All About Diancha
It's been an exciting (and hectic!) week here. I have found it particularly exciting because several people have been ordering one of our new - and certainly most experimental - products: diancha.
I've been continuing to read up on this crazy tea, and want to share some more of its background with you.
First of all, a refresher: what is diancha?
I refer to diancha as a sort of "proto-matcha." In its current form, it can also be called "white matcha," because it is milled white tea leaves that are whisked up into a frothy beverage, much like the more well-known Japanese matcha (bear in mind "matcha" literally just means "milled tea," and doesn't technically have to refer to the shade-grown green Japanese milled-tea that has become synonymous with the term).
Though I call this tea "experimental," it actually has a long history. You see, this was the form of tea that was consumed in Tang and Song Dynasty China. It is what the first Japanese Buddhist monks who travelled to learn Zen (there called "Chan") Buddhism would have encountered. By the time these monks arrived, diancha had been well-integrated into monastic life, and was also popular among the literati of China.
However, diancha fell out of favor a few centuries later. The emperor, for some reason, felt it necessary to mandate loose-leaf tea be produced instead of diancha. It was more economical to make loose-leaf tea, and that was the sort of tea that was becoming popular anyways, so I find it funny that the emperor had to make a matter of taste into a matter of law but...that's how emperors are, I guess.
Why is diancha making a comeback?
There's the cynical interpretation, which says that diancha is coming back because the free market (our new emperor) determines it is necessary. Matcha has become so popular that Chinese farmers need something of their own to remain competitive.
But, there is more to it than that! Diancha had almost fallen into complete obscurity, known only to a few tea geeks, until popular interest in the drink was revived (at least in China) in 2022 by a hit TV show: A Dream of Splendor. To meet this growing demand, Chinese tea-growers have been learning from Japanese matcha-millers and tea-growers what had been lost to them: the best way to produce tea for milling, and the best way to mill it. Perhaps this is why higher-quality Chinese-grown conventional (green) matcha has been popping up too.
There have even been some diancha artisans who have been popping up, reviving old artistic practices of making intricate art in the foam.
How has diancha changed over the centuries?
Diancha, despite being underground and unknown, has still managed to evolve in secret over all the years, as most teas do. Old-school diancha used to be made from steamed green tea leaves that were aggressively packed into molds and turned into dried tea "cakes." When you wanted some diancha, you'd break off a chunk and grind it in a traditional Chinese medicine wheel. I'm sure there are some engineers striving to prove me wrong, but thus far, this is not a scalable system. The back-and-forth motion of a medicine wheel can't really be automated quite so readily as the circular motion of more traditional mill stones. Consequently, I have yet to see diancha made from steamed green tea pulp. Most diancha is made from white tea, as that is the least-processed style of tea, and therefore retains some degree of historical accuracy (white tea would have been the easiest loose leaf style to make, so we presume it came before the others), while also keeping the leaves big, flat, thin, and brittle - ideal for milling.
What hasn't changed, as shown by the picture above, is the emphasis on the froth of the tea. Back in Song Dynasty China, the literati would compete to see who could make the frothiest, whitest, most uniform froth. Truth be told, diancha does seem to froth even easier than matcha. The artistry displayed above also apparently has medieval origins. The more dense and uniform the froth, the better canvas you have to "paint" with. These designs are made by brushing or dropping in tea paste that sits on top of the froth of the base tea. I have a ways to go, but you can see I tried to do this below using our diancha and some thick green matcha. The contrast is there, the artistry is not - perhaps you'll have better luck! In any case, matcha had better watch out; there's something possibly even more photogenic waiting in the wings!
Thanks for reading and happy sipping,
Simon