Hey Teaheads. This is Don from Mei Leaf. In this video : understanding Dan Cong. In this
video we're going to be going through the processes for making this incredible oolong
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I'm standing in mount wu dong, near phoenix village, where is where the best dan cong
is made. Dan Cong tea is one of my most adored and favorite teas. It's an ancient oolong
tea that comes from the song dynasty. Every time i come to china i'm an eternal student
of tea, and i'm humbled by how much i need to learn. So i'm going to explore this area
with you, and i'm going to try and impart some of the knowledge that i gain about this
incredible oolong tea. So join us.
So, we're on our way up to Phoenix village, and i just wanted to stop and show you an
example of some garden tea. If you look behind me you can see this terraced garden tea. It
looks very beautiful, but in fact, this is the lowest quality Dan Cong that you can buy
in this area. You can hear behind me that we're right on a main road, and it's low altitude
- around 200 to 300 meters. These are very young trees, so they're not going to have
the deep roots that are going to give a mineral-rich tea.
his is an example of garden tea, so if you're buying Dan Cong be wary, because this is Dan
Cong from the right area, but [a] very low quality tea.
Let me quickly explain the concept of Dan Cong. There [are] a few theories [relating
to] the reason why it's called Dan Cong. " Dan Cong" literally means "single stem", so one
of the theories is that the tea is made from a single tea tree. [that is] the batch of
tea is made from one tea tree. This is not the case for 99.9 percent of the Dan Cong
out there. Sure, some of the Song dynasty trees are kept single-batch, but for the majority
of them they're mixed, so i don't think that that's really valid. The second reason [for]
calling it Dan Cong is, because as you can see behind me, these are all planted as single
trunks, whereas if you go to see garden tea, for other types of tea, you'll see that the
shrubs are kind of merged together. This is planted as single trunks.
The third reason relates to the concept of "mother trees". The idea with Dan Cong is
that there are some original mother trees that all have their own unique flavours. They're
single trees that were grown from seed. As the farmers tasted this tea they related flavours
to them : ginger flower, gardenia, honey orchid. Then from there they had taken grafts of these
mother trees and propagated first generations of those flavours. Then you have second and
third generations, and so on. One of the most confusing things with Dan Cong are the different
flavours. The reason why Dan Cong is confusing is [because], number one, it's an ancient
tea, and just like any other tea in china there's a lot of ambiguity [and] cross-communication
when it comes to explaining the tea. The second reason is [due to the fact that] actually
there is no official classification system for [this] type of tea.
So certain producers will name the tea after the cultivar, certain producers will name
the tea after the area that it's grown in, [and] certain producers will name that tea
after the fact that it's an old tea tree. So there's a bit of a mix-up of terminology.
I do suspect that a lot of that is marketing to try to express a new tea to the market,
and therefore command a higher price. The easiest way to think about flavours - if you
are new to Dan Cong - is that there are generally two strains of flavours. There is the kind
of flowery, buttery, and nutty flavours, like the ya shi Dan Cong, like the gardenia, or
the ginger flower Dan Cong. Then there [are] the fruitier, honey notes of the mi lan xiang
Dan Cong. Imagine that there are generally two strains, and then the producer steps in
and they can take any of those strains of flavours and either lightly roast them, to
make them a very fresh flavour, or they can roast them darker to make them riper, richer,
and sweeter.
That's the best way to start. Once you start to taste those two strains then you can start
to move into more detail with the cultivars, and taste the differences and nuances between
each one. But the key to all of judging quality and value is taste. Don't be fooled by the
marketeers. Instead, develop your taste buds, and trust in your instincts.
We're walking through a Dan Cong plantation, and there are a few different cultivars here,
with different flavours. This one here is the ya shi Dan Cong - so it's the "duck poo",
or "duck shit" [laughter] dan cong - and this one here is the bai ye dan cong. You can see
it behind me here as well. This is bai ye Dan Cong. You can visually see that there
is a difference in the leaf shape. This [ya shi leaf] is a lot thinner and more supple
- this ya shi Dan Cong here.
This is just an example of one plantation growing multiple cultivars of Dan Cong. [i'll]
just give it a taste. [it's] very green [and] celery-like, but then a lovely, floral fragrance,
and a thick feeling in the throat. This is the ya shi ["duck shit"] cultivar. This is
the ba xian cultivar [which is] a really revered cultivar of Dan Cong. The Dan Cong lovers
of the world will know this one very well. Let's give this one a taste too. Very bitter.
Whoa! Super bitter. Yeah. [with] that one you need to wait until it's tea. Whoa!
These plants are probably about 10 to 30 years old, so this is still considered "garden tea"
[which] produces medium quality Dan Cong. We're going to head up the mountain to the
older tea tree plantations to try and find some even higher quality Dan Cong. This tree
behind me is a Song Zhong. It's from the Song dynasty, so [it's] about 700 years old, [and]
is one of the original Dan Cong tea trees. This is probably the most expensive dan cong
that you can buy, if you can actually get your hands on it. In fact, most of it is given
as gift tea. The price for this true Song Zhong tea would be something in the region
of $30,000 [usd] per kilo. I'm with Mr. Lu here, and Mr Lu [is] running away [laughter].
I've just been told that Mr Lu has actually tasted the tea from this Song Zhong, 700 year
old tea tree. When i asked him what it tasted like he said that the aroma was very similar
to cooked egg yolk, but it was very nice.
Yes?
Interpreter: yeah.
Don : [a] very nice tea. Okay.
Welcome to Wu Dong mountain. This [shows] the difference between those really low altitude "garden
tea" plantations that we saw before. This is properly within the rocks. You can see
[that] in order to get into this tea picking area there's lot's of climbing over rocks.
It's very, very steep. This is the perfect Dan Cong growing environment. We're going
to go in and try and get deeper into this ridge, and i hear that there's a picker over
there [who] is eighty years old! So follow me. Keep coming. Keep coming. It's very steep,
[so] be careful [with] your step.
These rocks are actually damp to the touch here. This is [a] perfect environment. The
soil here, look at this. Can you get a close-up of [the] soil? [it's] a perfect mixture of
soil and sand. This is natural to this mountain, this lovely, sandy soil that really irrigates
well. This sandy soil is what you want for good Dan Cong. Look at that. It's perfect.
I cannot believe that an eighty-year-old woman is picking so deep into this mountain. This
is quite a trek, and the ground is really precarious. I’m full of admiration for this
woman. She's 80 years old?
Young girl (off-screen) : more than 80 years old.
Don : [she's] more than 80 years old, and she's just trekked through this really precarious
terrain to pick Dan Cong. Look at her. This is years and years of experience.
You can see this has just been freshly plucked by this amazing woman who's in her 80s, and
you can see [that] she's always leaving one leaf. So if there were four leaves she would
pick three. If there were three leaves she would pick two. But she would always leave
one healthy leaf. I'm getting in her way, so I’m not going to disturb her. Look how
quick she can pluck. She can spot it, [and] know exactly what she's plucking. This is
decades and decades - a lifetime - of experience.
More than any other tea that I’ve ever experienced, Dan Cong is so heavily affected by the weather.
The reason for that is, during spring, when these plants are flushing and making the best
leaves possible, it's also the rainy season. So the producers are constantly playing dodge
with the rain, because if it rains whilst they're picking, or while they're sun-withering,
then the tea will reduce in quality, and the price will drop. Estimates are that about
a third of Dan Cong production is ruined by the rain. So these producers are always looking
up into the clouds, and being very wary of the showers.
As you can see, the weather has turned, and this is a disaster for the tea producers.
We were just in the tea fields, and it was a beautiful, sunny day, and they started to
look up at the clouds nervously, and pick furiously, because they could see that the
weather was changing, and then it started to pour down with rain. They started to rush
back with the leaves. All the leaves that were out withering in the sun had to be brought
indoors really quickly, because this has severely compromised the quality of the tea. So this
gives you an example of how precarious the tea growing and production business is, because
just at the whim of the gods - with just a change in the weather - the tea has gone from
a high quality tea to a medium - or even low - quality tea, and the price has just plummeted,
because you can taste the difference that this wet weather has made in the cup.
You can see the tea pickers trudging up with empty baskets because they were cut short by the rain.
They're withering this tea outdoors, but this is not the ideal conditions because
it has just finished raining, and it's still drizzling a bit, so they don’t really want
to leave it out for too long, but they're trying to do some outdoor withering. They
know when it's ready when the leaf starts to curl up like this. See if you can focus
on that. The edges are starting to curl. Normally this takes about 20 minutes to half an hour
if it was a relatively sunny day. But you can see [that] they're keen to get these indoors,
so I’ll give them back their leaf, because it's still drizzling a bit here, and they
don't want to let these leaves get too wet. If it is a dry day then every available flat
space would be used for sun withering. The perfect place, as you can see here, are flat
roofs, because the leaves get an even wither away from any pollution.
The best time for withering is when the sun is not too hot, so producers either
pick very early, and wither at about 9 or 10am, or they pick in the early afternoon
and wither at about 5 pm. It takes less than a half an hour, but this sun withering stage
is crucial to producing flavourful tea. In fact, it has been proven in laboratories that
this 20 minutes of sun withering increases the amount of flavour compounds in tea radically.
This is why a rainy day makes for less flavourful tea. After the leaves have been picked, and
they've been sun-withered, they are then brought inside to cool down. Then they go through
the shaking process. Now, high quality Dan Cong is shaken at least five times. The first
two times is very gentle. What the producer does is [to] literally just take the leaves
and spread them out evenly so the ones at the bottom go to the top, and then we have
an even release of moisture.
After that's repeated another time - and with about two hours in between the shaking processes
- they will then get more vigorous with the shaking of the bamboo sieve, and it will start
to dance the tea leaves around. They'll do this usually another three times. So that's
five times shaken for most high quality Dan Cong. If they want to produce a slightly lower
quality Dan Cong, and they want to make the process less manual, then what they will do
[is] after the two shakes that he is doing now they will then put the leaves into a bamboo
rolling drum like this. This spins slowly, and the leaves will strike each other and
promote, and speed up, the oxidation process. This spinning is usually about seven minutes
long. Now he's going to be taking them out. I'm interested to smell [them].
The smell coming off this is amazing. The fragrance is incredible. You're getting some
of the green still, but it's starting to get that lovely, matured Dan Cong aroma - this
slightly oxidized aroma. They will then take these leaves, pile them up, and they'll allow
them to oxidize before they're fired tomorrow morning. This is the firing process. This
is after they've done the shaking, and after they've left it to oxidize. They're now fixing
the tea. The temperature here is bit low. It's about 180 degrees [celsius]. Normally
it would be about 230 [degrees]. I'm not sure why they're firing it at such a low temperature.
But this is going to be heating up, and when the tea master feels it's ready then they
will release this, and the tea will be allowed to cool a little bit, and then they will roll
the tea.
After the firing process they take the leaves and put them in here, in small quantities.
And this [machine] rolls the leaves. [it] crushes the leaves, but doesn't break them.
It releases the oils and juices from the leaf that makes that delicious, delicious brew.
It makes the leaves sticky and lustrous. This is the leaf after it's come out of the rolling
machine, and you can see what i mean, very lustrous, really sticky, sticky leaves, and
the smell is now really, really fragrant. [it's] almost nutty. Yeah, [it's a] kind of
nutty, green acorn smell. They'll then put it in this machine which spins and separates
the leaves, because the rolling machine turns them into clumps, and this will separate them
out into individual leaves, onto these sieves here, and these will be used in the drying
machines - the big ovens - to bake and dry them. This is an oven that's baking at 100
degrees [celsius], and this is releasing all of the moisture from the leaf, and drying
the leaf.
Sometimes these are wood-fired. In this case it's a gas-fired oven. The smell coming off
here is intense. It really is. Now it's lost the green fragrance, and is much more [of]
a warming [and] flowery fragrance. This is the drying process, and depending upon how
many stacks of trays they have here it will change the amount of time that they bake for.
They will bake until the leaf is practically dry. So we've been in the mountains, and I’ve
showed you how they're making Maocha. After they've finished the Maoha they will sort
the leaf, take away the old leaves and stems. And then they will bring it for charcoal roasting.
They're not doing that now, because they're busy picking, but when they decide to charcoal
roast - and that will probably be in a few weeks to six weeks - they will light charcoal
lumpwood wait for it to settle down and go white.
Then they will pile the tea leaves on these bamboo sieves [don holds up an empty, circular
bamboo sieve] the temperature will be about 100 degrees [celsius]. They then put this
back in [don places empty sieve into sieve basket] and they make sure that there's no
fannings or dust that [are] going to fall out, because if they put this on here and
any of the tea leaf falls through the holes and hits the hot charcoal, then it will start
to create smoke, and the tea will be ruined because it will be smoking. They will charcoal
roast for about ten hours, and they will be going in every couple of hours to check the
tea and stir the tea, again, making sure that no fannings fall into the charcoal. You can
see that this is a very arduous and skilled process that requires a lot of patience just
like everything else [with] tea. So after dodging the rain clouds, [and] all
of that hard work picking and processing over 36 hours, here is the result. This is a Dan
Cong maocha, so this is a still a rough tea. Let's give it a taste.
So this is a mi lan xiang Dan Cong maocha. It’s got the roughness of a maocha - the
bitterness - but it's got an amazing fruitiness and honeyness, and i know that this is going
to become a wonderful, wonderful tea. I hope that you've learned something with this video.
That's it tea-heads. If you made it to the end of this video then please give [it] the
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them over. Other than that, I’m Don Mei from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being a 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.