Let's make reddened Puerh tea

Hi everyone, today I'm going to make an interesting experiment. Look at this tea. Here you have leaves that have withered for 48 hours. As a comparison, these leaves have withered for about 4 hours. I wanted to make black tea originally, but I thought it would be interesting for you to try what a long-withered, poor tea would taste like. So I'm going to process this tea as poor tea. This is very unusual because we like to give a withering time of 4 to 6 hours typically for poor tea. So let's try this and let's cook that tea in the wok. So I'm going to start at a relatively small fire because there's not too much water left in those leaves. I don't want them to burn. So I will start at a low wok temperature and a medium fire. Slightly less than is expected for a normal shaxing with normally withered leaves. Now from the go on you can see that there are lots of dark leaves. So it precludes what kind of tea we're going to get in the end. And I can smell already that you have that oxidization smell. They smell different from the fresh leaves. You don't really have that what we call qingwei, like the smell of the fresh leaves. It's already changed a bit into some kind of white tea. So you can see that the way the leaves wither is not homogeneous. Basically, if some leaves received some damage during transportation or for any reason, they will very quickly turn red and you will have that kind of tea. And they will also dry more quickly because if the cell integrity is compromised, then the water will escape more easily. So you can see that the way the leaves wither is not homogeneous. Basically, if some leaves received some damage during transportation or for any reason, they will very quickly turn red and you will have that kind of tea. And they will also dry more quickly because if the cell integrity is compromised, then the water will escape more easily than if the cells are intact, such as in that kind of leaves. Okay, after 25 minutes I think the tea is ready now. I think the stems are cooked enough. The tea didn't burn in the wok despite the fact that there were many leaves that were already dry. I can smell a fragrance that I'm really not used to. Something a bit between white tea and I would say, you know that oolong from Taiwan, that's called kuifei or hongshui oolong or maybe some kind of oriental beauty fragrance. I'm looking forward to tasting this tea. I think it will be very interesting. So let's take it out of the wok. So let's try the result of our work of yesterday. I smell some roasted notes, which means that probably on my second batch, because the tea was so dry, it got kind of burned or roasted a little bit. It's not burned notes, it's roasted notes, so it's just the step before it goes really bad. And it's actually pretty good that way. Okay, so now let's get the first brew. It's quite animated in Jingmai because people are still making tea. Now you can hear the tea pickers coming back from the fields. Here it is. So you can see that the soup is slightly red. It's redder than it would be for poor tea. So let's try the first brew. Yeah, it has much more expression than a standard poor tea, especially on the next day of its production. The aroma is more demonstrative thanks to this roasting mixed with the higher oxidation. So again, it reminds me a bit of those Guifei, those medium oxidation and medium roasting Taiwanese oolong, but of course without the oolong effect. And yeah, it's quite satisfying and it pushes us to experiment more because you can see that you are rewarded when you're a tea maker. You are rewarded with experimenting. So it has some sort of fragrance that could remind you of an oolong tea, but with the mouthfeel of a poor tea. The mouthfeel is definitely poor tea-like. Actually, I think I'm going to make some more. I'm not going to use mine. Yeah, that's really interesting. Let's go for the second brew. I'm going to brew it slightly stronger. Oh, by the way, I gave it a light rolling yesterday after the cooking, and I was a bit scared at that time because I saw a lot of tea leaves were already dry and we got a bit of dust in the rolling machine. So that can be a problem when half of your leaves are dry and half of them are like poor tea. That's something we could think about if we want to improve that processing path. But so far so good. Eventually, we didn't have too much dust, just a little bit on the machine. It didn't impact too much the final result. Now, the problem can be that if the buds are dry, they will detach more easily than the leaves, and they will end up with the dust. So if you lose the buds, it will surely affect the taste of the tea. So we have this thing. Either we keep doing two days of withering, so it takes a long time, and some of our leaves will be dry. Either we find another way to speed up the oxidation in the fresh leaves while maintaining the water content of the leaves. And if you know a bit about tea processing, you might have an idea about this. And I'm not going to tell you my idea. Next time I do it, I will shoot a video and we'll see my next experiment. Meanwhile, I'm going to put this tea on the website because I think it's really worth a try. It's an interesting tea. Again, the fragrance is different on the second brew. And it's actually an even better mouthfeel than poor tea. At least, just right out of the factory like this. This tea was made yesterday. Thank you for watching, and I hope you get to try this tea because that's an interesting one. Bye bye.