Many tea lovers are familiar with the Gong Fu style of brewing, which is often praised as being the “truest” in bringing out a tea’s character. But when we evaluate tea and judge tea during competitions, different methods are used based on the same principles of brewing.
When we brew tea to enjoy, we want to bring the best out of a tea. One of the principles of brewing is to use a higher temperature to bring out the complexity of tea and a lower temperature to dilute the flaws. This is why we see the highest-quality teas demand boiling-temperature flash brewing at full size (yes, there are standard water-to-tea ratios for Chinese tea), while inferior teas usually use half size (a greater water-to-tea ratio) and are steeped at a lower temperature. A seasoned brewer should be able to manipulate flavor and even the perceived quality of tea by adjusting temperature, water-to-tea ratio, and steeping time.
This creates human variables in a tea’s performance. One can argue that a tea did not perform as well in a competition because the person brewing the tea ruined it. This is why, based on the same principle, a different brewing method is devised for competition to ensure fairness.
Opposite to the objective of bringing out the best of a tea for enjoyment, tea evaluation brewing methods aim to force-brew all teas, eliminate the human factor, bring out the worst in a tea, and make the least horrible tea the winner. This calls for standardization of the water-to-tea ratio, boiling water, and prolonged steeping time. Depending on the competition, there are different rules, and below are some popular examples.
- 3 g tea/100 mL water, boiling water, one steeping: 5 minutes (popular for green tea)
- 3 g tea/100 mL water, boiling water, two steepings: 3 minutes and 5 minutes (popular for red tea)
- 5 g tea/100 mL water, boiling water, three steepings: 1 minute, 3 minutes, and 5 minutes (popular for Wu Long)
How a competition is structured usually has to do with the type of tea, the number of teas in the competition, and the number of judges—in other words, logistics. Imagine 5–10 judges evaluating 100 teas: doing three steepings means tripling the time of one steeping. Most tea competitions last just a couple of hours to half a day, so faster methods are usually adopted to accommodate the timing.
But some very ambitious and intense tea competitions, like the famed Yan Cha competition Tian Xin Cun Dou Cha Sai 天心村鬥茶賽, start with a thousand teas in a rough competition that takes days to a week to complete. Then comes an elimination round lasting 2–3 days, with 100 teas being evaluated each day, culminating in a final round of 30 teas.
But no matter how a tea competition is structured, as we can see from the timing alone, we are bound to get lots of flaws out of a tea. In a way, no tea would taste THAT good. But we do get to examine a tea’s quality thoroughly. And yes, a lot of spitting buckets are used.
For industry evaluation—for example, when larger factories and exporters grade teas, or when a producer evaluates different batches or rough tea for a blending formulation—variations of these forced-brewing methods are also used, depending on what factors each evaluator is looking for.
I personally have a unique method of evaluating tea. I want to know a tea’s good side and its bad side. So I usually brew the tea normally for the rinse brew and first brew to assess its aroma, upper notes, and more pleasant traits. Then I start to give the tea pressure gradually, accelerating the extraction rate from double to triple the normal exhaustion of a tea’s flavor inventory. This ensures that I don’t miss anything interesting from the tea in its middle range and have a rounded assessment of its texture. Lastly, I finish the tea with a kill brew; this is a force brew similar to the last round of a tea competition. But I like to “open the liquor/soup,” 開湯 (jargon for pouring the tea liquor out for evaluation), while the tea is still hot, so I don’t miss essential aromatic qualities of a tea while still getting to know all its faults.
The teaware used for tea competition and evaluation often consists of toothed cups, bowls, and spoons, all in white porcelain. The toothed cup accommodates varied skill levels among brewers; there’s almost no learning curve to using it, and it can ensure quick separation of the liquor and leaves. I have some unpopular thoughts on that, for another time.
The bowls receive the liquor, making it easy to see its color and assess the level of bitsy tea leaves. The spoon makes the process of “pouring” tea easier through self-service. Judges can go around the table and scoop tea into their cups as they want to. One can also smell the back of a spoon to assess the aroma of tea.
But the aforementioned Dou Cha Sai uses Gai Wan, as pretty much everyone in a Wu Long region knows how to use a Gai Wan, so no additional training is needed.
Now, evaluating tea is not just about tasting it, though this is a big part of a tea’s score. The evaluation starts by examining the appearance and consistency of the dry leaves, and once we have “opened the liquor,” we still need to trace as many details as we can about a tea’s aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and aftertaste to get a comprehensive review of its total profile.
The color of the liquor also matters, as does the appearance of the spent leaves. In a close competition, this could become the last contentious point. I have personally taken part in a heated debate during a Shui Xian competition where the judges were divided over first and second place between two excellent teas. It was the examination of the spent leaves that eventually led all the judges to agree on the winning tea.
Editor’s note: The tea evaluation sessions described below were upcoming when this article was published in December 2023.
Recently, I did an Instagram Live video of me evaluating Yan Cha and saw lots of interest from people wanting to know more about it. So, we hosted some of these sessions at our office, beginning with a red tea evaluation.
Note that these are distinctly different from our guided tastings, where we get together and appreciate the best of a tea. Tea evaluation is designed to find faults with a tea, so pleasantness is not guaranteed. But you do learn a lot about a tea and the factors that make up a quality tea.
Participants were welcome to bring their own tea to these sessions so we could assess them together.
Sip with you soon.
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