Curious Tea – Tibetan Tea Xiao Bing Zang Cha
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Flushed with the success of my inaugural Matcha a couple of days ago, I am today expanding my tea fancying horizons still further by having Pu-Erh for the very first time.
Actually, Curious Tea’s Xiao Bing Zang Cha isn’t technically a Pu-Erh tea. I had hitherto thought that Pu-Erh was the generic name given to all ‘aged’ or ‘dark’ teas. Pu-Erh is given as a tea classification in its own right alongside black, green, white and oolong.
However, as it turns out the name Pu-Erh is properly only used to refer to teas from Yunnan. This tea, heralding from China’s Sichuan province is properly known as Zang Cha. So instead, I should be referring to Xiao Bing Zang Cha as a dark tea. Such teas are known as ‘black tea’ in China. But given that we in the West use the term ‘black tea’ to refer to all oxidised teas, I won’t be muddying the waters by calling it that. (What we call black tea is known as ‘red tea’ in China.)
‘Well, that’s all well and good, Em,’ you might be saying at this point. ‘But what is Pu-Erh/dark/aged tea anyway?’ I’m glad you asked.
Dark teas are fully oxidised teas which have undergone further fermentation over several years. Unlike other tea types, dark tea gets better the older it gets. It is usually sold in compressed blocks or discs, a practice which originally made the tea easier to transport over long distances.
Curious Tea’s Xiao Bing Zang Cha arrives as a small, compressed cake, exactly the same size and shape as an Elizabeth Shaw after dinner mint. It is even wrapped in the same gold foil.
My dark tea ignorance was such that I didn’t know whether I needed to break up the tea cake before steeping. Left to my own devices, I would crumbled it like an Oxo cube. So it’s a good thing I had YouTube to set me straight.
I popped the cake – whole and un-crumbled – into the teapot and added almost boiling water. Five minutes of steeping revealed that this was the darkest tea I’ve ever had in my whole life. Sure, the clue was in the ‘dark tea’ name, but it still took me by surprise. As a rule, fancier schmancier teas come out paler than, for example, a cup of builder’s breakfast. Not so Xiao Bing Zang Cha which was the colour of a maxed-out espresso.
As for the taste? Well, I’m pretty sure I like it. It was a lot to take in, to be honest. There’s a strong, almost savoury, taste to this tea with notes of wood and metal and other things that aren’t usually considered foodstuffs. By the third cup, I was relaxing into it, but my initial reaction was “Whoa! What’s going on here?”
I did add milk to subsequent cups which I worried made me a terrible heathen, but I couldn’t help myself. It’s so dark! It’s like it wanted me to. I preferred it with milk which tones down some of the metally flavours and adds a hint of smoothness and sweetness to the proceedings.
Reassuringly, the Curious Tea website informs me that Xiao Bing Zang Cha is traditionally drank with fermented yak’s butter, which makes me feel a lot better about the whole milk-adding thing.
After my first ever dark tea experience, I am a bit on the fence about how I feel about it. It tastes like nothing I’ve ever had before. And that takes some getting used to. The dark tea journey will continue. I have another Curious Tea Pu-Erh in the tea stash which I will brew up soon. I probably need to stock up on fermented Yak’s butter.
Today’s featured book is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.
