My roasted oolong tastes only of burnt toast

In short

Three quite different situations produce the same cup: a tea that has not rested since firing, a tea roasted too hard, and a tea brewed in a way that pushes the roast forward. The first resolves itself with time and the second does not.

Likely causes, in order

Most likely first. Answer the question under each one before moving on — several of these look alike in the cup and are told apart only by what was done to the leaf.

1. 1. The tea has not rested since roasting

   Leaf quality

   Check: Was it roasted recently, or bought soon after the season’s firing?

   Fix: Roast character fades over a year or two of rest, and high-grade rock tea is deliberately rested for weeks between roasting cycles for the same reason. Put it away for a few months and try again.

2. 2. Roasted too hard to disguise the material

   Leaf qualityInferred by TeaHQ, not established

   Check: Does the char persist unchanged across five or six infusions, with nothing developing underneath?

   Fix: A heavy roast can be so dominant that the underlying tea is unreadable, and that is how the technique is most often misused. If nothing emerges by the fifth steep, nothing will.

3. 3. Too long a first steep

   Over-extraction

   Check: Was the first infusion much over ten seconds in a gongfu vessel?

   Fix: Roast character extracts fast and sits on top. Very short early infusions let what is underneath come through before the char buries it.

4. 4. Too much leaf

   Leaf quantity

   Check: Did the dry leaf fill much more than a third of the vessel?

   Fix: Reduce it. Strip-rolled roasted oolong is deceptive in the other direction from ball-rolled: it looks bulky and weighs more than it appears.

5. 5. Water that was not actually boiling

   Temperature

   Check: Was the water off the boil?

   Fix: Roasted teas want water at or very near boiling. Cooler water extracts the surface char and not the body underneath, which is exactly this complaint.

Tea types this applies to

• Oolong

Brewing methods this applies to

• Gongfu brewing (gaiwan) — A high-leaf, low-volume, many-infusions approach: a great deal of leaf in a small vessel, steeped for seconds at a time and poured off completely, repeatedly.
• Gongfu brewing (Yixing pot) — The same short-steep, high-leaf approach as gaiwan gongfu, carried out in a small unglazed clay pot that seasons over time and is dedicated to one tea.

When this cannot be fixed

A tea roasted hard enough to hide poor material does not improve with rest in any useful timeframe. Rest fixes a young roast; it does not fix a concealing one.

Guides covering this

• Wood, smoke, camphor and medicinal: the heavy persistent aromas — These are the compounds that stay. They dominate aged teas, they survive storage that removes everything lighter, and one of them — smoke — is the only member of the group that is usually applied from outside rather than generated by the leaf.

Related problems

Sharing a cause category, a tea type or a brewing method with this one.

• 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 gongfu brewing falls apart when I have guests — Sessions that work perfectly alone become chaotic with three or four people: the tea is inconsistent, the pours are rushed, and the cups arrive at different strengths and temperatures.
• 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 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 young sheng pu-erh is unbearably harsh — A recent raw pu-erh is aggressively bitter and drying from the first infusion, with a rasping quality that stays in the throat.

Sources