Tai Ping Hou Kui

As promised, a post about this inimitable tea - Taiping Hou Kui (pronounced tie ping ho kway).  Taiping refers to the county in Anhui province where the tea originates.  Hou refers to Hou Keng village where the highest grade of this tea is made, whilst Kui refers to Wang Kui-cheng who made this tea by improving the processing of a local green tea - Jian Cha - in around 1900.  Literally, Taiping Hou Kui translates as Peaceful Monkey King and the title of Monkey King is often added to the tea by tea sellers.  This tea won the 'King of Teas' award at the Chinese Tea Exhibition in 2004.

This particular Tai Ping I purchased from Dragon Tea House.  As mentioned in a previous post, the leaves are huge.  In fact, they are the longest leaf of all tea plants and come from the Shi Ye cultivar.  Here are some of the leaves - placed in a traditional Chinese 'origami' vase design I made (fitting I thought...)

For $20.99 for 100grams, this is on the lower end of the price range for Taiping Hou Kui.  Falsified Taiping's are apparently common and without visiting the tea farm itself it is difficult to ascertain the authenticity of this particular batch.  One of the signs to look for is that the majority of leaf sets should consist of one bud and two leaves.  Whilst there were many such sets in the infusion I prepared there were also some single leaves:

Nevertheless, I was happy with the quality of the leaves overall.  You can see from the above photo there was a considerable size range between leaves (the one on the right is 11cm long!)  With such large, flat, straight and delicate leaves, the way this tea is processed takes great care.  I was concerned about how this tea would handle the journey from Shanghai, but allmost all the leaves were intact when I opened the package, indicating care had been taken by both the tea producers and the people at Dragon Tea House.  

This tea is group on the northern slopes of Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) range...

...where the combination of rain and mist and clouds, together with the shade of the northern slopes, provides ideal conditions for growing this type of tea.  Thanks to James Norwood Pratt and his Tea Dictionary for this info.  N.B. Future post to review this and other tea books...

This tea is delicate, with a fresh, sweet aroma and a mild vegetal flavour which is balanced by floral notes.  I used more leaf in my second attempt at this tea yesterday and was rewarded with a more satisfying result - greater depth of flavour without bitterness and just the faintest astringency.

The opened, relaxed leaves, swirled around in the gaiwan like a school of emerald eels (perhaps not the best visual image to ponder before drinking, but that was my instant impression so I have to go with it I guess!)

So, a pleasant, relaxing, subtle green tea which is a pleasure to prepare and consume.  My tip - be generous with the amount of leaf you use.  The size of the leaves suggests that you should only use a few, but I found that quite a number can be used in a small vessel like my gaiwan (which is around 150ml) without it becoming too strong.  Keep the water temperature at around 80 degrees Celsius. Any lower and I found the full flavour wasn't drawn out of these large leaves. 

One last thought - I wonder if anyone will ever be mad (or evil) enough to attempt to produce Taiping Houkui in a teabag form.  The bags would either need to be the size of hair-nets or the leaves would have to be broken into hundreds of fragments...but could they still be rightly called Taiping Hou Kui in that case?