Greetings, tea curious people! May this post find you in vibrant health.
Once in a while, I get a question about why we blend some pu’er teas and not others when we create a pressing or loose leaf offering for our website. This is a good place for me to dissect that just a bit.
The simple answer is because some leaves are great on their own. True, it is often the case, especially as we seek out higher and higher grade material, particularly ripe tea, that a single leaf grade may be tremendous as a solo act.
There are other factors that come into play, one of which is the leaf size itself. With ripe tea blends, we may use some smaller grade leaves along with larger leaves so that we can prolong the tea drinking experience with each sitting. The smaller leaves will give up more flavor in the earlier infusions while the larger leaves come out to play in the later steeps.
There are times when one leaf may be more astringent (or tongue drying) and we look to balance that with a sweeter leaf. The practice of testing the aroma of the rinsed leaves along with the taste, help us to determine what will be the most appealing.
What we do first is test the various leaves on their own, give them each the go over from start to finish and see what boxes it checks for quality, taste, experience, leaf integrity etc. From there, one leaf might be such a stand out that we say “this one will be a pressing unto itself, nothing to add here.” Then the rest of the experiment happens and we begin to weigh out different amounts of leaves and test them at various ratios for a blend in order to create balance and harmony between them. It’s fun and it’s also time consuming, a labor of love.
Tasting a blend in its loose and un-pressed form is not always fully indicative of what the final result will be once steamed, pressed, cured and aged. It’s part of why we offer some leaves both in cakes, mini-tuocha and/or loose on our site so people can compare the differences made after the pressing. Of note are the loose leaves of the Antwerp’s Placebo and the Zendo mini-tuocha versus their loose-leaf counterparts. Even we get surprised by the transformation of flavor and aroma between loose and pressed. Add in the long-term aging of the cakes and one will sometimes taste an entirely different tea than when it was first tasted as loose material.
It’s fun to play here and tea, like life, is one big experiment - tweak a few variables then check the outcomes and see what works best, knowing that some experiences will appeal to some and not others. May the life experiment you are doing be a long, healthy and happy one, my friends.
With gratitude,
Garret
Various grades of ripened 2020 leaves for blending into 2021 pressings.