Partially oxidized Puerh tea: let's try it again!

Hi everyone. Yesterday we got a big problem in the factory. We got quite a lot of tea, like some Gu Shu and some Shanghai, and we were processing the Shanghai, and then a friend showed up, and we started talking about business strategy, and he got me into a quite complex but extremely interesting framework, and we ended up discussing this thing regarding business in general, and regarding the farmer leaf tea business. We ended up talking about this until five in the morning, which meant we had problem in the factory, because we were supposed to talk about this for just half an hour, and eventually it took us five hours, and the wok cooled down, and we hadn't finished processing all the tea, so what could we do? It was like five in the morning, and I felt like, should I just add more wood and reheat the wok and keep processing the tea? But at that time I saw that, well, we still had that one wok worth of Gu Shu from our tea garden, from No.1, still in need to be processed. But I saw that the withering was already quite thorough, so I chose to do the same thing as I did last year. Well, I could either make it into white tea, maybe spread it a bit thinner and make it into white tea, or I could decide to make a black tea, again spread it thinner, and then the next morning just roll it and make a black tea. But you know, I'm not a big fan of the very early spring black teas, and I don't really like using Gu Shu material for making black tea, because this is, I think, material that you could use to make more complex teas than black teas, namely pu'er tea. But now that the withering was already overdone, you couldn't really make a decent pu'er tea. So let's make indecent pu'er tea instead, let's make a reddened pu'er tea. So I've let this tea to wither for about a day actually, about 24 hours, and now we're in the late afternoon on the second day, it's five o'clock, and we're going to cook this tea. You can see here that some of the leaves have already dried a bit, so it's going to make the Sha Qing quite challenging. Last year actually, I had some roasted notes, because some of the leaves were already quite dry when I put them in the wok, and now my question is, should I go reach those roasted notes, and maybe even go even further into the roasting, and try to dry it even further more in the wok to get a proper roasted taste, or should I be more conservative and just cook the tea as a usual pu'er tea. Yesterday we got 14 kg of these leaves, which is quite a lot for one batch, but since then the tea has withered, and now I will need a lot of steam, so I will make it into one batch. This is a lot of leaves to shuffle, but it will be fine since it's only one batch we have to do like this, and we'll try to mobilize as much steam as possible in order not to burn everything before we have a proper Sha Qing. So let's go. So I opted for a low fire, with a nice bed of embers that will slowly heat up the wok. Usually when we cook the pu'er tea, we like to start with strong flames at the beginning, and then finish on embers, but here I have a fairly warm wok at the beginning, but not too hot actually, not as hot as when we make pu'er tea, and not so much fire. And this is because I want to cook this tea gently, because there are lots of dried leaves already in the batch, I don't want them to burn and give those really bad notes to the tea. So what I'm going to do instead is try to extract the steam, try to extract the water out of the leaves that haven't withered that much, and try to give a lot of steaming first. We want to have the whole batch reduced, and then we will think about roasting or not. So we might either want to add a bit of fire midway, or we'll see, maybe we could just keep a low temperature, a low wok temperature, but just keep the tea cooking for a long time until it dries in the wok, that could be a possibility. So this is quite an unusual material, so far the harvest, I think the harvest is really picking up, you can see that it's rare that I cook tea by daytime, but today we have quite a full, we're at full capacity today, we have about 300kg, oh no sorry, 150kg of leaves to process, so it will take us quite some time. So it's 5 o'clock, and it's good to start now, especially considering I had this red and poor batch to make. So last year I made a first red and poor tea, again because I had some leaves left over on my weathering mat, you could say a bit, not really voluntarily, but once you get them you get to choose what you will do with them, so either white, black, or a more exciting option, like this red and poor tea. And I did that, and I really enjoyed the batch, we even pressed cakes of this tea, this is the Jingmai Yishai that we had last year, and I'm eager to see how it's going to age, actually I haven't had it in a long time, I'd like to, maybe you can share your thoughts if you have a cake at home, and try it, the Jingmai Yishai. I don't plan on making a full-on batch of this tea this year, so this will probably be the only batch I make, and so it will be available on our website, and sold as loose leaf tea, not pressed as cakes. I think I want to keep it that way because it's an entertaining tea of course, but maybe not a tea that a tea enthusiast would like to have every day, so I prefer to give the priority on other teas, but that's always a nice distraction from our monotonous tea life, you could say. So now maybe you can have a look at the leaves a bit more up close, and you can see here we're having a good natural light here, it's quite pleasant actually to cook tea at sunrise, so you can see it's taking some time now, because the wok, the fire is not very strong. When processing normal pure tea, it would be a problem if you don't have a strong fire at the start, the leaves are going to take a while to get reduced, to shrink, and that will cause the leaves to turn red while they are not shrunk yet, so usually if you want a good, vibrant, spicy, bitey pure tea, you want to start with a hot fire. Starting with a low fire would give you also a slightly reddened pure tea, a milder version, so usually you don't want to have a low fire when you start making pure tea, but in this case I did that because many of the leaves were very dry, and if the fire had been too strong, I think we'd have a lot of burned leaves, because when the water content in the leaves is low, it's going to easily burn. When you have water in the leaves, the water will be traded against the heat, so the leaf is not going to heat up as much, instead the water evaporates. But here we have a mix, so we're in really dangerous waters on this side, I think, so I'm very conservative. But you see now, we're having steam coming off, so I think using low temperature in this case was not a big problem, and I'm not too worried about reddening the tea, because it's a reddened pure tea anyway, so it's not a concern. But you see in exchange, I don't shuffle it too much, because I want the steam to build up in the batch, so I will use minimum shuffling, just to prevent any strong burning, and then if we want to make a roast, I think we'll try to do that a bit towards the end, but I'm a bit scared of doing that roast, because a light roast can really enhance the complexity of the tea, but on the other hand, if you do it too much, it also simplifies everything, so roasting is a bit like putting sugar in the tea, it's a bit like, it's somehow, when you smell, it's more complex, but the mouthfeel tends to be a bit more simple with the roasting, and so it's a tool that you have to use with extreme caution, especially if you have good material in your hands, and this is pretty good material, this is early spring tea from our Noguan garden, so actually I might roast just a bit, but I won't go full on on the roasting, no, actually this is too expensive, too precious a material to do this, there's still plenty of mouthfeel, of texture that you can get in the tea, but if the roast is too strong, you will lose everything, you will have a nice fragrance, but you will have a watery mouthfeel. Okay, so we can have a look at the leaves from a bit closer, see how they change under the action of the heat and the steam building up, and here, every day, we're just cooking tea until late at night, and you can let your thoughts run into that never-ending shuffling of the leaves, and discovering new leaves, a new sky every time you shuffle the tea, but it's still early, we have plenty of work to do before we're finished tonight, and we have some, I think, esteemed guests who will visit us today, some journalists from some Chinese media, some tea people who are coming from Kunming to visit us, and like I said at the beginning, there's a tea friend who is now like a strategic analyst for brands and things, so we talked about strategy from warfare to business, to life strategy, philosophy, so these chatting sessions are quite enriching, actually, when I'm not with people and I do the chatting, I like to maybe listen to audiobooks or some videos or just listen to good music, because cooking that is a bit like driving, you know, it takes your hands and some of your attention, but not too much, you're still able to really deeply focus on something else while doing this. Now, of course, for this batch I have to pay more attention, for this batch I have to pay more attention, because this is an experimental batch, but now we're in the safe zone, you see, with this batch, the leaves have shrunk, but they are not really cooked yet, so I want to keep drying them in the wok, and it might take quite some time, so I think we can just meet again in a few, in a couple of minutes, let's see what happens. So you can see that now we're towards the end, about 20 minutes have passed since we started the chatting, and now as I'm flipping the tea, I can smell both, you could say an oolong-like fragrance, so an oxidized fragrance mixed with some notes of roasting. I'm gonna keep doing just a little bit more, because as I said, I want to have a lightly roasted character to the tea, but I promise you that I won't push it too far, because I really think this is good material, and we shouldn't go overboard with some fancy effects, such as roasting, but roasting is great when you have an average quality material, or low quality material, and that you want to make something good with it, so for example, if you look at the Taiwanese oolongs, generally the roasted ones are not the highest quality ones, the higher the quality, the lesser the roasting. Okay, so let me just give it maybe two minutes more, and then I will extract. I will extract and sun-dry, now of course it won't be dry tonight, we'll have to wait for tomorrow, so let's forget about the idea of drying it in the wok, because that would give too high, too strong a roasting. I could try this again, maybe with some black tea, probably more likely with some shanghai material, which is less expensive and more expendable, but look at this color, you've got a really really different smell in this one. Okay, so I really hope it will be good, and this tea, as soon as it's made, I will put it on our shop, there will only be this batch available, I will sell it probably as a 70 gram pouches, so there will be what, maybe two kilo of this tea, so it will probably sell out fast. Let's see, meanwhile I'm going to extract it now, so let's look for the baskets. Okay, just one more flip, okay, maybe a bit of li tiao, of shaping, like this, look at this, not much steam left in this tea, so it's really time to get it out of the wok. I can already smell a bit of roasting, but not too much, just like I would love it, I'm sure. So let's do this, and we'll have the, we'll be able to taste the result of our work tomorrow, and I hope you will be able to taste this tea soon. Thank you for watching, and see you later, bye bye.