Assam Teehaus Orthodox Enigma and Wild Origin Assam

I'll add more photos in the next samples post; this doesn't show much

I'm trying two interesting looking Assam versions from Maddhurjya Gogoi of Assam Teehaus, dropped off by his cousin Chittaranjan, who recently visited Bangkok.  I've reviewed teas of his earlier, and have reviewed a tea and told some of his story. 

I passed on a little of this to the Jip Eu owner, Kittichai, to try when Chittaranjan and I visited recently.  It never works out like that, trying a tea sample before I actually review it.  It was malty, definitely Assam, but light and soft in character, along with being sweet and complex in flavor.  It was really good. 


It definitely seemed to match a typical Assam flavor profile, but at the same time backed off the astringency as better orthodox versions tend to do.  From there quality relates to getting the growing conditions and processing issues right, bringing out intense, complex, positive flavor, the feel working out, etc.  It checked all the boxes fairly well.  Since I'm trying the same tea again for review I can go through more detail about that.

This was a remote tasting, held at my kids' swimming class area beside that pool; that's different.  I didn't even start an early Sunday morning tasting session due to using the time to cook French toast and bacon instead, and eating some of it (without tea; odd being in a rush and passing on that particular morning routine step).  Priorities come up, and it was my daughter's birthday yesterday, so she deserves just a little more focus than usual this weekend, and tea gets bumped if the two sets of demands conflict.

later that morning

Review:

on-location reviewing; photos aren't what they normally would be

Enigma left; it looked redder, less dark

Enigma (first infusion):  it's nice.  Malt stands out as the main flavor aspect; that's normal.  Malt really spans a range of different flavors, as I understand and use the concept, crowded into a dry-mineral sort of version (the one in Assam, this one), and the malt in malted milk balls or Ovaltine, a little closer to fermented grain animal feed, which smells a lot better than it sounds.  This malt aspect isn't dry, rough, limited in scope, towards how rocks come across (maybe just a little like a reddish colored sandstone, I guess that would be), but it is the mineral intensive malt, just a soft, complex version of it.

I like brewing teas Gongfu style to adjust how far I push them for timing and infusion strength round to round, and to see how the flavors transition, and then later rounds I tend to skip making notes for.  I brought a Western device this time so I'll only be doing two infusions here.  That limit relates to how much water I brought too; I can't imagine the hot water they supply at this pool doesn't taste a lot like drinking water out of the pool.  I just did a water tasting experiment yesterday, but I really don't want to drift too far into that, so I'll leave off saying more until I finish that post editing.

The flavor has good complexity, but it's hard to extend that to a list.  Construction noise nearby is a part of that; funny how a high level of background noise limits what you pick up.  Of course I'd forgotten about that from last weekend.  Malt extends into cocoa, which isn't so far from that flavor.  Really those two flavors, with malt first, are most of what I'm picking up.  Beyond that might relate to a warm, aromatic wood tone, hinting a little towards cedar or redwood, just not strong enough to stand out as that.

Kittichai mentioned that he thought this wasn't fully oxidized, as black teas go, that they'd backed off that range a little to give it a different character.  Maybe.  It looks pretty oxidized as wet leaves.  Some bud content always ramps up dryness, and shifts flavor profile a bit towards even more mineral, and this contains that.  That kind of thing occurs in Yunnan black teas too, not limited to a change based only in Assam.  Oddly buds-only black teas can tend to be really smooth and subtle instead; I'm not sure how that maps out, since those two ideas seem to imply a bit of contradiction.


Single Origin Wild Seed Varietal (first infusion):  much, much different; this just turned into a contrasting types review.  A lot of the base flavor is common but there's a front end aspect that hits you hard, something quite novel, which I interpret as being pretty close to fennel seed.  Malt isn't pronounced at all; strange.  Beyond that other warm, rich tones do fill in complexity, and this might be slightly sweeter.  Cocoa doesn't stand out either, so there is mostly only overlap in the base flavors range, the aromatic wood tones.  Probably a mild, subdued version of malt and cocoa are mixing in with that, since it comes across as complex, but very limited malt as most Assam goes, next to none.

The effect of that spice is unusual.  It works well; it's clean and well-integrated, just really novel.  It shows up a lot stronger in the initial flavor, so that it tends to shock you a little in the first half a second, then the rest of the flavors come on strong and it fades back to being a mild supporting element, almost hard to pick up.  I don't remember a flavor working like that before, so strong as a front end, then dropping way off in part of a second.  I'm not even in the habit of talking about that kind of range of experience, temporal flavor effect order, beyond aftertaste splitting out as a different thing than the taste while teas haven't been swallowed yet.

Overall balance is important for teas like this, especially when drank this way, as a good-sized mug worth.  Both these seem to work.  They are brewed a little on the light side, intentionally so, since that makes identifying flavors a lot easier (to me).  The proportion is probably slightly high per conventional Western brewing but timing was only around 2 minutes.  Made like this these teas would prepare three good, strong infusions, and probably stretch to a fourth, if one preferred.

Ordinarily I'd guess the amount of tea and the brewed liquid, since I can estimate that, but it seems to work well to leave it as a vague kind of thing, since experimenting to get to what you like best either involves making teas over and over by look and feel or else carefully weighing and measuring amounts.  I do the first; I must have prepared 1000 cups of black tea this way before.  It would be a shorter process following the second approach instead, being more precise; the learning curve would narrow faster.  Since different teas work out differently, even if they look the same, you can't arrive at an optimum based on past experience and expectations.  The look and source patterns only tell so much of a tea's story, and soaking the dried leaves in hot water tells the rest.

Ok, I will guess the amounts; this was probably about 4 or 5 grams of dry tea used to make about 8 ounces or 240 ml of brewed tea (so a lot).  At a normal infusion time that would've been way too strong.  Put one way I tend to prepare black teas as a hybrid version of Western style, adjusting that a little.  Water temperature factors in too.  Since I brought water here by thermos it lost some temperature, even the second it hit the thermos, even though I pre-warmed them.  The edge to this version would be stronger at full boil, and it would've brewed a little faster, making this infusion stronger. 

Some people would say that only using full boiling point water would bring out these teas' potential, and some would think a good bit off boiling point would be optimum, down around 90 C, not far off how these were prepared.  The right answer probably depends on preference.  I'm sympathetic to both preferences; drawing out more flavor and intensity at higher temperature is nice, even for adding a little more astringency edge, but a softer, sweeter, milder version also works.  Since these are relatively mild feel-character Assam versions I think hotter might be better, per my preference.  Both are a little rounded-off in character as I'm experiencing them.  1000 cups of tea in you can sort of see how those factors come into play, and I don't think I've really optimized these.

Enigma left; redder, less dark leaves as well

Brewing tea Gongfu style is much different, giving different results, but one main advantage is the ability to "see" the tea from different angles, using a slightly different approach round to round.  Brewing temperature can drop a little if you use a slow process, because the leaves will keep cooling between rounds, but running through two infusions in a row fairly quickly can even that factor back out.

Another aside (this has turned into a really conversational post):  they're making Loi Krathong krathongs at the table next to me, the small flower "boat" type things used to float for the holiday coming up soon, tomorrow.  Supposedly those carry away your sins, not so different than how Easter works out, as I understand it, except that Jesus is on top of that on a more ongoing basis.

Second infusion:

I'll go a little longer on this round, maybe slightly over 3 minutes, to draw out a stronger infusion.  Really using less tea and a full 5 minute brewing time is the standard approach, the ISO process version.

This will be it because I only brought this much water.  If I do a third round it will be using the water here, which really should be awful.  If it's well-filtered tap water it could be exactly the same, but even then warmers can build up scale in them, and that adds a lot of mineral flavor to water while heating it.

Scratch all that; I ran out of water halfway through the last infusion, and had to blend in some from the pool-staff heated water source.  This is a bit heavy on mineral; I can smell it in the water as it pours.  It's tempting to draw on experiences from that water tasting yesterday to talk about that but again it's too much.  The short version:  the right level (and type / proportion) of minerals works much better than too much or too little.

Orthodox Enigma:  I'm tasting that water input in this, but I think mineral might've been likely to ramp up for brewing it stronger anyway.  That just happened in the other, and I used the water from home in that one, and a mixed version of both water sources in this.  Warmer tones ramp up too; that is the brewing difference, along with infusion round transition.  It's a pleasant effect.  It does taste like rocks, not so much that red sandstone but onto dryer, warmer, even heavier range, volcanic rock types instead. 

The balance is the thing; all the aspects work well together.  Malt has dropped back, cocoa is still present but milder, earthier tones in the range of that warm mineral contribute more, and aromatic wood tones towards cedar or redwood contribute.  It's quite pleasant.  It's all very clean in effect, with no trace of anything off or muddled.  That doesn't happen by accident; people making tea have to get the steps right.


Wild Origin Assam:  brewed a little better; slightly stronger suits this. That hit of fennel seed (or whatever spice) is still unusual, the main thing that stands out, even though it drops out part-way through tasting it still in your mouth.  It's pleasant though.  A strong, warm mineral base stands out in this (not from that water input; I ran out brewing the second infusion, and made this one first).  It even has a slightly savory taste to it, definitely not in the range of umami / seaweed as in Japanese teas, but instead essentially not different than salt.

Conclusions:

Two very good teas.  The first, the Enigma, is a little closer to a standard Assam version in style, but a well above average version, even for decent orthodox range.  It's not that far off the Latumoni versions I reviewed not so long ago; I'd have to try both together to place differences better.  When you compare teas side by side very fine levels of differences stand out, and those could occur, different degree of complexity, slightly thicker feel to one, or other variations in body, etc.  For trying the teas a few weeks apart they're pretty close.

These are about as good as the highest level of Assam gets.  The other versions that I tried from Oiirabot seemed closer to Chinese black teas in style, really in between for some reason.  That related to flavor profile and feel more than quality level, since versions from all three producers were really solid.

This Wild Origin version is something else, a completely different experience.  It probably relates mostly to being an unusual plant type, but growing conditions would factor in as well.  People often claim that growing together with other plants changes the flavor of a produced tea, which could account for the atypical flavor range, especially that one fennel-seed spice aspect.  They'll even say a plant will pick up flavor of what grows near it, so a spice growing nearby would make a tea taste like that spice, or corn, or whatever it is.  Or that could be a plant-type / cultivar input.  "Cultivar" tends to be used to mean an intentionally replicated plant type, whether bred by mixing other strains or not, but the end effect isn't so different than that of tea plant types varying naturally, those are just not controlled.

I'll do a more careful, controlled review of some of the other versions Maddhurjya passed on (and Chittaranjan, his cousin, who just visited Thailand and actually brought the tea here).  These results are valid but tasting the teas under more carefully controlled circumstances would've turned up a few more aspect notes.  It would sound like the flavor was more complex, reading a longer flavor-list version, but really the teas were complex and exceptional as they were.  I was just tasting them under less than optimum conditions, out in public, brewed Western style, with a bit more background noise than is typical, introducing mixed water sources as a variable.

I did brew a third round of this tea there, and it was fine, the water wasn't as bad as I expected.  And a fourth at home, with the tea not diminishing that much in range or pleasantness for being stretched a little at that point.  Brewing a lot of positive infusions is a good sign for teas, one marker of quality level, although just one of many.  The tea tasting and feeling like it did was the main thing, balancing really well across all the aspects.

the finished krathongs