Matu said

Heritage Honey Oolong - Home Roasting

Today I began conducting a tea experiment. A while back, I took advantage of a sale from Mountain Tea on their Heritage Honey Oolong – 5oz. for $10. I do like this tea, but haven’t had any in quite a while, so I became a bit concerned that the remaining ~2oz. were going to go to waste. To prevent that eventuality, and also because it sounded like fun, I decided to give the remaining tea a roast!

I used a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper in the oven. I spread out all 61g of my tea on the pan. I started with the oven at 200F and ramped up the temperature slowly, each time taking a portion of the tea off. I did take the tea out once between each sample collection to stir it around, ensuring an even roast. I ended up with six different levels of roast, which I hope will give me an interesting spectrum to taste. Here’s the specifics on my roasting time/temp:

20 minutes at 200F – Remove sample #1
15 minutes at 225F – Remove sample #2
15 minutes at 240F – Remove sample #3
15 minutes at 265F – Remove sample #4
15 minutes at 275F – Remove sample #5
15 minutes at 285F – Remove sample #6

So now I have six little baggies of roasted tea! There is a notable color difference between them, but the difference between #1 and #6 is not as stark as I expected it to be.

There should be ~10g of each roast level. I plan to sample each of them in the coming days, then give them a rest before trying again. Anybody know how long it would need to rest before it’d no longer be considered “freshly roasted.” Not sure how long it could take the roasty flavor to calm down some. I’ll be posting reviews and results either on Random Steepings or on the Heritage Honey Oolong tea on this site. Ideally I would have kept some of the unroasted tea around to try between my different roasted ones, but I did at least do one session right before roasting and took decent notes on it. I’m interested to see how great of a difference there is between my different roasts.

Relevant Links:

Heritage Honey Oolong: http://www.mountaintea.com/products/heritage-honey-oolong

Page where I got my roasting parameters (I know, it’s a coffee site, oh well): https://ineedcoffee.com/home-roasting-oolong-tea/

4 Replies

Looks like fun!

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t-ching said

Looks like a fun project! I’d love to see the pictures of the teas at different roasting times and to hear what you think about the taste of each one!

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tperez said

Very cool!

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Hoálatha said

Can’t wait to read your reviews on this. Experimenting with tea is fun!

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