I feel a little silly: when I read about ‘gongfu tea ceremony’ in western social media, I had absolutely no idea what it was.
So I put off making tea that way. Recently I had a lightbulb moment: I sat with my grandfather, from Chaozhou, as he made tea every day and that’s probably gongfu tea, though he just called it ‘tea’. So I didn’t actually have to read about how to do it. I just had to make tea.
Today, Yunnan Sourcing’s delicious Jin Jun Mei black tea.
If I can rewrite the description for gongfu tea:
- use mainly tea leaves from Chaozhou (dancong, yashi, fenghuang oolong) tho any black tea is probably fine
- use more tea leaves than you expect
- use less water than you expect
- wash the vessels with hot water, throw it away
- throw away the first steep of water immediately
- steep for much shorter than you’d expect
- keep making small batches of tea throughout the day
- drink a lot of tea
- put on socks if you’re cold
What I read about as ‘an amazing oriental tea ceremony’ was always described to me as ‘getting rid of germs from the cups’ ahahaha. Honestly, unless you’re a tea lady at a fancy tea house you can just pour the water in any direction. I was made to attend Chinese tea ceremony classes in school and obliterated some of those memories, but maybe they’re coming back now
I thought I had to learn gongfu to make tea (I’ve also seen people pouring tea with gongfu moves, but that’s another thing)