Edible San Francisco

No bags allowed

For Luong, the four influences on the flavor of a tea—its terroir, leaf variety (of which there are 2,600), time of year picked, and finally, how the raw tea leaves become tea at the hands of a master—are nuanced enough to keep him tasting and learning for the next 40 years.

Luong hefts one of the metal canisters from the shelves—an oolong, an Alishan Winter Harvest from Taiwan, and begins the process of brewing the tea. First he scoops out a bit of the oolong, which looks like little black pellets. He rinses the tea in the Yixing, a tiny ceramic teapot appropriate for oolong teas.

“I’ve had this one for 16 years,” Luong says. “This type of pot absorbs the flavors of the teas. If you look inside, you’ll see it’s dark.” It goes without saying that tea bags are out of the question at Red Blossom, as are tea balls or pincer spoons: just the proper tea pot for each kind of tea. A gaiwan, preferred for green and white teas, looks like a porcelain bowl with a lid. Luong vows to never sell tea whose packaging costs more than the tea inside the packaging, unlike a certain tea company that sells their tea in a silky bag.

He shakes the pot a bit, and shows me the inside. The pellets have bloomed. They are the rolled-up, mature leaves of the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. Oolong teas generally are made from larger leaves, while green teas are made from the tips or buds. The point of rinsing them is to unfurl the leaves, to get them ready to give off their flavor.

After offering me a sniff—yum—he pours in a bit of almost boiling water until the little vessel burps out a bit of liquid when he puts the lid on the pot. The overflow falls onto the latticed tea tray and between the cracks; later these overflows will be poured into a bucket. And while we wait, Luong tells me about the trek to find the tea roasting master.

“Half of the Tung Ting was roasted by this gentleman who lived in a shack on the middle of a mountain. It was so HOT inside. There were 10 pits in the ground, and that’s where he would roast the tea.” The man would place bamboo baskets over the pits where he burned logan wood (a relative of the lychee) and, without using a thermometer, roast the tea perfectly, working on it over a period of several days. Most tea roasters, Luong points out, have big calloused hands from working the tea. The logan smoke adds a fruity note.

The tea ready, Luong pours out small cups, warming the cups first with warm water, then dumping them using a pair of wooden tongs. The tea is yellow and tastes sunny, a little bit citrusy.

“Do you taste the grapefruit?” Luong asks. I nod. We drink more tea, leisurely. We are drinking the product of years of work, each step in its manufacture fraught with potential problems, and here we are: the tea is perfect.

But this Alishan is just a mouth awakener.

“Here’s the plain Tung Ting,” Luong says, opening up the big canister. Little balls of green roll around, smelling a bit like alfalfa. “And here’s the Charcoal Fired Tung Ting.” These are dark: a smoky sweet fragrance wafts out that’s not unlike barbecue. Modern tea makers use convection ovens, not pits with logan wood. But for Luong it’s important to preserve these artisanal quality of teas, to support the master tea roasters. That’s why the teas at Red Blossom are one of a kind, the very best tea a customer can buy.

Brewed Awakenings continues >