steanze wrote: ↑Mon Jun 04, 2018 10:05 am
Clay, firing temperature, pour speed, size, wall thickness are all important. Here is another example. Consider a pot that is made of lao zhuni (great clay for yancha), but with very slow pour. That would make it unusable for yancha, despite the clay is good.
I haven’t found many absolutes in GFC and taste varies from person to person. With this in mind, I respectfully disagree regarding the importance of pour speed and the affinity of yancha with lao zhuni.
I think having a fast pour speed is desirable but accommodations can be made for a modest to slow pour speed. Augmenting pots to increase pour speed, as seen in other threads, is extreme. Just break the water seal during your pour if you want it faster. This is more common than drilling larger holes in lid knobs. It also gives you more flexibility in pot selection as you don’t have to rule out an otherwise ideal pot because its pour is slower than you desire.
I’ve brewed yancha in lao zhuni (late Qing junde and early ROC ba le ), and late 60s F1 hongni (shuiping). The early ROC has been used for over a decade for yancha with what I thought were excellent results. I’ve recently changed my mind on which clay was best.
The late Qing lao zhuni junde pot expressed the yancha as though it were in high definition. There were strong roasted notes I would have preferred to have been attenuated. Instead, it amplified those high notes. This teapot had worked exceptionally well for all oolongs and greens I had tried with it, except yancha.
The early ROC lao zhuni ba le teapot is really the wrong shape but it was the teapot I selected for yancha way back when. It has the same faults as the Qing teapot above, though not as pronounced. It conveys the leaf exactly as it is, without amplification, but even that reveals unpleasant roasted notes that can be too strong. I plan to reset this pot and use it for something more fitting.
The late 60s hongni from Factory 1 produced the best yancha I’ve tasted. The unpleasant roasted notes, specifically these unpleasant high notes, were well managed with this clay. The variety I was drinking last is called Sparrow’s Tongue. It has an aroma that is reminiscent of wisteria in addition to the usual yancha flavors. This wisteria aroma was every bit as present as the tea from the lao zhuni teapots, but everything was in balance.
This reminds me of an equalizer on a stereo. The zhuni teapots had too much treble, you might say. Whereas the hongni was perfectly equalized.
