한국 발효차의 유형과 특성

The Types and Characteristics of Fermented Tea in Korea

Korean has its own tea culture, second to none in holding historical tradition and environmental elements, when compared to China and Japan. Nonetheless, the fact is that, Korea, having failed in suceeding to and developing these assets industrially as well as culturally, is now left with few major power brand names like the 10 best teas in China and Gyokuro in Japan. Another problem is that, these days green tea is known as the only representaive of our tea, even though we had, at least until the 1970s, black tea and coffee prevalent, described as our main beverage by various media outlets and academic papers. This is what urges us to gravely reconsider and correct our biased practice of focusing our contemporary tea culture on green tea only. It may be that we have neglected the divesity of tea culture of our own, handed down to us over 2,000 years, and we have concentrated too much of our research on the consumtion pattern in those years. As a result, the first generation of tea lovers in Korea who created today's tea culture have come to put forth gree tea as our traditional tea up until 1980, and this practice finally led to the disappearance or falling into obscrurity of other tea making than green tea, as they made a quick turn towards green tea-centered tea making. It follwed that the diversity of our tea making gave way to commerciality, and disappeard or fell into obscurity. In the midst of this trend, however, not a few efforts were made in some parts of the country. A kind of korean traditional fermented tea handed down around Jirisan mountain over long time was not just reborn under the name of 'Jacksal', but also 'Doncha' transferred in and around Jeonra-do began to hold the spotlight again under the name of 'Cheongtaejeon'. This is a desirable development that helped a lot in renewing our traditional tea again. And subsequent boom of discovering our ancient literature related to our tea revealed what our traditional teas like 'Choi-cha' made by Great Monk Choui and Hwangcha made by Dasan Jeong Yak-yong had been like. This all offered us the opportunity of bringing underlying changes to our understanding of our traditionla tea based on leaf tea alone. While unveiling these facts and centering around a number of papers and literature with respect to tea before and after 1980s, this study examines the dversity of our tea culture by looking into the types of tea making in our fermented tea and its characteristics.