fuzhuan 500g brick

There are several different approaches to preparing dark tea. That is, the preparation of Fuzhuan always requires breaking the required amount of leaf off the brick first. Because of the loose pressing, this can easily be done with bare fingers. Then, depending on dosage, style and number of infusions, there are 3 basic types of dark tea preparation:

“Gong Fu Cha” means preparing a tea with relatively high dosaging over a long series of rather short steeps. That is, dosaging starts from 6g leaves per 100ml water and infusion periods shorter than 1 minute per steep. At this, the infusion temperature is always 90°-100°C, which corresponds to boiling hot. As with all ripened teas, a short “washing steep” of 5-10 seconds with boling hot water is recommendable.

The “western approach” to preparing a dark tea resembles that of “black” (in China: red) tea. At this, the infusion temperature is also boiling hot. However, this approach goes with a more modest dosaging (3-5g/100ml) and longer infusion periods (2-5 minutes). The western approach can also involve the preparation of several steeps (2-3). However, their number is rather small in comparison to the Gong Fu approach. Also here, a short “washing steep” is recommendable-

Also from China comes the practice of boiling the tea leaves for up to ten minutes. With this, 4-5g Teeblätter per 1 liter water suffices to help the the single resulting steep to full flavor.