dodj aha that means howdy y'all in Chinese my name is Sol Han and we are here with another
episode of gong fu teacher at guan yin teahouse in austin texas today we're going to talk about
smell snow is one of the most important aspects of tea I would say that the smell of tea is easily as
important as the taste of tea and tea has a lot to smell about so there's the the classic ways of
smelling tea when we think of smelling too you think of smelling the leaves themselves either
cold and dry like in a 10 or warm and wet and a guy one or a teapot after they've been rinsed
and that's that's definitely an important smell of tea and then there's the smell of the liquid
tea when you have a cup of tea in your hand and you smell the liquid itself but there is also a
whole panoply of other smells that arise when ceramic and glass materials get cold and dry
things that have had tea in them start to dry out you get what's called the lungs young or
the bass young which means the cold fragrance or the cup fragrance and we can observe that quickly
and easily on the lid of the guy WAN so I'm gonna go ahead and do a steeping of tea and we're gonna
look at one by one all the places where we can find this very elusive and exquisite fragrance
and why does it get its own episode because it's different the smell of the lid of the guy Juan
is going to be different than the smell of the leaves that are in that guy Juan and in addition
to that the smell will evolve and change as the Kwai cools and what's happening essentially is
that the fragrant oils that make up the aroma of tea are not necessarily water-soluble and so they
float on the surface of the liquid and then when I pour that liquid out and that material that clay
or that glass is now dry then those oils form a film on the surface of that glass or that clay and
as they start to evaporate there they're volatile and they start to evaporate and one or the other
of these chemicals will exhaust itself and so for example I smell the wood of the guy Juan
it already smells different than the leaves but if I wave it around a little bit and let it cool
off more more of those vapors more of those Roma evaporate and I get a different smell you're just
gonna have to take my word for it unless you want to follow along we're drinking behind the
ditch Phoenix you long it's exceptionally fragrant tea and it has a lot of this after fragrance this
long Sean so small you know guy Juan weird smell it again what a cool and then we can do the same
thing with the Ganga Bay and what we're gonna get out of the going debate is gonna be ever so
slightly different because it's deeper and you've got more oils on the sides and it's just gonna be
a little of a different experience and we smell the empty Ganga Bay and it's just blast of floral
sweet fragrances and then we wave it and it gets a little bit sweeter and a little bit sweeter and
then the last place that we typically taste this is on the bottom of our cup so we drink our tea
and then we wave around our cup and then we can smell our empty cup yeah and it's again a little
bit different than what I got on the guy one would a little bit different than what I got on the gong
job eh and so that lungs young or bass young he's gonna be different depending how you get
it and there is even a specialized cup just for observing experiencing and smelling this elusive
and exquisite fragrance that changes as the vessel cools and that is called the one xianbei these are
from Taiwan well this one's made here in Texas by a friendly fire glass oh and this is made by
whiskey and clay also Texas based pottery but though when Shang Bay is a tall cylindrical
cup that is roughly equivalent in volume to the tasting cups which are the cups that we usually
are used to using and its purpose is not to drink out if we don't drink out of this melon cups we
just to smell them and so we do it like this I would demonstrate by making another pot of tea and
we will get to use this morning cup the smelling cup is originally from Taiwan the Taiwanese are
very very classy people and they take their tea very seriously and so they developed this
specialized vessel so that you don't have to wait for the guy Juan or the Ganga Bay to get passed
around you don't have to wait till you finish your tea either using this one shown Bay you can
smell that after fragrance before you drink the tea and that's the primary purpose of it is to
give every drinker the opportunity to smell that second fragrance and experience the whole range
of what it does before they actually drink their tea and we accomplish that like so I Center this
here so I've gotten my smelling cup I'm gonna fill it with tea all the way up and then we're going to
take our tasting cup and we're gonna invert it and put it right over the top of the spine cop just
like a little mushroom then we're going to take this whole thing grip it like so I like to have
my thumb and forefinger on the smelling cup and my ring finger and middle finger on the tasting
cup and turn the whole thing over and if you do it right not a drop will spill Hey and the tea will
remain in a little column in the smelling cup you see there's no tea down in the tasting cup itself
until I take a spine cup and remove it like so just like that and then I can take my smelling
cup before I drink the tea take my warm smelling cup wave it around roll it between my hands cool
it off a little bit and then yeah very classy very classy and then after having prepared my palate by
smelling that second fragrance I can taste the team and have a and even richer tea drinking
experience thank you all so much for joining us this has been going through tea cha if you enjoyed
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