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What Is Oolong Tea? | What does oolong tea taste like? | What you should know about oolong tea.
Many of you are familiar with green tea and black tea and white tea now, and Oolong tea is actually a tea, a category of tea that is everything between green tea and black tea. All of these teas come from the same plant which is camellia sinensis but the difference is the way that they are processed and the level of oxidation.
So a green tea is very, very, very lightly or almost no oxidation and a black tea is fully oxidized, so you have the range of green tea and then black tea and now Oolong tea is all of these teas in between. So it can be from anything from a very, very light oxidation which would be a very green Oolong to a very very dark oxidation which would be like for most of Oolong or oriental beauty sort of a blackish Oolong.
So there's a really wide range of flavor and variety and in fact Oolong is one of the most under represented teas so it's a tea that you might have had Oolong and chances are it wasn't fresh or it wasn't that good, but that just means you had a bad Oolong. There's actually really, really great Oolongs.
Some examples of different Oolongs, cause due to variety of shape and color like a very green twisted shape Oolong, a tippy Oolong made from the fresh tips, an iron goddess Oolong, which is a very baked and very oxidized Oolong and a baked high mountain Oolong. So different terrain and different processing is just going to create different flavors. The other thing that makes Oolong so special is that Oolong is one of the most complicated teas to process and it undergoes, it has the most human intervention in processing the teas.
So Oolong production is made up of about seven steps. Each step dries the Oolong a little bit and so because the people are so involved with making these Oolongs, Oolong is considered a work of art because it's the plant that grows out of the ground and then you have the person harvesting it and then that direct interaction through the tea master that is the harvester or the processor then is transferred into that Oolong and that's the reason why it's such a wonderful tea.
And in fact, most tea experts prefer Oolong as a tea to drink themselves. So that's a little overview of what Oolong is and the incredible variety of flavor that is present in Oolong tea.