I popped into Postcard Teas in London the other day to see the owner, my friend Tim d’Offay, and I was thrilled when he very generously gave me a sample of dry leaf of his latest Da Hong Pao oolong from Fujian province.  So I brought it home, set time aside to brew it with loving care and attention and to then sit down quietly and savour every sip of this truly remarkable tea.  Also called Big Red Robe, its leaves are long and twisty and woody brown with dark olive tones.   The liquor is sparkling, clear amber and gives an aroma that is sweet and toasty, rich with hints of roasted nuts, and the taste is complex, smooth, almost like melted chocolate on the tongue and with a long, soothing aftertaste.  I lingered over every drop, brewing the leaves several times in my little gong fu pot.

Da Hong Pao is the finest of China’s famous ‘Rock Teas’ and as I sipped, I was reminded of my trip a couple of years ago to Fujian’s Wuyi Mountains where this tea is made.  The name Red Robe comes from an ancient legend that tells how the mother of an emperor was once cured by drinking tea made from the leaves harvested from four bushes growing in the Wuyi mountains.  In gratitude, the emperor sent red robes to cover and protect these wonderful plants that had made his mother well, and the bushes survive to this day, high up on a rock for visitors to admire, a symbol of the healing properties of the tea bush.  In the photo, I am standing in front of the four bushes with my friend Asako Steward and we were doing what all visitors to this impressive place do - standing in front of the famous bushes to have a photo taken to prove were really there!  We were travelling with Dan Robertson on his annual tea tour and prior to our trip to the Wuyi mountains, we had been in Beijing, Tibet, Sechuan province, Hangzhou and Taiping Village.  Wuyi was a real highlight of the trip for it was from here that early black (or perhaps they were really oolong) teas first reached us in Europe and America in the mid 17^th century. 

 Today, the place where the bushes grow is a place of pilgrimage (the photo below shows the path up which thousands of visitors walk to see the sacred bushes each year) and the teas made from the leaves of descendents of those original bushes fetch very high prices each year.  Each bowl or cup that you drink is so delicious that it is well worth every penny!  

But it is really important to brew expensive teas - indeed any teas - in good water so that all the flavour and aroma can be fully appreciated.  Water drawn straight from the tap in so many places around the world is either full of natural minerals such as calcium that mask and spoil the true tea flavour or it contains all sorts of chemicals such as chlorine that totally overwhelm the tea’s character.  I carried out a very interesting experiment the other day at the offices of a company who have just launched a water boiler for use in catering outlets that draws water from the mains supply, filters it through an easily-replaceable filter cartridge and allows tea rooms or hotel lounges to brew excellent tea.  I took six different teas with me - a delicate white, a Korean spring-picked green, a Taiwanese pouchong, a Chinese oolong, a Keemun and an Assam, and we brewed each tea both in unfiltered and in filtered water drawn from the machine.   After carefully comparing the brightness and colour of each liquor, we assessed the aroma and tasted the liquor of each - and of course, in every case, the filtered water had brewed a startlingly better tea.  The liquor was more crystalline, the colour more intense and certainly more attractive, the aroma was more powerful and the taste much clearer, purer, sweeter and truer.  The difference wasn’t perhaps quite so marked with the stronger black teas as it was with the more fragrant, delicate teas but they were without fail so much more enjoyable - there was no interference from chlorine, no cloudiness and no film on the surface of the tea that so often puts people off. 

If you’re  brewing tea at home, you don’t need to buy bottled mineral water unless your tap water is completely undrinkable - it’s really too expensive except perhaps for brewing the most special of special teas.  And don’t use distilled water - it is so pure that it produces tea that tastes flat and lifeless and sometimes doesn’t taste of anything at all.  What you do need is a water filtering unit of some kind that will remove the worst of the offending chemicals (known as TDS or total dissolved solids) before you fill your kettle.  In a catering situation, it is almost essential (unless your tearoom is on one of those rare places where the water is naturally wonderful for tea) to install some kind of filter system.  And whatever you do with the water before your brew, don’t forget that you need plenty of oxygen in it in order to brew a lively, sparkling, bright tea with plenty of flavour.

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