Staying away from all unclean things is the beginning of cultivating the heart of tea people.
Chatted with a friend from out of town on WeChat and said that he wanted to send some "localized pest tea" to the old tea ghost to try.
Fragrant insect tea, this is not insect tea.
A few years ago, I went to Wuzhou, Guangxi to inspect Liupao Tea, and saw this kind of insect tea for the first time in a tea shop opened by locals.
Folk production of Liupao tea, the process is more extensive, street shops in addition to selling the primary processing of mao tea, but also incidentally raise insects to produce insect tea.
The shopkeeper casually picked up the bamboo basket behind the door, moved it up and down twice, pulled away the dead leaves on the top, and there was indeed a layer of black particles below, which was the legendary insect tea.
The method of brewing insect tea is different from that of conventional tea brewing. The shopkeeper prepares the fair cup, puts another filter, puts this small handful of black particles into the filter, and directly pours the boiling water. The water filtered into the cup turned a dark yellow color and looked somewhat viscous.
A group of people watched intently as the shopkeeper brewed "tea" and carefully handed the divided "tea" to their lips. Everyone saw that the shopkeeper drank first, and then lowered his eyebrows and slowly touched it. I couldn't get through the psychological barrier, I didn't touch the teacup in front of me, I just watched everyone drink.
Friends who have drunk worm tea commented: the taste is slightly sweet, there is sweetness, no tea taste, chaotic chaos, there is a feeling of inexplicable and unclear.
The insect tea that sounds very mysterious is actually a kind of excrement of larvae called fragrant night moth - raising insects is very simple, a large bamboo basket, loaded with thick old leaves from the tea tree, placed in a dark and dark place, naturally will attract the fragrant night moth to settle in and lay eggs. After the larvae hatch, they feed on the old leaves in the bamboo basket, and the granular feces excreted by the insects are deposited at the bottom of the basket. As soon as the insects hatch, the more the worm droppings accumulate, and the "tea" is also more and more.
This kind of thing is called "tea", but it is actually not compatible with tea. It is even more nonsense to advertise that insect tea has the effect of nourishing the stomach and removing dampness. The use of animal feces into medicine, for drinking, has been around since ancient times, and all of them are mixed with metaphysical ingredients that are taken for granted. For example, Chinese medicine has "luminous sand", which is used to treat glaucoma, night blindness and so on. It sounds like the tall "luminous sand", but it is the feces of bats, the ancients believed that bats come out at night, their eyesight must be extraordinary, and their feces can naturally treat eye diseases. It is not known that bats have very weak vision and are agile because of their special function of ultrasonic positioning.
The ancients were ignorant and used the disgusting "luminous sand" as medicine. Today's people are blind, taking dirty worm as tea, stupid or not?
Tea is the purest thing, "for drinking, it is best to be frugal and virtuous (Lu Yu)". Putting good tea instead of drinking, having to chase after the excrement of insects, this is a cognitive problem.
Staying away from all unclean things is the beginning of cultivating the heart of tea people. Remember.
Text: Old Tea Ghost (Independent Commentator in the Tea Industry) 2021.8.6