ming hai puerh with roy fong

Roy is one of the most knowledgeable tea masters I know, and I was lucky to be granted an audience and a couple of cups of his early 1990's Ming Hai Puerh the other day.

Roy is a salt-of-the-earth tea master, claiming that the pedigree of a tea or a tea master is not as important as the tea experience itself.  "The tea should always be clean and bright," Roy said.  "Let the personality of the tea and of the guest determine how you will begin," he says, reminding me of the many shamans I have filmed and interviewed from Africa to South America, most of whom agree that to heal a person, you must know the character of the person and the illness as well as the character of the plants that might heal him.  So it is true of tea as well.  

Roy suggests that a person experiment as much as possible with the teas that interest you.  Try different water temperatures, serving vessels, leaf quantities and steeping times. This way you will begin to understand the potential range of flavors and expressions of the tea.  Lower water temperatures bring out more floral notes of a tea, he claims.  I have noticed this also, and that sometimes using less leaf and letting it steep a bit longer brings out more subtle and delicate notes that are otherwise lost.

Roy and I have both come to some other similar conclusions about optimal steeping habits. For one, don't boil the water only to let it cool down to a temperature that is best for the tea.  Bring the water only to the temperature you want it to be, and not beyond. Remember that the water is a living entity, just as the tea is.  Scalding or boiling it will change it's character.  If you don't want to steep the tea in boiling water, don't bring it to a full boil, but only to the optimal steeping temperature.

Second, tea and metal are not that compatible during steeping.  Although many teas are stored in metal containers or distributed in metal bags, when you are steeping the tea and the leaves are "waking up", you don't want them exposed to metal.  I avoid metal strainers, spoons, and other items containing metals. I do use a stainless steel tea kettle, but I suspect that an enamel coated tea kettle would be optimal. 

When I met with Roy, he was just about to leave for China. He says that to really know a tea, you need to climb the mountains where it grows and observe it in its natural setting.  Many purveyors of tea buy their teas from brokers and never understand the teas' origins.  "When you are in the mountains, you learn what the tea is going through, in its growing, harvesting, and processing," Roy said. "I could do it the easy way, just stay in my hotel room and meet with brokers, but then I wouldn't really understand the tea."  He first went to Yunnan 20 years ago, though he "likes to do something new, learn something new about tea every time."

Puerh teas from old growth trees have become fashionable to buy and collect now, yet Roy has been at it for twenty years.  When a tea comes from trees hundreds of years old, it embodies properties of the earth over those centuries: the air and atmosphere, the soil conditions, the light, even the stories of the local inhabitants.  This is what engages tea lovers who perhaps long for bygone eras when one could not hear the hum of engines, machinery, and electricity, but only the sounds of the wind and the nearby streams.  All of this is in this old growth tea, it is said.

"In most cases, wild teas taste better than cultivated teas,"Roy continued.  "Nature knows best what to do with a plant.  Man changes the balance of nature.  Wild teas have usually been there for a long time.  They are not self conscious.  They grow as they are meant to grow. When a tea is cultivated, the end product is not what nature intended."

Last, but not least, Roy delighted in sharing that wherever you find great tea, you find great water.  As with others who have made a pilgrimage to China to drink tea at the site of origin, Roy claims that the water, ladled from a nearby stream and simmered, makes the most outstanding, unrepeatable tea experience.

Look for Roy's book on ten top teas from China (title as yet unconfirmed) coming out soon. (It will be posted on this blog).