Tags
Competition, Drink, Odor, Oolong, Taiwan, Taste, Tea, Uncle Cien
The deadline for tea submission is 7:00 am next day. All tea masters had gone home to rest after 24 hours of working. The organizer take 40 tea submissions, and randomly assign a new number for each tea which is different than the number that is assign to each tea masters. This way the judges would not be able to influence by tea masters.
8:20am Pour first hot water. 100 degree Celsius, 4.5mins.
8:25am Pour first tea out and begin judging process. The first run is judging Aroma. One main judge and one secondary judge. The third person is recording the score for each tea.
8:27am Judges smell the aroma second run. Temperature now is not as high, so tea aroma might change. This is to confirm that the first aroma stays the same.
8:42am Jude tea flavor- first run. Swirl couple times, then spit out.
8:50 am. Second taste run. Main judge pull out tea counter clockwise around tea cup to decide the tea is to hold or to eliminate. If second judge agreed, the cup stay the same. If not, they both taste the tea again.
8:58 am. Third taste run.
9:00 am. Final taste run.
9:05 am. Giving out the number rating and eliminating 21 competitors.
9:20 am. With 19 competitors left, repeat the same procedure.
9:42 am. Eliminating another 5 out of 19.
9:45 am. Group different grades to judge.
10:08 am. Final tea judge begins. Repeat same procedure with previous steps. Some tea masters start to show up at this point to observe the judging process. You can tell that most of them are pretty anxious.
10:25 am. Winners are decided after 2 hours tea tasting.
Results: Uncle Cien won the third place. We are so proud of him.
Note: Ai didn’t continue her win from previous competition. Her tea flavor is great, but the aroma is not what judge is looking for. Judge wants to have tea with milky flavor.
It was fun event for 3 of our family tea masters from 3 different tea shops to enter competition. In the end, we all sit down and have our own tea tasting of what they made. They discuss the pros and cons of each one’s tea, and noted what to do next time. Judge’s taste might not be the same as consumer’s taste, but in the end of the day, only the well balance tea can win the competition. END.
