Literati and scholars had a special love for tea. Now it is also rude for ordinary people to have no tea in their homes. Nowadays, tea can be said to have entered every household in China. With the continuous expansion of the market, some bad merchants in order to improve the absorption of their products, pigments, flavors and other additives emerge in an endless stream.
So today we will talk about how to distinguish whether pigments are added to the tea leaves in the process of buying tea.
1. Look at the dry tea
The color is too bright
From a dry tea, you can see a lot of things, such as the old and tender leaves, the quality of the production process and so on. At the same time, we can also see from the dry tea whether it has added pigments. Usually the color of the dried tea with added pigment is very bright, such as the biluochun with lead chrome green, the golden junmei with sunset yellow, etc., and the color is particularly bright.
If it is difficult to look at the color alone, Xiaobian will teach you two more suitable identification methods for green tea today. The surface of general green tea will have millihair hairs, under normal circumstances, this milliper must be white, which is what we call "pekoe". If the hairs are green or pale green, there is no doubt about it.
2
Smell the tea
The tea aroma is not pure
It's not just teas with flavor added that have a strange taste, teas with added pigments will also have a different taste. If after brewing, the taste is very different from usual, not pure tea taste, but mixed with some other flavors, then this tea is most likely added flavor or pigment. Pigments generally have odors, especially when smelling dry tea, smelling some uncomfortable odors, which are most likely added pigments.
3
Look at the tea soup
Turbid and impermeable
Usually the tea soup is very clear, and only a few tea leaves will produce turbidity due to improper craftsmanship, or the haze produced by multi-hairy tea leaves. Tea with added pigment, after brewing, is very turbid, like a suspended solid, it appears turbid and impermeable, which is added to the pigment.
In addition, the tea leaves are brewed in a white paper cup, and the surface of the normal tea soup will have a circle of round edges with a lighter color than the soup color, on the contrary, when the color of the circle is darker than the color of the tea soup, it is pigment tea. This is caused by the poor water solubility of pigment particles that gather on the surface edge of the tea soup.
Finally, I will introduce you to a small way to identify pigmented tea, or take green tea as an example, because I love to drink green tea.
First, brew the tea leaves in a glass for 2-3 minutes. A tissue is then tiled over the tea table. Finally, sprinkle the tea just brewed evenly on the paper towel, do not sprinkle too much, and soak the paper towel as the best.
Tea with pigments, you will see in a moment, the place that has just been soaked is a piece with green, a piece without green. This is because there is no way for the pigment to achieve the effect of even soaking. For experienced old tea customers, these abnormal phenomena are easy to find, but for tea xiaobai, it is still necessary to understand more about learning.