Cheong Seok Gol Gu Jeung Gu Po, tasting

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...

Handmade Jung-jak cha, from Cheong Seok Gol

It's about time I add a bit about preparing Korean green tea, taking a look at the tea we made back in May. For a bunch of first-time tea makers, our efforts were a success, aside from from a few leaves being greener than the desired bluish-jade and a few strands of cotton I've had to pick out from the gloves we were wearing.

Korean tea ware is much heavier and more rustic and bulky than its elegantly simple Yixing counterpart, but there's a humble charm I've always appreciated about Korea's rustic aesthetic. The most recognizable feature of a Korean teapot is the long side handle, perpendicular to the spout. I chose this set because it was traditionally fired in a wood kiln with a beautifully textured and coloured glaze. In the tea shop, I mentioned Japanese "raku" firing, asking if it were the same. This was back in 2007, before I knew better, and if looks could kill, from the other-wise lovely clerk, I wouldn't have lived to see 2008, or even taken another breath, for that matter... You see, during the Japanese invasion of 1592, Korea's best potters were forcibly taken to Japan, entire villages of them in some cases, leaving Korea to relearn what was lost with the sudden absence of its masters. It happened 422 years ago, but anything related to Japan remains a touchy issue!

Korean tea sets often serve 3-5 people, though if you were to substitute Chinese cups, you could nearly double the servings. Some traditional Korean techniques focus on three servings, but I can't help but approach any tea with a gongfu method. An important piece in the Korean set is the "suku"(숙우), a spouted bowl for cooling the boiled water, since Korean green tea requires the water to be cooled to a very low temperature. The first infusion can be steeped at as low as 50ºC/122ºF (which requires a longer steep than usual). Since green tea is unique in that the brewing temperature is much higher as the steeps progress, the suku is convenient for cooling small amounts of water, while the rest may remain heated in the kettle. There's a saying in Korea not to be too greedy during the first infusion. If the first cup is too delicious, the rest of the session won't be as good. I don't see it as choosing quantity over quality, but finding a pleasant balance between the two.

The pot and cups are heated, as the Chinese do, but unlike Chinese style, there is little to no overspill. There is also a smaller leaf to water ratio than gongfu style, but that's often the case with any green tea. Once the set is heated, a single pot's worth of water is poured into the suku. While waiting for the water to cool, the heated pot has some time to heat the leaves and awakens them with a rich, sweet aroma.

There's no need to rinse the leaves. Once the water is cooled, gently pour it over the leaves in a circular motion. With the water between 70-80ºC, steep the leaves for 20 seconds, then you may either pour directly into the cups or back into the suku. I look for a light jade color in the cup. If find a strong or slightly yellow colour is too bitter for my liking and loses its delicate sweetness. The second steep should be 15 seconds and the third 20 seconds again. After the third steep start increasing the time by 10-15 seconds. While steeping, rotate your wrist to gently rock the pot in a circular motion. It always gives me a little thrill to see how bright green the leaves become after steeping them, almost as they were off the bush.

Green tea is one of the trickiest to steep well. It took me lot of practice before I was able to steep more than three cups and still extract any flavour. As delicate as Korean green tea is, even if done with skill, after the sixth steep, the brew is very light, especially with Ujeon or Sejak.

Myung Won "Hadong Green Tea"

After receiving this tea as a gift at the COEX Tea World Festival from Myung Won's booth, I was very excited to get home and try it. The chairwoman of the company is holder of Korea's Intangible Cultural Asset Number 27 for the Royal Court Tea Ceremony, and has been recognized with the Ok-Gwan (Jade) Order of Cultural Merit from the Korean Government.

The box was divided into two small packages, one with 20g of "녹차 Green Tea", and the other 20g of "홍차 Black Tea". I found the simplicity of the names a bit puzzling since, traditionally, Korean green tea is known as 작설차 (Jakseol Cha/Sparrow's Tongue tea) and is then divided into 우전 (Ujeon), 세작 (Sejak), and 중작 (Jungjak) for the first, second, and third flushes.

The second sign that I may have overestimated this tea was the leaves themselves. Though a bold, sweet fragrance emerged when I cut open the foil pack, reminiscent of strawberry jam, the elegantly curled leaves, beautiful to look at, had many bright green leaves mixed in. In other respected teas from the area, these would have been painstakingly removed during the roasting and drying process.

The steeped leaves had a full balance of sweet and tart that eventually faded into a piney astringency. The aftertaste was rich and a burst of sweetness on the tongue left a pleasurable final impression. The finished leaves varied widely in size, but most closely resembled a Jungjak harvest.

Somewhere between my initial great expectations and subsequent skepticism after inspecting the packaging and leaves, this tea ended up being very delightful. Though it lacked the subtlety of the highest quality Hadong teas, it is still a much appreciated gift that I will enjoy 'till the end.

making tea at Cheong Seok Gol; sealing the fragrance (Surprise Tea!)

⤶ part 1; harvest

⤶ part 2; roasting & drying

Despite our 20 hours of travel and labour the previous day, I woke up at 5:30 am, after just four hours of sleep (not sure if it was the 20 hours of drinking tea or Mr Ahn's snoring that had anything to do with it...), but was excited for the day. After the heavy rains that fell throughout the night, Jirisan was enshrouded in a heavy white mist rising from its slopes. After the fresh mountain air woke me up a little more, I headed into the workshop to see how our leaves were coming along.

When I got to the racks, another man from the group was standing there with a puzzled look, which I soon duplicated when I saw that our tea was gone without a trace... We turned around and the tea master was suddenly there behind us, saying that he'd moved the leaves upstairs to dry because of the rain. All I could think was, "Man, he was up really early!"

After breakfast and tea, he brought our leaves down in a single, small basket. I was amazed how much they had changed since a only few hours earlier and how similar they looked to the Sejak leaves I usually buy from Cheon Seok Gol each spring; wiry, twisted, more bluish-grey than green.

It was time for the final step of the process, "hyang olligi" (향 올리기), litterally "fragrance giving", or "sealing the fragrance". The gamasot was heated to only 110ºC and the leaves had to be slowly turned in it over the next five hours to completely dry them.

Throughout the process, from plucking the leaves until the final drying, it was important not to have any scented products on your body, but it was especially important now. We couldn't even use soap to wash our hands before this step because the highly absorbent nature of tea leaves would be ruined by the scent. For this reason, it's important to keep yourself as clean as possible.

The leaves had to be gently pushed up along the walls of the gamasot in a clockwise motion and allowed to roll over themselves back to the center of the pile. Mentally dividing the pile into thirds, you rotate the leaves a handful at a time without stopping. Any bright green leaves that appear have to be tossed out because they did not dry properly.

Again, the scent of the leaves was alluring, much like the scent of dry leaves heated in a pot before steeping, but indescribably more alluring, sort of like the difference between a store bought apple pie or one baked fresh by your grandmother.

Every little while, I would take a break and head out to the porch to watch the white clouds as they thinned and drifted through Jirisan. At 6 am, the mountain was completely hidden, but later it had mostly emerged from the mist, which clung like long strips of cotton, then suddenly engulfed again in opaque white, then materializing again. Mr Ahn and I took a walk a short ways up the hill behind the house, just below the tea field, where a patch of rogue tea shrubs were growing. While he cut a few clipping to bring back to Seoul, I continued to admire the scenery and the sacred plants growing in narrow terraces along the slopes.

Soon, we heard Mr Ahn's wife calling us back down to the house. The tea was almost finished and they were waiting for us to join them for the first tasting. As our tea was steeped and poured, I eagerly accepted, quickly admiring the colour and scent before impatiently bringing the cup to my lips. After the first sip, the group let out a collective "Mmm", then Mr Ahn stood up and exclaimed, "와... 맛있는 차!", "Wha... delicious is the tea!" (No, I didn't intend that to sound like Yoda, the translation just works that way!) It wasn't merely his enthusiasm that told me his words were sincere, but the genuine surprise in his tone and the expression in his face! Koreans, like Chinese, love to make puns, and the man next to me, a professor of dentistry in Seoul, dubbed our tea "Gi D'tong Cha", which is Korean slang for "surprise", but happens to end with the Korean/Chinese word for tea. I think it summed it up well, our "Surprise Tea!"

There was something surreal in the experience of drinking the tea we'd all come here to make, apart from the surprise that it was actually delectable. Everything coming together in a cup of tea, the mountain, the leaves, the smells, the old friends and new, and all our hard work, converged. I'd be lying if I said our tea was as good as the tea master's but the experience filled the cup and was in the taste just as much as the tea did. As Matt insightfully commented on the first post of this series, now we know the true taste of tea!

Once the tea leaves were cooled enough, we weighed and sealed them into 30g packages. There were just enough for each of us to take home three. We took turns as Mr Ahn presented us with the leaves of our labour in a sort of ceremonial fashion. Since I taken the job of sealing the packages, I was last to receive mine. It felt somewhat like a graduation, or perhaps more of an initiation into the tea master's realm. He congratulated me on my good work, and with my tea clenched carefully in my hands I thanked him and bowed deeply, in gratitude for the experience.

the leaves after drying over night, nearly fully dried

the tea master, heating the gamasot

Mr Ahn, inspecting the leaves

the tea master, demonstrating the technique

the 'minbak' (guesthouse) and workshop

organic tea leaves