Good morning and welcome to my first tea review! Don’t worry, KC Coffee Geek is still going to be mostly about coffee, but I have getting into tea in a deeper way recently and I’m hoping you will want to be along for the ride with me!
Purchase Gao Wen directly from Hugo Tea for $2.50/sample, $16/100g loose and other formats
HUGO TEA GAO WEN
OK, let’s start with a few disclaimers on this first of tea reviews, which will be trickled in here are there among the coffee reviews… Coffee is still going to remain 90%+ of this blog, but I’m interested in tea and you may be, too, so I think this is a good platform to explore those flavors. Second, I know next to nothing about tea! Reading Hugo’s very informative description of this tea really illustrates how little I know about how it’s grown, cultivated, picked, processed, etc. I have a lot to learn and I’ll surely make some mistakes along the way. It seems like learning a new language, and there’s a lot to all this with coffee, too, but I’ve been in that world for a lot longer time. And, finally, I don’t know how my palate will translate to tea. I’m sure it has a lot of flavors to discover, and will my palate be up to the challenge? I guess we’ll find out!
This morning’s tea was provided to me by Hugo Tea, a local Kansas City company that I thought would be a fitting intro into tea reviews for me. Hugo Tea was started in 2012 by Tyler Beckett, with a mission to appeal to the craft/luxury side of the market, as opposed to the health/weight/loss/sleep aid/chest cold market that actually makes up the bulk of American tea drinkers. Reading some interviews and profiles about Hugo Tea and Tyler, he’s a “tea guy” through and through. He has obvious love for everything tea related, from how it’s grown and processed to its relationship to culture, it’s long history with the human species, and his interest in business and entrepreneurship. Tyler saw a lack of “craft tea” in the US that was present in coffee, beer, spirits, wine, etc and didn’t understand why tea should be any different. I can say as a package and presentation junkie, Hugo Tea kills it with their presentation. Even the $2.50 samples come in a beautiful white box with a packet with all the origin and brewing info inside, and the full size retail boxes make me feel like I’m opening something very special. At around the same price as a good bag of coffee, a 100g box of tea from Hugo seems like a good value, especially seeing how much attention and care the company takes to educating their customers and highlighting the product and the producer in such a special way through their website. Hugo Tea has direct relationships with all of their producers and spends a lot of time in Asia, with the farmers. They also only source organic teas, since pesticides and other chemicals can make it into the cup in a way that is different from coffee, which is “shielded” somewhat by being a seed inside a fruit. Since tea is the leaves of the plant, anything sprayed onto them can be a potential problem, so it’s nice Hugo is taking this step for tea drinkers.
This morning’s tea is Hugo’s Gao Wen, a black tea from Yunnan, China and the Ma Wei Shan farm. Yunnan is also where the majority of specialty coffee is grown in China, having the right altitudes and weather for it, and I’ve reviewed a handful of coffees from this province. This is a “Yunnan red” (apparently what we call “black” tea is referred to as “red” tea in China) or dianhong and comes from da ye or “big leaf” bushes. The producer, Yuanzhen Li, developed a unique high-heat roasting process for this tea, which is to “smooth out the bright fruit notes of dianhong in facor of the malty and complex floral qualities older tree Yunnan black tea is lauded for.” Hugo Tea recommends this as the ideal breakfast tea. Hugo elaborates that “their dianhong is produced with 3-5 leaves down the shoot (think “young” huangpian material made into black tea) that are hand-plucked, sorted, withered in the sun, snail-rolled and bruised to high oxidation, and baked to dry.” I know almost nothing about what this sentence is saying, but what is clear to me is that tea production, just like coffee, is a direct reflection of the grower/producer. Sure, it’s a crop, but it seems like there are a million variables in the processing that will affect the outcome in the cup, just like with coffee production, and that’s quite cool! This tea grows at 1200masl and is Summer 2019 vintage.
I followed Hugo’s “modern tea preparation” instructions for this tea, using their excellent Teapot Boli for my brewing. I used 2g of tea and 250ml of water, which I prepared using Teacurious’s water recipe. Since tea is mostly water, even more so than coffee, water is just as important for this beverage as it is for coffee, and I know firsthand that it makes a HUGE difference for brewing coffee. I brought my water to 205F and steeped the tea for 5 minutes. Dry, this tea is absolutely gorgeous to look at, with long leaves semi-curled into rolls of different colors. The fragrance in the dry tea is pure chocolate, of all things! I would think this is a chocolate-flavored tea if I didn’t know any better. One of the things I like so much about the Boli teapot is seeing the leaves unravel as they brew. It’s a really beautiful process to see the water take on color and the leaves change shape. It’s almost otherworldly to see and one of the reasons I enjoy using a transparent brewer. The Boli is also great because I just pour straight into my cup and the built-in strainer works like a charm. The glass is thick and beautifully made and I get a lot of satisfaction using this piece of teaware.
Once brewed, this tea has mostly a malty aroma for me. It’s hard to describe and here’s where I’m running into some vocabulary problems since I’m so new to tea, but there is a maltiness that is way more subtle than you’d smell in a brewery or a whiskey distillery, for example, but not unlike that sweet aroma from a mash tun. As the cup cools toward room temperature I am getting more of that chocolate note I found in the dry fragrance, along with a more floral note. As far as tea goes, I’d call this a medium+ bodied tea and I really like it close to room temperature, although it has tasted nice through the whole range of temperatures. This tea does bring up some memories of my mom’s Lipton ice tea made in the sun in a big glass jug in the summertime, and that’s not a bad thing, but probably not what Tyler and other tea drinkers with more trained palates would want to hear! There is a nice sweetness to this cup, thanks to that malty note that comes through in the flavor from the aroma, and I think I even get a hint of that chocolatey note on my palate. There’s a sweetness not unlike that from a peach or apricot here for me. This tea has a neutral finish at first, then is quite dry on my palate through a lingering aftertaste that leaves a hint of rose in the back of my throat and into my sinuses. Taking a look at Hugo’s flavor notes, they say to expect “milk chocolate, tobacco, bold” flavors and that in the field, the producer is able to “steep a healthy pinch for a few seconds at a time, coaxing out roses, cherries, and deep sweetness” and I feel like I appreciated a little bit of both with this tea.