Earlier today I sat down with Rei, a friend of mine, for some tea. An off the cuff gathering. Too late in the evening, really -- I shouldn't have had tea, but who cares. We reviewed the teas that we both happen to have, so we could pick one we shared: A biluochun, a monkey valley maofeng, and... a qilan. All from sweetestdew.
Blending these three teas is criminal. They're all really high quality teas of their types. They all need different steeping times and temperatures. The qilan needs a super high ratio, and the biluochun and maofeng absolutely do not. And I'm brewing them in one of the slowest-pouring vessels I own.
ME: so like, i'm happy with all three
REI: So we blend them
ME: well. sure. ok. that works. let's do it
I said this as a joke -- but it was too late. Rei had already blended them. So, off we went. 1.5g of biluochun, 1.0g of maofeng, and 1.5g of qilan. Great. Good. Everything is going to work out perfectly. Surely nothing could go wrong.
Because this tea has qilan in it, which normally wants boiling water, we just decided hey, fuck it, let's try it boiling. There's a good reason for this, too. While most green teas want water that's cooler than boiling, high-grade green teas can accept boiling water as long as you adjust accordingly. And that adjustment usually means steeping as quickly as possible -- something we'd already want to do because the qilan normally wants that. The greens might not shine, but they would work, we thought. So in principle boiling water means this is... at least not a completely unreasonable pairing. If it was going to work at all, this would be how.
The dry leaves in the preheated vessel smelled vegetal, almost like fried asparagus. After the first rinse, the lid was fully dominated by the qilan's recent reroasting - charcoal and fresh smoke. The wet leaves were not, however, and carried a more rich and vegetal smell with them. Sum total, it smelled like kelp or ponzu, something sea-like with a rich umami sauce. Rei commented that it almost smelled like something to eat with soba noodles.
It... worked. In the tea itself, the qilan flavor was out in front, yes -- but where normally we would expect this qilan to recede after a sip, something grassier and sweeter started to take its place. If both the roast, creamy nuttiness of the qilan and the sweet vegetal flavors of the greens had taken place at the same time, this would be chaos. But they were spaced out just enough to make it work. In between the two phases, the first qilan and the second green, was the smooth creaminess of this qilan, serving diligently to bridge the gap. The long-tailed minerality drew out the fine details in the vegetal flavors of the greens.
On the second steeping the flavors grew bolder and crisper. In the brewing vessel the leaf smells mixed together into something almost like spiced candy, forming something collectively that is not present in each tea individually. There's something like smoked vegetables. Something like cinnamon, maybe? And the aftertaste -- very long-tailed, with a deep cooling feeling in the mouth accompanied by a complex minerality on the back of the tongue.
I'll cut the notes off here. Suffice to say, we went more steepings. Voluntarily.
