Earlier today, Ivy demonstrated how to brew oolong tea. For oolong tea, we recommend using clay teapots or thick porcelain. Because Taiwanese oolong has a curled shape, it needs the superior heat retention of clay or porcelain to properly brew. Without this extra heat, the curls will take too long to open.
This results in weak, unevenly extracted, initial rounds of brewing. When brewing curled oolong, we strongly recommend using boiling (100 ° C) water.
Ivy adding Li Shan Mildly Roasted Oolong to her clay teapot.
We start by preheating our brewing vessel with boiling water. Leave the hot water in your vessel until the exterior surface is hot to the touch. Drain the water, then it's time to add tea leaves to our pot. We typically use 7g of tea per 100ml.
With oolong, we recommend rinsing the tea. We call this the "opening" round. There's no need to rinse the tea for any great length of time; five seconds will do. Once we drain the rinse water, it's time for the first round of brewing!
During your initial experience making our tea, we recommend you follow the table below:
1st Round: 50 Seconds - The purpose of a longer first round is to allow the oolong to fully unfurl.
2nd Round: 40 Seconds - Now that the leaves are fully open, we have to decrease our brewing time. If we increased our time for this round, we would end up with an over-extracted cup of tea.
3rd Round: 55 Seconds - For the third round, we recommend increasing the brewing time. We're seeking to create a balanced cup of tea; not too strong, and not too weak.
For succeeding rounds, we recommend increasing the brewing time by 15 seconds per round.
This brewing guide is just our recommendations, not rules. We feel like this style is a good starting point, however, we also strongly encourage you to try your own brewing style with our tea.
What do you think about this brewing style? Is it too weak, too strong? If you have a personal brewing style, please feel free to share it with us!
You can reach us at wangfamilytea@gmail.com, or at our social media pages, links for which are at the top of this page.
Thank you for your time,
The Wang Family