Reading the wet leaf
The spent leaf is the most honest thing in the session. It shows the grade, the picking standard, the oxidation and the processing faults that the liquor politely hides, and almost nobody looks at it.
What it is
Once a tea has opened fully, usually after two or three infusions, the leaf returns close to its original shape. That shape carries the record of everything done to it: how it was picked, how hard it was rolled, how far it was oxidised, whether it was scorched during firing and whether the batch was uniform. Professional graders read the infused leaf as seriously as the cup.
How to do it
Empty the leaf onto a pale surface or a lid and spread it out. Look for whole leaves against fragments, and for a bud beside its leaves, which tells you the picking standard. Check the colour: even green through the leaf means even processing, while red or brown edges on an oolong show where the bruising did its work. Then feel one. A well-made leaf is supple and springs back; a scorched or over-dried one is brittle and crumbles. Smell it while it is still warm.
What to look for
Uniformity above all. A pile in which every leaf is roughly the same size, colour and condition is a carefully made tea, whatever it cost. A pile of mixed fragments, mixed colours and mixed sizes is a blend of several pickings, which is not automatically bad but is worth knowing before you decide the inconsistency between two sessions was your brewing. Broken leaf also explains a fast, harsh extraction better than any brewing variable will.
What people get wrong
Throwing the leaf away before it has fully opened, and judging a compressed tea on its first infusion. A puer cake or a rolled oolong needs several rounds before the leaf is telling the truth about itself. The other mistake is reading whole leaf as quality on its own. Some excellent teas are deliberately broken, and grading systems that reward size were built for a market that brewed with milk.
