A Tea Addict's Journal

Writing after a trip to Beijing, I visited some old friends and made some observations of what’s going on here

1) Maliandao is growing up – literally. There’s another one or two new tea malls that have popped up – with rather empty storefronts. I think it is safe to say that at some point the malls have oversupplied the amount of space people really need/can sustain. While some stores that were around when I lived here in 2006 are still here, going strong, many others have died. Some others yet have migrated out of Maliandao to other places in the city – usually these are the higher end places that do more of their own custom pressings, etc. Some of my old contacts are now no longer there, and some of my tea friends in the city also no longer visit Maliandao.

2) Among the stores that have stayed is Xiaomei’s, an old friend whom Hobbes has blogged more about than I. I go see her pretty much every time I visit Beijing. The amount of tea she has stocked up in her store grows every time, to the point where now it’s just a narrow corridor going in with boxes on the sides.

You might also notice junior there, learning the trade (and yes, drinking tea) at the tender age of one. She’s been busy having a family too, now the mother of three. Time flies! Alas, she has no more of the Yisheng cake, but some of her old pressings are still available (though, oddly, not all on her Taobao store). I bought some, as it’s not bad and for teas that are about seven years old, not a bad value.

3) White tea is still the tea of the month. It all started with the tieguanyin craze, some ten plus years ago. Then people caught on to puerh, and that went on for a while (still going on, sort of). And then you have the black teas – things like jinjunmei were sold at astronomical prices, and now every other store in Maliandao seems to sell white tea, from Fuding and other places. Xiaomei has also started doing a lot of white teas from a few years ago – puerh raw material prices are such that business is difficult to do, as you need to spend a lot of money on inventory. For smaller operators like her, that’s a big risk. White teas are cheaper and the sales more reliable, so she, like many others, have gone and pressed white teas into cakes (that’s what some of the cakes for sale on her Taobao shop are). I tried a couple, which were not bad, including this one. She gave me a couple for me to store in Hong Kong and compare, and I’m supposed to report back in ten years. I guess we’ll see.

4) New teas, as we all know, are increasingly unaffordable. The bargains are still in lesser-known brands from 5-10 years ago, preferably from secondary sellers who are selling what they bought up a few years ago. The thing with buying from official vendors is that while you’re sure of its authenticity, you have to pay (usually) the MSRP, which the producers raise every year to make it possible to continue selling young teas. So you have the situation where 5 year old teas are now easily over 600-800RMB a cake, even if it’s relative crap. New make old tree teas easily bust 1600 RMB a cake these days retail, regardless of region. To protect their market, they have to raise prices for older teas to be above that, otherwise nobody would buy them. So, the key is to find those bargains from a few years ago, and try to snap those up. Not easy to do when you only have a few days in the market, but in the long run that’s where the value is.

5) Dayi’s new 7542 is interesting. They have loosened their compression a bit, so the cake isn’t a hard-as-stone disk anymore. We’ll see how that experiment ends. I bought one just for laughs.