Some expensive oolong teas come with the whole tea leaves rolled into little dried balls. Since I'm not one willing to take things at face value, I've been thinking about this.
In our cynical age, one might be forgiven for thinking this is some kind of marketing trick to provide "product differentiation," but the Chinese have been doing this for hundreds of years—long before schools had Departments of Marketing. I've always suspected that the little rolled-up tea leaves had to do with the processing of tea where the leaves must be crushed to release enzymes for fermentation. It turns out this is true, but why roll the leaves into a ball... why not just roll them longitudinally between your fingers to break the plant cells?
Yesterday, while enjoying some Ti Qwan Yin at Samovar Tea Lounge in Yerba Buena Gardens, the answer appeared. The rolled-up dried tea leaves, when prepared using the traditional Gon Fu tea service of multiple short infusions, unroll a bit each time they are infused. As they expand they expose more surface area to the water, thus making up for the flavor leached out in the prior infusions. So, rolling the tea leaves into little balls allows constant flavor over multiple infusions, a sort of early application of organic nano-technology! The picture below shows some oolong tea after the first infusion, and after the fourth.
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