stepho&crank

Longjing, a green tea varietal

Last week Craig and I took a “Tea Tasting Safari” tour of Maliandao Street with the culinary tour company Hias Gourmet. Maliandao, located in the south-west of the city, is an area that boasts nearly one thousand tea shops on a kilometer-long stretch of road. The area is now quite developed, with lots of well-established shops and even large mall-complexes with hundreds of tea shops each, but this was not so several years ago. Before concerted government development in 1996, the area used to draw farmers who came with enormous bags of loose teas and sold them on the open street. Now the area, which is right next to the Beijing West Railway Station, still draws farmers from around the country, but they instead are selling to the hundreds of tea shops that now line the street.

Our first stop on the tour was into one of the “tea malls” on Maliandao. Walking in to the building I was daunted, to say the least. Having grown up on Lipton and Celestial Seasonings, my knowledge of tea was pretty much confined to how to put a tea bag in hot water (and even that I often managed to foil, somehow), so the thought of hundreds of stores with even more varieties of loose leaf teas…well it made me thrilled to have a guide at my side, I’ll say that.

A quick background on the many varieties of tea: there are a total of seven tea varieties, which are distinguished by their methods of processing, and each of which have their own distinctive flavors. These are:

• Green tea (lù chá 绿茶): Most common tea in China. The tea is unfermented and the leaves are pan-fried right after being picked. The leaves are also commonly used to make balls of flower tea.
• White tea (bái chá 白茶): White tea is made exclusively in China. It is slightly fermented.
• Red tea (hóng chá 红茶): Red tea is a fermented tea; it is what we in the West refer to as English black tea.
• Yellow tea (huáng chá 黄茶): Another slightly fermented tea that goes through a process of “smothering” which turns the leaves from green to yellow.
• Puer tea (pŭ’ĕr chá 普洱茶): Puer tea can be made from green, oolong, or black teas. It has a very strong, distinctive flavor which places the tea in its own category. The tea is fermented and unlike other teas ages well.
• Oolong tea (wū lóng chá 乌龙茶): A partially fermented tea somewhere between green and black teas.
• Black tea (hēi chá 黑茶): Chinese black tea is fully fermented. It should be distinguished from the English and Irish teas we commonly refer to as black, which in China are red teas.

Our first stop in the building was the Cha De Fang tea shop, where we tasted our first “hua cha”, or flower tea. You might notice that this isn’t in the list I just mentioned, which is of course a little confusing. The ball-like teas that expand in water to become beautiful flowers (photos below) are actually green tea; they are handmade by sewing green tea leaves around flower buds (so crazy!!). From Cha De Fang we moved on to various other tea shops, sampling their varieties and learning about various aspects of tea culture and methods of serving tea. Some of my favorites of the day, for flavor and also for name, were Love at First Sight (a flower tea) and Iron Goddess of Mercy (an oolong variety). We also tasted longjing, one of the most famous green tea varieties, and a three-year old “imperial grade” (higher quality, more finely shredded) Pu’er tea from the Yunnan province of China.

I have to say all of the teas we sampled were incredibly tasty and made me want to swear off Liptons forever. Going in to the tea shops I was daunted by the incredible variety on offer and wondered at how to choose from among the hundreds on-hand. My biggest lesson from our tour was that “quality” in tea is really a subjective thing — in fact buyers will almost always wait for you to taste the teas, see which ones you like best, and then price accordingly.

I would definitely recommend a trip to Maliandao to experience the incredible variety and deliciousness of teas that China has to offer. A couple of tips for prospective buyers:

1. Ask to taste! Shop owners seemed happy to serve you tea, and you should really only buy something after you’ve tasted it. If it’s your first time with Chinese teas ask to taste a sampling — green, oolong, flower teas. You will leave happy.
2. If you’re not sure on prices, ask to taste a low-end tea, and then ask to taste a high-end tea. If you taste the two ends of the spectrum you can see what suits you and hopefully be given a fair price for what you buy.
3. Buy what you like — there is really no standard on quality. The five qualities for judging tea are: smell; color; shape of leaves; taste; aftertaste. But really, whatever is most delicious to you is the thing to buy.