A Tea Addict's Journal

Well, I got off the Chinatown bus from Boston to NYC yesterday, and what did I do? I went to a teashop. This place, called the Tea Gallery (Map) is run by a young couple who were students of Mr. Chan of the Best Tea House in Hong Kong. Mr. Chan told me about them before, but I forgot about it (since I don’t live in the city) until a tea friend reminded me of them this time I’m coming down. So I got their contact info and went (apparently it’s best to make an appointment).

I was feeling slightly under the weather, thanks to a small cold I caught and the copious amounts of tea I drank the night before. I told the store owner that, and decided that we should drink some rock tea (Wuyi oolong). Well, long story short, I ended up trying 4 different kinds (and the tea friend came halfway). Some were better than others, and when you drink a few back to back you can really tell the difference. I wasn’t quite 100% in my tasting abilities, since my nose was stuffed, but still I could manage to get some notes out of it.

We also tasted a big brick that said tea friend stores at the teashop. It was a flavourful brick, quite interesting. It was supposed to be dry-storage only, 1980s tea, but seems like it wasn’t stored quite as well as they claimed (or maybe wet storage, I’m not 100% sure myself — they think it went into wet storage at some point).

I ended up buying one kind of dahongpao. It wasn’t the cheapest thing on earth, but then, I got a free, small cake of puerh out of it. More importantly though, I got to meet a few new tea friends (the tea friend from NYC has, until yesterday, been an internet friend). In many ways the company of tea drinking is as good as the tea itself — sometimes :).

End of the day…

You can see how big my usual gongfu cup is. For these two pots, they only make about one cup with tea inside.

Well, I have one more pot that I haven’t talked about — my nongxiang tieguanyin pot. I haven’t been using it as often, primarily because I ran out of nongxiang tieguanyin, and didn’t open a new pack for the longest time.

So here are the pics:

The words on the pot says “Able to drive away my (feeling of) heat, and able to expand my chest”. Obviously, it’s talking about tea, but unfortunately some of the words, like the word “xiong (the final word) doesn’t translate so well into English.’

The pot hasn’t been progressing as well as it could, but then again, I don’t drink nongxiang as much as the other things.

Since I decided to drink two teas today — a Taiwan oolong and the Taiwan nongxiang tieguanyin, I’m a little caffeine buzzed… ugh, shouldn’t drink two teas again. Gotta restrain myself.

I’ve been on a dancong binge lately, drinking it at least every other day at home. I think I haven’t had it for so long, I’m a little deprived. Everything else is being put to the back burner.

I am trying hard to stave myself off from drinking two rounds of tea these days. My dancong pot is fairly small, and I don’t put that much leaves in there when I brew it, which means not much tea at all, at the end of the day. I suppose there’s a slight low in terms of caffeine when compared with drinking a, say, gongfu tea or a rolled oolong. It is always so temping to make a round of green or something (god knows I need to finish off some of my 2005 green teas) and to supplement my dancong with that. However, I should be good……

Well, after yesterday’s caffeine extravaganza, I decided to take it easy and went with a light tieguanyin from a tea friend of mine. It is supposed to be the 2006 pick, fresh from China.

The tea comes wrapped individually, so I opened the pack and emptied the contents into the pot. The tea itself looks remarkably like the other ones I’ve had recently — at least the greener ones. The tea leaves are small, green, and buttery smelling.

When I brewed it it comes out rather light, fragrant, with a good aftertaste. The “cha chi” is not terribly strong though. It seems to tastes fresher than my 2005 stuff, but it is really difficult for me to tell partly because I cannot compare them directly. The amount of tea I’ve used are different because of these annoying individual packs. While they are great for preserving the tea’s integrity over time, it does make tasting a bit more of a guessing game.

I think I need to try another tieguanyin again to compare…. hmmm