Solution For "How to Select best Quality Tea????"

If you are not so much zealous about the taste of tea, then the quality of tea will not affect you so much but if you are a crazy tea lover then your taste buds can detect even a small change in quality and we being tea lovers cant compromise on such changes. So today we will discuss how can one ensure that this tea is of best quality when there are large variety of same category tea available. This article will solve the mystery of “How to choose best quality tea”?

Without taking any more time lets us start the test. For this test you will be needing following things

Standard cups

This is very necessary for a good quality test, as these cups are made in such a manner that the taste of tea will not be affected during the test if you performed exactly according to procedure that will be described in this article later. In china these cups are widely used for testing purposes and lot other purposes if you don’t have these cups there is nothing to worry about, what you have to do is just send us an email and we will try our best to solve your problem. It looks somewhat like shown in picture below, it comes in set of three jars with lid and three bowls with spoons.

Samples of tea

Second thing you will be needing for this test will different samples of tea, which you want to for quality. While we were performing this test, we used three different kind of dark tea which were:

Kungfu Hong Cha

Hong Cha

Gushu Hong Cha

Starting from right side the first one is Kungfu Hong cha, Middle one is Hong Cha and the leftmost with most dark colour is Gushu Hong Cha. Now if we try to decide which one is best quality just by having a look on it then from texture Kungfu Hong Cha seem to be of most uniform texture with nice golden colour and large same size leaves, followed by Hong Cha also have a nice Uniform texture and same size leaves and third one Gushu Cha, have uneven rough type leave so if some ask me to judge the quality based on visual judgement I would select Kungfu Hong Cha to be the best one. But is it really the best of three? "You will get your answer at end of test Procedure"

The first step is to take some hot water and put it in jar and bowls and make it warm because if you want to experience the real taste of tea it can only be the cups should be warm before making tea in it. This is the basic principal in Chinese tea culture which is practiced before making any kind of tea.

Take three grams of each tea and put it in the warm cups, you will know the significance of warm cups if you smell the tea leaves before putting in cups and smell it again as soon as you put the tea  leaves in warm cups, you can clearly distinguish these two smells and can feel that in warm cups the smell is much stronger than before.

Now take the boiling water and put it quickly in jar and fill the jars to its brim. Make sure you don’t waste any time in filling the jar because for this test all the leaves should be kept for same amount of time in boiling water. Set the stop watch for 3 minutes and after three minutes take tea out in bowls. In case you are slow in filling the jars and for instance you take 3 seconds to fill one jar then during the time of taking tea out form jar, you should wait for three seconds before taking tea out from second jar and six seconds before taking it out from the third one. During making normal tea we keep the leaves in boiling water for almost 30-40 seconds but here we can see that we are keeping it in boiling water for 3 minutes and the purpose of doing this is make a dense tea drink with rich taste, so that one can easily distinguish between different tastes.

OBSERVATIONS

The next and most critical step is to observe the tea in jar visually, by smelling it and tasting it. But before tasting the tea you should drink pure hot water first so that taste of your tongue become neutral. While we were performing this test the final product looked like the one shown in picture below.

For visual observation you would have to check for the colour of the tea as all of these were dark tea, so the colour should be dark and it can be seen in picture that all three have dark colours. The second visual observation should be looking for the golden circle on the top of dark colour. Greater the width of golden circle the better will be the quality of tea, but in our case all three of them have almost same width of golden circle so for visual observation all of them are of same quality. Tough competition here ……  

Now our second observation will be to smell it but this observation can only be valid in case when all tea samples under consideration are baked under same condition during the process of manufacturing of this tea by any tea company, because most of tea from ancient Chinese trees and baked on woods which is so different form baking in ovens at large factories so, it will have smoky smell but it doesn’t means that the tea is of bad quality. So it is important that all the samples under consideration have same baking process before making observation using sense of smell.

But if you are more conscious about the flavour of tea than the quality of tea then smelling it can be a better option in selecting the tea like in our case the samples having following smells.

Kongfu Hong Cha smelled like Vanilla

Hong Cha smelled like Chocolate

Gushu hong Cha have smoky smell

Regardless of quality of tea, if you like chocolate flavour Hong Cha is good option for you and if you like vanilla flavour then Kongfu Hong Cha will suit your taste the best, and you can decide it easily by observing the smell.

Third and last and most important observation is tasting the tea. For our test till now, both of above observations have failed to decide which one is best tea. For this test it is important to know that the best quality tea is always from naturally grown old tea trees in forest, free from pesticides and fertilizers. Whenever you drink tea made from tea leaves from old trees of forest the stimulation point on tongue is always on the middle and back of the tongue and if the tea leaves are from the Bushes of tea farms that are usually grown using pesticides and fertilizers, the stimulation point will be on tip of tongue and its always more soothing on back of tongue. (it’s not meant that the quality of tea leaves from farms are of any bad quality, they are also of very good quality but here we are trying to select the best quality, and that’s only from ancient tea trees of forest).All the three samples of tea were tasted and there was quiet prominent difference in stimulation points on tongue for three of them,

"for Kongfu Hong cha the stimulation point was on tip of tongue"

"for Hong cha the stimulation point was also on tip of tongue"

"for Gushu Hong cha the stimulation Point was on middle and back of tongue and this feels most soothing and comfortable"

So Gushu Hong Cha have stimulation point on Middle and back of tongue it means that it comes from the Old tea trees of forest and hence this one is best of these three kinds of Black tea. Also while we were doing observation by smelling it we saw that it has a smoky kind of smell, that was because most of tea leaves from tea trees of forests are still baked on woods even till this day. At the start of this article when we try to decide the quality looking at tree leaves I gave an opinion that Gushu hong Cha will be of least quality because of uneven leaves shape and size but it came out to be wrong, and hence its necessary to carry out test for quality before jumping to conclusion just based on shape of tea leaves, As said by a wise man “ Never judge a book by its cover” . .