Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Tea doctor to the rescue

Yesterday, I reported how I received a sample of good oolong stored in a zip bag full of bad kitchen odors (detergent, closet). I hadn't paid much attention to it when I opened the bag, but I couldn't ignore it when I tasted it. It ruined the flavor.

In these bags, I still have some oolong left as well as an old Tie Kuan Yin and a green tea from Guangzhou. The bad smell is in all these bags. I almost thought I will throw them away. But wait, I think I can cure them!
The trick is to take the tea out of the bag and just leave it on a plate in a odorless room. After 1 day or 2, you can then store the leaves in a clean bag or can. Just don't put the teas next to each other to breath. They may catch each other's smell.

It worked quite well for the green tea! I unpacked it yesterday, let it breath fresh air and could drink it today. The bad smells were gone. It reminded me of bi lo chun, because the fragrance is less important than the yun. But the dry leaves look more like longjin. On the open leaves, we can see that this tea was picked with cissors (some red oxidized color where the leave is cut). The green color also doesn't look so fresh anymore. I smelt nice flavors of fresh aspargus and found that this green is high quality enough to withstand the very high temperature of almost 100 dgrees Celcius. However, it remains a few levels below the Long Jin or Bi Lo Chun Teaparker let us taste this year:

1 comment:

Steph said...

Oh, excellent advice! I once had garlic tea. Uugh.