Whatever tea we drink, we hope the liquor before us will be clear and luminous—so much so that clarity is often taken as a standard for judging tea quality. But if the liquor is somewhat cloudy, can we conclude that the tea is of poor quality?
@Chicha Qingnian (Tea-Drinking Youth):
The causes of cloudy liquor include both innate quality and the way it is brewed—we need to tell them apart.
1. Cloudiness from raw material. Problems with the leaves as picked can make a pu-erh liquor cloudy.
(1) “Tip-fuzz haze”: when the raw material is very young, the buds carry a great deal of down—the tea hairs—which float in the water when brewed and form this haze. Spring pu-erh teas show this especially often. Far from being a bad thing, it is actually a good one: it proves the buds were plump and rich in down, a mark of high-grade raw material.
(2) Low grade of the raw material itself can also produce a cloudy liquor.
(3) Tea picked and processed in rainy weather tends to yield a cloudier liquor than tea picked at other times.
2. Cloudiness in raw (sheng) tea: incomplete craftsmanship. When a sheng pu-erh liquor shows obvious cloudiness when brewed, it is generally due to imperfect processing, mainly in three critical early-stage steps: fixation (shaqing), cooling, and sun-drying.
First, smothering during fixation. If the fresh leaves are handled carelessly during fixation, they may be smothered, damaging quality and producing a cloudy liquor; the craftsman must watch the wok temperature, ventilation and tossing speed at every moment.
Second, cooling in layers too thick. After fixation and before rolling, the leaves must be spread out to cool. If space is limited and the leaves are piled too thickly, the leaves underneath will smother over time—and smothered leaves yield a cloudy liquor.
Third, incomplete drying. After rolling into strips, the leaves must be sun-dried. On high-mountain tea gardens in overcast, rainy weather, drying proceeds very slowly; if the leaves are spread too densely, they may take two days to air-dry, producing a cloudy liquor.
3. Cloudiness from brewing and prying. If the cake is pried into too many fragments, or there is simply a lot of dust and fannings in the pot, the liquor will cloud—this tests each tea friend’s prying skill, and it is one way tea drinkers can avoid cloudiness. Brewing technique looks the same for everyone but differs by more than ten thousand miles—otherwise there would be no such profession as tea blender. Pouring too hard, or pouring water directly onto the leaves, will cloud the liquor and waste good tea.
@Li Chenyue:
Liquor can also show “clouding when cold”: as the liquor cools, cotton-like wisps appear and float in it. This is not a quality problem—it happens because certain substances in the liquor form complexes as the temperature drops, which then suspend in the liquor and become visible to the naked eye. It is precisely proof that the tea is rich in intrinsic substance.
September 2019 issue
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Author: Lam Sam (LamSam), the Old Tea Head
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