Following the advice of the Cheong Seok Gok tea master, I kept my portion of our Gu Jeung Gu Po sealed for a couple of weeks. Basically, it lets the heat energy of the roasting process mellow out and the true taste of the leaves reestablish themselves. It takes a year for the heat to really fade, but I only have one package... Official 100g boxes from Cheong Seok Gol are sealed in individual 25g packages, so it's easier to keep one of those aside for a year.
It's a bit difficult to make a fair comparison to the batch we made last year, since we used the more elaborate technique of "gu jeung gu po", nine roast, nine dry, but on the other hand, it gives an excellent comparison between roasting nine times and the contemporary standard of roasting three times, as we did last year. The overall flavours and aromas where the same but what I noticed with gu jeung gu po is that they delivered themselves with an extra intensity.
The taste was incredible similar to the sweet, citronella-like scent of the leaves during the processing, which last year's batch only held a faint reminiscence of. The brew had a bright, concentrated colour (not so much in the images below, where I used very short steeps) and were very durable, producing a few more good tasting steeps than I usually get from Korean green tea.
Since making tea for the last couple of years, it's actually been over three years since I've purchased any tea from Cheong Seok Gol, but I would like to see how our gu jeung gu po compares to the tea master's Ujeon cha (first flush tea).We did taste some very fresh Ujeon between roasts making this tea, but it was too busy to give it my full appreciation.
side note - after seeing the Cheong Seok Gol tea master and Prof Ahn both use Yixing pots to brew this tea, I decided to do the same. I'd love to see how beautiful this tea looks in my favourite Korean pot next time...
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