A Tea Addict's Journal

I went to Maliandao again today, partly because my friend DY wanted to go and she’s really unfamiliar with the territory, and partly because I still have some unfinished business there.

We just went to L’s store, where we sat down and started drinking. We first had a Yichang Hao 2006 Yiwu cake, which was a gift to DY from a friend of hers. I amazed myself by guessing that this is one of her Shenzhen friends (Shenzhen is across the river from Hong Kong). I asked because it tasted like a Hong Kong/Guangzhou area storage condition — i.e. the tea changed faster than it would in Beijing, smoother, and generally better. I was right! She was impressed I could tell where her friend is from just by drinking gift tea. I have to say I was happy 🙂

We then proceed to have a few cooked puerhs. I ended up buying a sample of all of them:

These are all directly or indirectly for my girlfriend. The two bricks are going to be gifts for people in Inner Mongolia, but I am not sure what kind of taste is better, because this will be used to make Mongolian milk tea. Since she’s much more of an expert on such matters than me, a pathetic Han weakling who knows no such things, I will defer to her judgment and going to bring the samples over to the States. The mini-tuos are also for her to make yuanyang, which is a mix of robust tea and coffee. She wants to try this with espresso and cooked puerh, and these mini-tuos are VERY robust tasting. I think it will work.

Lastly, we had another tea from DY, an almost border tea from a region near Burma. It was, surprisingly, very good. Very light, pleasant, fairly smooth as young puerh goes… and generally quite enjoyable. It lacks a bit of depth, but really…. for a tea that shouldn’t cost more than 20 or 30 RMB a piece, it is quite nice. Now, her friend bought it from a touristy area in Yunnan and told her it was “very expensive”, so….. somebody got robbed….

We then walked around a little to buy necessary teaware, but nothing exciting there. I am still in the hunt for a shui ping pot for Chaozhou style gongfu tea, but haven’t found a suitable pot yet…. maybe I can find it in Shanghai. Either way though, this will be my last Maliandao trip in almost two months. Tomorrow, I fly back to Hong Kong, and I won’t be back here until early April….