I did 4/7 of this weeks cuppings for class this afternoon. I have such a bad caffeine buzz going on right now; I feel like I should be doing something super productive like running a marathon or filing taxes or something. At the same time, I feel like I could keel over any minute and have a heart attack…
I don’t want to post the whole cupping sheets from the ones I reviewed today, like I did with last week’s teas so I guess I’ll just summarize key stuff.
I did the same Silver Needle and Ti Kuan Yin as last week – the purpose of which was to go back and see what new things we could notice, especially now that we’ve done more readings. This week’s reading was basically a super big glossary of descriptive terms used for cupping/professional tastings – many were already familiar to me through reviewing here on Steepster but there were some new ones, mostly in regard to how to describe the dry leaf appearance of tea. I still really liked the silver needle, though something about the oolong tasted different; it was almost sweeter and more fruity trying it this time.
The big thing from this week was the green tea; in addition to learning about tea tasting terminology we learned more about the process of making each type of tea from picking it until the finished process. Part of this was doing a side by side comparison of a Chinese pan fried green and a Japanese steamed green (a sencha).
I really didn’t like the Chinese one, but I did feel like I made leaps in my understanding of nomenclature for green teas. I’ve always had a harder time describing green tea. Comparatively, I found the Japanese one much, much more enjoyable and it caused me to have an epiphany of sorts. It’s always been obvious to me that green tea is my least favourite type of tea but I know there are some exceptions to that; matcha, Genmaicha, Hojicha primarily. Well, all of those are kinds of Japanese green tea which is something I’d never noticed before. Steamed > Pan Fried, I guess. It’s neat knowing that maybe I just need to put more effort into exploring that class of green tea though, instead of somewhat writing off the type all together.
Gotta do the last three cuppings on Tuesday; two different black teas and a Pu’Erh.
