Fundamental Gong Fu: Boiling it down to the essence

[klepto]

Coming from having no experience to some experience in tea brewing I found gong fu brewing to be elaborate and confusing, especially as a westerner. The more you learn about it, the more you know you know not so much . The guides online give you the basics but that comes with their own opinions and honestly some bad advice at times. I'm the type to want to learn as much as I can but that lead me to much confusion as there is not one method but many. Another issue is that many regions in China and Taiwan have their own ways of doing things. So I of course tried as much as I could. Thankfully there were some kind souls who helped me on this forum and helped me to cut out a lot of the noise and learn what was important.

After many bad brews and some small successes I was getting to what worked for me but the important question was why?! That required more experiments and my tea started tasting like tea. I began to cut away the things that didn't improve my tea and the hold on to the things that did. I'm still in that process but things are beginning to make sense. I found some things that many find important I find not to be important at all. Its a preference, the proof is in the pudding.. Will my tea be drastically better if I do all these things?! Well if not why would I do it?

So my question is what do you consider fundamental gong fu? What are the most important things to you when you brew tea?

For those who are wanting to learn about gong fu brewing, you have to put your lab coat on and experiment. Be patient and take notes. Experience is your best teacher but you do have to learn just a few things at first for a baseline. Save yourself some trouble and don't listen to someone if they say you MUST do something,

[Ethan Kurland]

Save yourself some trouble and don't listen to someone if they say you MUST do something,

Thanks for sharing (& it is good to see that I am not the only one who contradicts himself).

? for you: If gong fu is a type of preparation, then some elements of preparation MUST be part of what = a gong fu session, yes? I will say there are 2 that are required:
1. Use of more leaves than one would use for Western style preparation;
2. Less steeping time for each infusion than used for Western style preparation;
(& of course, water must be hot; this is not hours of infusion w/ cool water).

How many more tea leaves does one use (double, triple?); how hot must the water be; etc.? Discuss away, but of course there MUST be some "musts"

Comments about gong fu results for specific teas, seem useful to me. If someone says that a specific gaoshan is delicioius w/ Western preparation & equally delicious prepared gong fu style but different; or, a black tea is surprisingly better gong fu, etc., this is interesting, helpful. This gives us a reason why we should try gong fu.

Thanks for the post. I hope replies come from the experience you related. I think many of us have gone through a lot of same.

[klepto]

Save yourself some trouble and don't listen to someone if they say you MUST do something,

Thanks for sharing (& it is good to see that I am not the only one who contradicts himself).

? for you: If gong fu is a type of preparation, then some elements of preparation MUST be part of what = a gong fu session, yes? I will say there are 2 that are required:
1. Use of more leaves than one would use for Western style preparation;
2. Less steeping time for each infusion than used for Western style preparation;
(& of course, water must be hot; this is not hours of infusion w/ cool water).

How many more tea leaves does one use (double, triple?); how hot must the water be; etc.? Discuss away, but of course there MUST be some "musts"

Comments about gong fu results for specific teas, seem useful to me. If someone says that a specific gaoshan is delicioius w/ Western preparation & equally delicious prepared gong fu style but different; or, a black tea is surprisingly better gong fu, etc., this is interesting, helpful. This gives us a reason why we should try gong fu.

Thanks for the post. I hope replies come from the experience you related. I think many of us have gone through a lot of same.

Thanks for the reply!! The musts I am talking about is that you must use 5g of tea or you must use zini with this tea or that tea. There is a lot of that in the tea community, a bunch of people tell you things you have to do but they are only preferences. Tbh I don't have to do anything but my tea might not have any taste ...

[mbanu]

That's a good way to start a fight.

The sort of transformation that happened to British tea, where a brew time was decided on through a collection of scientific-sounding experimental arguments related to extracted tannins and "theine" shaped by commercial market pressures, was only able to happen because changing the brewing style of the tea in this way didn't mess with its "Britishness" for the British, because doing that sort of thing was quite British to begin with.

Gongfu has become a heritage-brewing method, so a lot of the things that make up its essence for some people are not related to the brew parameters. A person who is invested might see boiling it down to the essence as being dismissive of those parts that provide the cultural connection.

I have a hard time thinking of an American tea parallel, other than the way that Anglophiles get annoyed by mentioning things like Teasmades, which tend to get in the way of a good aesthetic. It doesn't really fit, though, because the existence of Teasmades doesn't attack the idea of Anglophile-style British hotel-tea.

The closest parallel I can think of is maybe with Scottish tartans, many of which were invented by the Sobieski Stuarts as part of a scheme to sell stuff to English tourists. If someone believes that their family tartan is part of their heritage, and they then discover that it was born out of a marketing scheme, well, that can be stressful to adjust to.

So with a fundamental gong fu, a first question to ask is whether spoiling the mystique also spoils the tea. On the one end you have the people who need gongfu to be part of an unbroken and ancient tradition that has survived all the great eras of human history, going back into the earliest past, where history and myth blur together, having tea with the Divine Farmer. For them, spoiling the mystique probably does spoil the tea. In the middle you have the Taiwanese tea-art folks who will willingly admit that a lot of ancient gongfu was invented in Taiwan during the 1970s & 80s, but will do everything they can to banish that behind-the-scenes stuff when the tea is actually being poured. For them, spoiling the mystique makes it easier to spoil the tea. And then in the far end you have the people who are not connected to gongfu tea as a type of experience and are just trying to figure out the mechanism that makes it help certain teas and harm others. For them, spoiling the mystique doesn't do anything to the tea.

[.m.]

I quite agree with @mbanu. In some sense it is a question of a terminology and of a cultural meaning: What is Gong Fu Cha? I understand this is not what you are asking, but i think it's crucial to the discussion. Is GFC any small teapot short infusion type brewing, as long as it leads to good results? Or is it a formalized set of practices which make it recognizable as this or that expression of GFC? Things like how many cups, in what direction is water poured, how many sips, etc. are very much arbitrary and hardly affect the brew, and could be potentially modified, but it is their presence that characterizes certain type of practice. One may have great results when drinking from a big bowl or a glencairn glass etc, but can it be called GFC?