hi everyone,
I recently read some information about tea and found something interesting about the name of tea. Such as the black tea is called red tea in China, while the red tea means rooibos in India. While the Chinese black tea refers to dark tea. Do you know any other interesting thing about appealation of tea? In fact, I would like to know something about guokuro.
It is true that black tea is called red tea in China. This is because early traders saw the leaves of black tea were usually black in color and gave it that name when selling it in Europe and America. The Chinese on the other hand called it red tea because of the color of the brewed tea. It is also true that the CHinese call ripe Puerh tea black tea. But they refer to it in other ways too. It is also called shou, fermented puerh, or cooked puerh even though I don’t think it is quite technically cooked.
Gyokuoro is Japanese steamed green tea. Its sweet soft and buttery… but a little tricky to brew, try a high grade sencha first, they taste profiles are similiar, but its much cheaper and easier to brew.
I am a bit late to the party, but the thing that sets gyokuro apart is that it is shaded for a few weeks before harvest, which is what gives it its distinct taste. Kabusecha (aka kabuse sencha) is also shaded, but for less time than gyokuro. I prepare both the same. They can be a bit tricky because they require such cool water temperature and specific timing to really get the most out of them, usually around 50-60C (sometimes even as low as 40C) for the first couple of steeps. My typical prep is 50 or 60C for 60-90 seconds for the first steep, second steep at the same temperature for 10-30 seconds. Then by the third steep I can either up the time or the temperature or both. The specifics depend on that particular tea.
With sencha I usually steep between 70 and 80C from the start and unless it’s a particularly high quality sencha, I’m less specific about the timing of the steep, but you can follow the same sort of general rule as with the higher end Japanese greens (1 minute or so first steep, shorter second steep, then gradually increase time/temp each steep after). All depends on what you find you like and what works for you!
That part about hei cha, or dark tea, could have been clearer. It’s one main category of tea, along with green, black (or red, hong cha, using the original color name), white, and oolong. Yellow is often included but it’s so rare that in modern times it’s also often left out. It’s also possible to translate “dark” as black, I just can’t say which is a better translation (I don’t speak any version of Chinese languages, and haven’t looked into that).
Pu’er is most typically considered one type of hei cha but not always, or at least not by everyone. The standard take is that the category type was called “dark” because it’s pre-fermented, and many types of hei cha are (I’m not clear on the existence or non-existence of exceptions), or as shou or “cooked” pu’er now is, but sheng pu’er doesn’t fit that categorization because it ferments through aging instead. It starts out relatively similar to green tea, just processed slightly differently.
It’s worth keeping in mind that the use of these terms change as the teas change. Shou / shu pu’er was only invented in the 1970s, so the earlier traditional meaning of the category doesn’t relate directly to it, except by extension to the modern tea type. Pu’er is named after a village in the area that produces it, and there are others, and I vaguely recall a reference source saying that the general type didn’t always go by that name. I’m not sure how it would have been referred to earlier. It could have been called hei cha, I guess, or there could have been another way of saying “compressed tea.” It’s interesting that the loose version is now referred to as maocha, also the name for unfinished tea, even though it’s ready to drink without being compressed into a cake (disk), brick, or some other form.
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