How to Brew Tie Guan Yin (Iron Goddess) Tea: Learn to Make This Famous Oolong Tea

Welcome to another instructional video from Let's Drink Tea. Today I'm going to show you how to brew Tie Guan Yin. It's also known as Ti Kuan Yin in Cantonese. Tie Guan Yin is the Mandarin name. And the literal translation is Iron Goddess of Mercy. So it's often called Iron Goddess Tea in English. It's a Chinese oolong tea. It's probably the most popular Chinese oolong tea. It's, you know, when you go to any store in China, any supermarket, grocery store, you see more of this tea than any other brand except for Dragon Well, I would say. Personally, it's my least favorite oolong. It's very close to a green tea, but doesn't taste quite as good as those. Still, it's a pretty good tea. To brew it today, I'm going to use a tea press. You'll probably see a lot of people use a gaiwan or a yixing. Those work fine too. But I'm going to use a tea press now. And as always, you want to warm up everything you use, both your teapot or your gaiwan or your tea press by just putting some hot water in it and swirling it around. Push it through. Do the same with this. And for oolong tea, you generally use water that's about 95 degrees Celsius. So just below the boiling point. Since this one is closer to a green tea, I use water that's a little bit cooler, but you don't have to. It's really a matter of personal taste. So here's the package for this tea. And here are the actual leaves. Now, you can see this one is characterized by very tightly rolled leaves that actually grow quite large. The larger leaves of the plant, not the younger ones. Usually for oolong tea, a lot of people like to use the gongfu method, which means you use more leaves and much shorter steeping times, like 20 to 30 seconds. And that does work well for most oolong teas. But for this one, I prefer to use a longer steeping time and because of that, fewer leaves. And the reason is because they're so tightly rolled, I like to give them a chance to really unfurl fully. If you use a short steeping time, they don't. It still works. Your tea will just be far milder. And I like it to be a little bit stronger. All right. So I'm using about two teaspoons here. And generally, you want to use about one teaspoon per four or five ounces. So if you're using a gaiwan, that would be one teaspoon. Basically, for a personal cup of tea, one teaspoon. This one, I'm using a little more than I probably should. But it came in a little sample packet. So I'm using all of it. All right. Like I said, the water should be about 95. At this point, I just heated it up before. It's probably about 90 degrees. Which I find better for this milder, greener oolong. All right. Fill it up. And I'm going to let it steep for about two minutes. And that should give the leaves plenty of time to unfurl. And give the tea a nice light green color. OK. It's been two minutes. And I'm going to go ahead and drop the tea through. And you can see you get a, you know, it looks basically like a green tea. Like I said, it's a very mild, very light oolong. It's barely oxidized at all. And, you know, I personally prefer darker ones. But it does still taste pretty good. Let me see if I can get some of the leaves out here. They have begun to unfurl. But they haven't unfurled completely. And that's fine. That's actually what you want. Because they'll continue to unfurl with future steepings. You can usually get three to six good steepings out of Tieguanyin leaves. It kind of depends on the quality. I have some cheaper ones too that unfurl much bigger and faster. And you only get about three or so steepings out of it. Out of these I'll probably get the full six. You can see that some of them have barely unfurled at all. All right. That's it. Thank you for watching. And you can get more information on Tieguanyin or any other teas on the letsdrinktea.com website.