Test your tea like a Bugatti Chiron on the Autobahn

What's the point of having a fast car if you just use it to drive to work downtown at 50 km per hour most of the time? Even though I can barely watch this video, because it makes my hands sweat and I think of what could go wrong, there's a certain logic of wanting to push a fast to its limits! (Note: my son showed me this video and I forbid him to ride a scooter! I also told him that Bugatti was originally a car company founded near Strasbourg in Alsace, my home region!)

2003 wild Yiwu sheng puerh

The brewer of loose tea faces a similar situation as the owner of a Bugatti Chiron. If he wanted to brew an insipid cup, he would have purchased a cheap tea bag. But if he went through the trouble of purchasing quality loose tea, he's expecting something different, out of the ordinary. 

He wonders not how fast can it go? But how good and how powerful can it taste? Unfortunately, most brewers don't realize that the Autobahn to test your tea is not an unattainable dream land, but it's easy to do at home!

The goal of this test brew is not to obtain the most comfortable cup, nor the smoothest. No, the goal of this test is to push your leaves to their limits and get the most flavors out of them. The goal is to better know your tea. How far you can push it? How strong a cup can your leaves brew? How smooth and sweet will it stay in the process? Or how bitter or astringent will it turn out to be? This is a moment of truth. Do you want to know if your leaves are a Bugatti, a Ferrari, a Porsche or simply a Toyota Prius or a Lada?! Are you ready to learn to evaluate tea quality with your own eyes, nose and taste buds? Or do you prefer to continue to believe the beautiful stories that are told by some vendors?

Here's how you can push your tea to its limits:

1. Preheat your tea vessel well. It's like an engine, it performs best after a warm-up!

2. Measure a small and consistent weight of tea leaves. The largest tea competition in the world, the Dong Ding tea competition, uses 3 grams only. It makes sense to be consistent, so that you may also compare different teas with this method. 

3. The same competition uses boiling water to brew the leaves. The higher the water temperature, the more flavors come out.

4. As for which vessel to use, the Dong Ding Oolong competition uses a porcelain competition set that has a volume of 115-120 ml. You can replace it with a porcelain gaiwan. Porcelain has the advantage of being neutral and less expensive than Yixing. It's ideal for beginners and people who don't own many Yixing teapots. However, if you can also replace it with your dedicated teapot for this kind of tea. This should help extract more flavors than porcelain.

5. Brew for a long period of time in order to extract a lot of flavors from the leaves. It's more important to be consistent and stick always to the same time. The standard of the Dong Ding competition is 6 minutes.

Buckle up and go full brew ahead!