Kang Zhuan

Where it grows

The districts recorded against this tea, all of them in China. Elevation is given as the band the district is recorded at, not a measurement of the garden this leaf came from.

• Ya’an — 600–1400 metres

  How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.

How it is made, in order

Read top to bottom: the list is the production sequence, and the sequence is what makes this tea its category rather than a neighbouring one. The same leaf from the same bush becomes a green tea or a black tea depending on where the heat falls relative to the bruising, so reordering these steps would not vary the tea — it would produce a different one.

1. 1. Kill-green (fixation) — Denatures polyphenol oxidase and related enzymes, arresting enzymatic oxidation.
2. 2. Wet piling (wo dui) — Supports microbial and thermal transformation of the finished leaf, converting harsh young character into a darker, softer profile.
3. 3. Drying — Reduces residual moisture to a level at which enzymatic, microbial and oxidative change effectively stops, stabilising the leaf for storage.
4. 4. Compression — Reduces the leaf’s exposed surface area and fixes it in a stable physical form, slowing and evening out subsequent change.
5. 5. Ageing and storage — Allows slow oxidative, microbial and thermal change to continue in stored leaf, gradually converting sharp young character into darker, rounder and sweeter character.

The route it is made by

The steps above are what happens; this is the named production route they belong to, with the other teas made the same way.

• Border-trade brick tea — The dark teas that were never made to be collected. Coarse leaf and whole stem, piled and turned for weeks, then pressed into a brick hard enough to travel a thousand miles on an animal and be broken up with a knife at the other end.

  Where it is practised: Hubei and Hunan for the bricks that went north to Mongolia and Siberia, and Sichuan — Ya'an above all — for the bricks that went west along the tea-horse roads to the Tibetan plateau. The productions differ in material and in pile length rather than in the shape of the route.

What its chemistry turns on

Every true tea contains caffeine, catechins and amino acids, so listing them would say nothing about this one. What differs is what the processing above does to them — and that is the same list of steps, read for its chemistry instead of its craft.

• Kill-green (fixation)
  • locks 2-Phenylethanol
  • locks Anthocyanins
  • locks Catechins
  • locks cis-3-Hexenol
  • locks Green-leaf volatiles
  • locks L-theanine
  • locks Leaf lipids
  • locks Methylated catechins
  • locks Theogallin
• Wet piling (wo dui)
  • converts Catechins
  • creates Gallic acid
  • creates Theabrownins
  • raises Organic acids
  • raises Pectins
  • lowers ECG (epicatechin gallate)
  • lowers Soluble sugars
• Drying
  • creates Strecker aldehydes
  • raises Beta-damascenone
  • raises Thearubigins
• Ageing and storage
  • raises Gallic acid
  • raises Pectins
  • raises Pheophytin
  • raises Thearubigins
  • lowers Catechins
  • lowers Chlorophyll
  • lowers Tea cream

These are statements about the leaf and the cup. What any of these compounds does in a body is a different kind of question and is not answered here or on the pages linked from it.

History

Pressed at Ya’an in Sichuan for the tea-horse road, the long-running frontier exchange in which Chinese tea went west and horses came east under state control. The catalogue does not fix the date this record earlier gave, because its two copies gave two different dynasties for it and neither cited a source. What is not in doubt is that the format, the coarseness and the butter-and-salt preparation are all consequences of that route, and that they have changed very little since.

Brewing

• Boiling and decoction

  0.5–1.5 g/100 ml · 95–100 °C · 1 authored infusion

  Open in the brew assistant

• Western brewing (teapot or mug)

  1.5–2.5 g/100 ml · 95–100 °C · 1 authored infusion

  Needs: Western teapot

  Open in the brew assistant

• Boiling aged and dark tea (zhu cha)

  1–2 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 1 authored infusion

  Needs: Kettle, Brewing saucepan, Tea strainer

  Open in the brew assistant

• Butter tea churning

  1.5–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 1 authored infusion

  Needs: Butter tea churn (chandong), Brewing saucepan, Tea strainer

  Open in the brew assistant

Vessels this tea suits

Recorded against the tea rather than against a brewing style, because the vessel does not always follow from the method — a whisk needs lateral room whatever the schedule says, and compressed leaf needs a pick before any method applies at all.

• Butter tea churn (chandong) — A tall narrow wooden cylinder with a close-fitting plunger, used to work boiled tea, butter and salt into an emulsion. The proportions are the design: a narrow bore means the plunger displaces the whole column of liquid on every stroke, which is what breaks the fat into droplets small enough to stay suspended.
• Brewing saucepan — An ordinary open saucepan, which is the correct and traditional vessel for every preparation where tea is boiled rather than steeped — masala chai, noon chai, butter tea, salted milk tea, boiled dark tea. It is listed because the equipment for the world’s most-made tea preparations is usually a pan, and catalogues of teaware tend to leave that out.
• Boiling teapot — A compressed border-trade tea whose normal preparation is boiling rather than steeping.

When the cup goes wrong

Written against dark tea and pu-erh as a category rather than against this tea in particular, and worked back from the symptom to the likely causes in order. 15 apply to the category; the first 6 are shown.

• Every infusion in my gongfu session tastes the same — The cups are pleasant and interchangeable, with none of the change from steep to steep the method is supposed to show.
• My clay pot has changed how the tea tastes — A tea that tasted right in porcelain comes out muted, differently scented, or carrying something that was not in the leaf.
• My first infusion is always the worst one — The opening cup is thin, dusty or flat, and the second is markedly better — consistently, across different teas.
• My gaiwan is too hot to hold — The rim and lid become uncomfortable within seconds, the pour is rushed, and tea ends up on the tray.
• My gongfu tea is bitter even at five seconds — The timer says five or ten seconds and the cup is over-extracted anyway, with the later infusions dropping off sharply.
• My pu-erh cake will not break apart cleanly — The cake resists the pick, then gives way suddenly into powder and fragments rather than intact leaf.

Every diagnosed brewing problem

If you like this

Grouped by why they were suggested, strongest reason first. Nothing here is a blended score — a suggestion appears under the best reason that exists for it, and never under a weaker one as well.

Compare this tea with another

Where this tea is drunk

Documented practices that name this tea. Each page describes what is done and by whom, and separates what is recorded from what is repeated.

• Suja and ngaja in Bhutan — Bhutan’s churned butter-and-salt tea and its sweet milk counterpart, served in wooden bowls, offered continuously, and present at every formal occasion in a country where the etiquette around it is explicit.
• Suutei tsai (Mongolian milk tea) — Brick tea boiled with milk and salt, made in quantity in a wide pan and offered to anyone who arrives — a savoury staple in which tea is one ingredient in a dish rather than an infusion with additions.
• Tang boiled tea and the Cha Jing — The first period from which a systematic account of tea survives — in which tea was a compressed cake, roasted, ground, boiled in a cauldron, salted, and drunk with the froth as the prized part.
• The Lhasa sweet tea house — Sweet milk tea sold by the thermos in noisy public halls, paid for by leaving coins on the table — an urban Tibetan institution with an unexpected foreign parentage, and an entirely different thing from the butter tea it sits beside.
• The tea-horse trade — A state-organised exchange of Chinese tea for Tibetan and frontier horses, run through a dedicated government office for centuries — and a modern tourist name for the routes that is barely thirty years old.
• Tibetan butter tea and the Himalayan tea trade — Compressed dark tea churned with butter and salt into a thick savoury drink, consumed daily in large quantities across the Tibetan plateau and Himalaya, with hospitality conventions of its own.

Prepared drinks built on this tea

A drink is a recipe rather than a leaf: the tea above is one ingredient in it, and the method, the additions and the ratios belong to the drink rather than to this page.

• Po cha (Tibetan butter tea) — Compressed dark tea boiled hard and churned with butter and salt into a thick, savoury drink. It is a staple across the Tibetan plateau and the Himalaya, drunk in large quantities daily, and it is a soup-like preparation rather than anything a Western drinker would recognise as tea.

Guides covering this tea

• Tea trade routes
• Every compressed form was an answer to a specific problem
• Where tea was money
• Tea dependence on the plateau and the steppe, and its politics