Brewing Hou Kui Green Tea Grandpa Style | Don Mei

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video, brewing Hou Kui, grandpa style. In this video I'm going to introduce you to this tea, we're going to SCOPE it, and then we're going to TASTE it, grandpa style. This video is going to go under the Tea Master Classes and the Single Tea Tastings playlist. If at any point in time you enjoy this video then please give the video the thumbs-up. The more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way. If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet then go click that button. Some of you may have already heard of Hou Kui. Hou Kui is also known as Monkey King, or Monkey-Picked Tea. It's a relatively new tea, invented around 100 years ago, so the early 1900s in An Hui province. This tea has a few legends behind it, in terms of its naming. One of the legends is that a farmer discovered a monkey that had passed away, and buried that monkey, and that monkey blessed the farmer by giving him some visions when he was sleeping to go into the forest and find this special tea plant to produce this amazing tea. The second story is that birds were flying, and they dropped seeds from the heavens down onto the mountains of An Hui province for this special tea plant, but the farmers felt that the trees were growing in areas that were too dangerous for them to pick, and so they sent specially trained monkeys with their perfectly padded fingers to scuttle up the trees, and pluck the tea, and bring it back to the farmer. Again, that's not true. Anybody who tells you that it's really monkey-picked tea is telling you a lie, but monkey-picked became something that became designated to high quality tea, and especially this Hou Kui tea. Another story is that this tea comes from Hou Kang village, which is true, a Hou Kang area in An Hui province. Hou Kang, Hou means monkey in Chinese, and the farmer that created it, or made the recipe to make this tea, had the name Kui in his name, and so the two were put together, Hou Kui, and therefore that's how it's named. So it's a relatively new tea, but it has quickly become one of the most revered Chinese green teas, and is often given as gift tea to businessmen, politicians, etcetera. It has something of a cachet about it. It has something very special about it. When you hear people talking about Hou Kui, and when you see these beautiful, amazing leaves, which I'll show you very soon, there's just something very special about this green tea. Anyway, let's SCOPE the tea. The season for this is, obviously, with all green teas, the high quality is spring-picked. There are summer-picked Hou Kuis. I would avoid them. You need to get spring-picked. However, the growing season for this plant is a little bit later than normal green teas, so around the middle of April to the beginning of May. The cultivar is the Shi Da Pin Zhong cultivar. This is quite a special cultivar. The leaves are pointed, and they just grow slightly larger than the average Sinensis tea cultivar. So that's the cultivar. The origin? This comes from An Hui province, and specifically from Hou Kang, which is in Tai Ping county. So Tai Ping county, An Hui province, Hou Kang is the name of the area, and there are a few villages around Hou Kang. Hou Kang means Monkey Pit. So that is really the only place to get proper Hou Kui. P stands for Picking and Processing. This is a very labor-intensive tea. Around one kilo of this tea is about 20,000 pickings. So it's a very light tea, and therefore you need a lot of it in order to make one kilo, but also it is very labor-intensive. So what they do is they pick the bud, and usually about three or four leaves. They pluck them. They bring them back to the processing area where they're going to make the Hou Kui. They then refine the plucking, so they'll pluck the coarse leaves off. That usually leaves a bud and two leaves, maybe a bud and three leaves, depending on how tender the leaves are. Then they wither it slightly to allow it to soften. Then they pan-fry it, and they very, very quickly, in order to fix the green. In other words, deactivate the enzyme in the leaf that causes oxidation. Then after that they hand-flatten them on meshes, and then they cover the mesh. So you see this criss-cross pattern, and I can quickly show you, hopefully, some of this criss-cross pattern. Let me see if I can find one that is particularly criss-crossy. See if you can see that. You might be able to get a close-up of that. Let me see a bit closer. What they do is they flatten them by hand, so they lay them all out by hand over a silk mesh, or some sort of cloth mesh, and then they cover it with another cloth mesh. Then they clamp them together, and then they roll them with these rollers. What that rolling does is it starts to extract some of the essential oils. It makes the tea more flavorful. Then they dry them, and they dry them in racks at different temperatures, starting at a hotter temperature, around 100 degrees, and then a bit more than 100 degrees Celsius, and then they reduce the temperature by moving the racks around in different ovens. The whole baking process takes about an hour, an hour-and-a-half. After that they then will cure the leaf sometimes. They'll sometimes put them in containers to draw more of the moisture out, but it is a very labor-intensive tea, and it is all hand-made. So the price of the Hou Kui also represents the effort that's gone into it. Finally, in our SCOPING, E stands for elevation. Just like most teas in this area, this is not super-high elevation tea. We're talking about 350 to 450 meters. But what you really want is to find tea that is picked from the north side of the mountains, because there's more mist there, there's less sun, it means that the tea grows slower, and therefore can be rich and flavorful, but without developing too many of the catechins which make the tea potentially go more bitter. What you want to look out for, for Hou Kui, is long leaves, around 3 to 5 centimeters. You want to see that it's relatively translucent, or very light, so you can see how the light can really travel through this leaf, and you can see that it's a nice, light green. Obviously, where the buds and the leaves are compressed together it's more dark, but if you look down at this part here you can see how light green they are. You can see how sharp and pointed these leaves are. This is from the right cultivar, which is a Zhen Cha, a pointed cultivar of tea. Okay, so we've scoped the tea. Now let's taste the tea. Normally I'd be brewing this Gong Fu style, and I want to make it very, very clear from the outset that I still believe that with any teas the best way to taste the flavor is Gong Fu style. But Grandpa style, or glass brewing, is something that's very popular in China, and there are some teas that I think are suited to Grandpa style, or glass brewing, and this is one of them. The reason is because this tea is grown in relative shade. As I said, it's grown mostly on the north side of the mountain, where there's a lot of cloud cover, and so it doesn't get a huge amount of sunlight. Because of that it is more delicate, it is more light, it hasn't developed those catechins that are in other green teas, especially teas from Zhe Jiang, or from Sichuan, or from Japan. It hasn't built up so much of those catechins, and therefore it is less susceptible to going bitter when it is kept in hot water for a period of time. That is why this tea is suitable for Grandpa style, or glass brewing. Let me show you how to do that. Gong Fu style I'd be recommending around 2 grams per 100 ml, but for Grandpa style we are going to be using about a 300 ml... it's 400 up to the top, so we're not going to fill it to the top... so about 300 ml. I'd be looking at something like around half a gram to a gram per 100 ml. I'm going to eyeball it here, and I'm going to say this is probably about 2 grams. It's amazing. One of the amazing things about this tea is that the leaves look very large, but because, if they're good quality, they're very, very thin, they're extremely, extremely light. This quantity here is around 2 grams, and I would say that's around 8 leaves. Now, hot water. We're brewing with about 85 degrees here, so green tea temperature 80 to 85 degrees. You pour, and pour in a circular motion if you can, just to try and agitate the leaves. As I said, we're not going to go straight to the top. Immediately, you can see that the leaves are starting to soften up, and the liquid is starting to change color, but it's very, very light. It's a really, really light tea. This is what I love about this tea. The reason I love Hou Kui is its lightness. If you look at provinces in China, and you look at Zhe Jiang province, you look at Sichuan province, you look at the other green tea-growing provinces, they differ from An Hui, because An Hui teas just seem much lighter, much purer. I don't mean that the others are not pure. I just mean that the taste is very elegant, very delicate, very pure. It's almost like taking water and purifying water. You're not getting a huge amount of complexity in flavors, but what you're getting is a delightful elegance that comes from An Hui green tea. If you look at things like Huang Shan Mao Feng, or Misty Peak, that's another really lovely green tea from An Hui province, which is, again, very light. You get the fresh notes, and you get less of the kind of umami, and the astringency, and the depth of the other provinces. This has been, I would say, about a minute, and you're ready to drink. With grandpa style, or glass brewing, you're leaving the leaves in the water, and then you're just topping up with water. What you want to make sure you do is that you don't finish the tea. You drink up to about a third, so you leave some of the liquor there before you refill. That way you're not starting from scratch in terms of a brewing process, but you're taking the concentrated tea and basically diluting it, and allowing it to brew again. As you get further on with your infusions you can cover the glass. You can cover it in order to try and extract more, to maintain the heat a little bit more, because obviously as it brews it will extract less and less as it's been infused more times. Okay. Cheers. Let's taste this grandpa style. You can see the color. It's very light. It's a nice, light, vibrant green, and obviously that's going to change as it brews for longer. One of the wonderful things about this tea, and other Anhui teas, is that you have the purity of taste, but you have a wonderful aroma. A very floral aroma. I'm getting a lot of orchid aroma here, so a lot of fresh floral, fresh grassy aroma, but the taste is very gentle. There's no bitterness. There's no bite. It's very, very soft. So if you are somebody out there that wants to drink green tea, but find that green tea can be a bit too strong for you, maybe you feel that it's too strong in effect, or it's too strong in flavor, maybe you feel it's too vegetal, it's too umami, it's got too much of those savory notes, or it's got too much of an intense grassy note, then I would really strongly suggest that you start to explore Anhui province. The two teas that you should explore are Misty Peak, or Huang Shan Mao Fang, and Hou Kui, or Monkey Picked, or Monkey King tea, because you're going to get exactly what you want out of a green tea, which is lightness, freshness, aroma, but without that heaviness that can come from some of the other green tea provinces. So what I'm tasting is what I'm smelling, and what's coming through my nose when I breathe out is the orchid and the floral. The texture is quite light, relatively thin, but the taste is got a slight spice to it. I would refer to it as a kind of nutmeg spice. So a slight It has a very light creaminess to it. So similar to a milk, or like an egg custard, but very, very light, with a sprinkling of nutmeg over it. I'm talking very, very light. The predominance of the taste is very pure, very refreshing. It's got grassy notes, freshly cut grass. It's got some green bamboo in it, but it's all really, really light. You can this leaf is sitting in here, and it's honestly not going bitter at all. It's maintaining its freshness. Now, as I said, I would always recommend Gong Fu style over any other style of brewing. If you brew Gong Fu style you're going to get the ultimate freshness of it. There's not going to be any stewed notes. As this moves on it will start to develop a bit of a stewed note, which some people like and some people don't like. But it's a great way to drink tea, because there's nothing to it, right? You've got your glass, you get your thermos or kettle of hot water, you just keep refilling throughout the day. This is often the way that they brew in China. If you're traveling around with tea leaves, you go into a taxi, you see people with their thermoses and leaves just sitting there, and they just keep refilling with water. So this glass brewing, or grandpa style brewing, is certainly something that's done a lot in China, but not when you want full tea appreciation. It's something that is just an enjoyable, simple way to brew tea. Mmm. Delicious. Storage of this is really important. Make sure you keep this out of the air. This is one of those teas that will change very, very quickly. So keep it sealed very, very well, ideally airtight in foil packages. Really, really take care with this tea, because what you'll shrink, and everything starts to get darker, and you know that you're losing some of the freshness of it, and those aromatics, those bright notes, will start to deaden down slightly. Not a big deal, but obviously you want to drink it in its prime condition. So this is one that you want to make sure you drink as fresh as possible. Okay. I hope that that has introduced you to this incredible tea. We'll put a link to purchase this tea in the description below, and I hope that this interests you in grandpa-style brewing. It's not suitable for all teas, but certainly for Hou Kui it definitely works. That's it teaheads. If you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs-up. Check out our YouTube playlist and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make. If you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares. If you have any questions or comments then please fire them over. Other than that, I'm Don Mei from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from the tea bags, keep drinking the good stuff, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye.