hey y'all my name is ohon I'm the owner of West China tea company and today we're gonna do a
little intro video about going through cha we're gonna produce a video series so that people at
home can learn how to pour gongfu cha on their own but first I'm just gonna go through it and
do it and let you see what it looks like without explaining in too much detail what everything is
and I'll talk about what gong for ties and why we do it a little bit so gongfu cha is essentially
the Chinese art of serving tea tea is like food in the sense that you have good ingredients but then
you have to prepare it in order for it to taste good and for it to be the best it can be and so
cooking is the art of preparing food and going food Chavez the art of preparing tea it's not
a ceremony people often use the word tea ceremony that's because they're familiar with the Japanese
tea ceremony which really is a ceremony what I like to say is that gongfu cha is not a ceremony
it's a discipline it's a set of techniques and a way of thinking about things that allows you
to make tea as well as you possibly can and so what I like to say is the analogy between gongfu
cha and Chinese tea ceremony is like the analogy between tea and wine if you analogize with wine
and Japanese tea ceremony is kind of like going to communion wine is is part of it and it's the
centerpiece of it it's the most important part of the ritual but instead of for its symbolic
significance and whereas doing going food chose more of what a sommelier does someone who's really
passionate about wine and really interested in wine and wants to share it with their friends
and the difference between wine and tea you know they're both very complex they're both very old
and they both have a very elaborate culture of connoisseurship around them never seen wine and
tea is that you get a bottle of wine and all the fragrances and flavors that are in that bottle
of wine are already there in their liquid form you just need to pour the wine out and you can
taste and smell them all they're there T however is not come liquid tea comes like this this is
a particularly unusual tea but he comes like this in dry leaves and so to unlock all those flavours
and fragrances we have to be able to prepare the tea in a way that brings out all of those
characteristics people have been doing this for a long time and it's not exactly clear how long
there's a lot of debate this is a fall cart this is not something that was necessarily taught
in schools or practiced in a formal capacity by the elite this is something that happens in the
streets and in people's homes going futures from Southeast from China from Fujian and Chao Chao
in the southeast and so they've been doing this for a very long time there are at least hundreds
of years and over time it's developed into a very elaborate and refined practice but at the heart of
it you're just paying attention to the tea and doing your best to make the tea taste good and
smell good and feel good so I might notice I've poured out the first steeping of tea we're just
rinsing the tea to wake it up the purpose of doing gongfu cha isn't to drink tea the purpose of doing
going for cha to taste tea if we wanted to drink to you would make it in a big pot and and drink a
lot of it all at once but we're here to taste tea which is why we use these little bitty cups and
these little bitty vessels the essence of gongfu cha is that you're making concentrated strong
tea not one big weak dilute steeping but many short small concentrated steeping that highlight
the whole profile of the teas flavor and so these steps though they might appear somewhat ceremonial
and elaborate really all serve one final purpose which is this what I just did taking those leaves
with everything that's gone into them and making this liquid tea that we can drink and so now the
vessels have been woken up the tea has been rinsed the tea has been steeped to the best of
my ability and now it's ready to drink and that is in essence the process of gongfu Chah thank
you very much and we're gonna be doing a series of these videos where we break down everything
that I just did so you know why I did it and how to do it so please keep watching thank you
you