A Tea Addict's Journal

This is my first young puerh cake… or is it puerh? I think it is, or will be, anyway.

Last time I tried this was a year ago. I haven’t touched it since. When I bought it from Kung Fung Yung I knew nothing about puerh, and I was attracted by the way this tasted and thought this will be good. I wasn’t thinking about aging so much as just buying it for the novelty value. I certainly overpaid for it…

Anyway, here’s the cake

You can see this cake consists of mostly small buds and leaves.

I peeled some teas off and put enough in a gaiwan to make a good cup

The resulting liquor in different infusions

1st

3rd

14th

The tea is rather interesting to taste again after having been away from it for a year. The colour of the cake has darkened a little, as has the colour of the liquor as I remember it. The taste has most definitely changed a bit though — it has developed a more fruity aroma, whereas I remember it last time as being a bit more on the green tea side of things. There is a plum/berry like taste, which is what reminds me of the XZH 97 Yiwu cake — only this tea is from 2003. The profile, however, seems to be moving that way. I certainly don’t know how this will age in another 5 years, but right now…. that’s what I think of when I am drinking it.

The tea is very smooth for a young puerh, with very little of the roughness but still being thick instead of thin. It develops a good aftertaste, although not obviously strong, with some reasonable cha qi. I would think the overall profile of the tea pins it somewhere in the six famous tea mountains, but the smaller leaves might put it in a place like Yibang, where leaves are generally smaller, than a place like Yiwu, where the leaves are big. Either way though, this has to be a spring tea, given the size of the leaves…

That’s my phone in the bottom for scale. I think given the sizes, in the 1-10 scale it is probably a grade 3 tea, mostly. A closeup…

When I go back to Taiwan later in the year, I’ll definitely go back to this store and try it there and see how theirs might taste different, given different aging environment. I don’t think I’ll buy another one, as it’s expensive for what it is, but it’s certainly instructive to try this tea.

I tasted this tea a little while back, and wrote some notes on it. I figured I will revisit it today. The Yecha is almost not worth drinking again.

Let’s cut to the chase and show you the infusion notes I took… I usually don’t, but after 3 infusions today I thought I should.

1st — good qi, clear, light, smoke

2nd — BITTER, rougher, unpleasant, but feeling the qi quite strongly

3rd — similar, weaker
4th — sour, smoke still there, rough, bitterness dying a bit
5th — sourness persist, with a hint of smoke, bitterness remains
6th and on — more of the same…. in weaker permutations

I think as the notes say… the tea is bitter, strong, and I’d say powerful. There isn’t as clear a note of huigan as I noted last time, probably because I consciously used less leaves today to see if the tea tastes different that way. The bitterness in the second infusion was almost overwhelming… if I were a regular tea drinker, I would’ve given up. I have to say that from that point on… the tea was largely unpleasant until about the 8th or 9th infusion, when it got weaker again.

The taste of the tea also doesn’t really jive with what I understand as a Yiwu tea. Over the past year or so, I’ve tasted at least a few dozen cakes that are labelled Yiwu. Obviously, not all of them taste the same, as Yiwu is not a tiny area and there is definitely some variation in the taste of each production. However, there is an underlying taste profile that is largely similar and is very distinctive of what I now understand as the “Yiwu taste”, and I’d say most of the teas that are creditably Yiwu share that Yiwu taste, especially among the higher end stuff that I’ve found from various sources. I can smell a bit of this Yiwu taste in the dry leaves of this cake, but I can’t say I’m really tasting it in the tea that I am brewing with this. Now, Mr. Chen is obviously a big name in puerh circles, and I’d imagine he knows what he’s talking about when making a Yiwu tea, but at the same time, I cannot but help wonder if this is truly Yiwu at all, or if it might be one of those “greater Yiwu area” teas. This cake stands out among the higher end stuff to be called Yiwu but not tasting much like any of the other ones, so I really wonder if this is what it claims to be. I’ve tried one cake, for example, by Zhongcha this year, also Fall 2006, that is precisely one of these “greater Yiwu” teas, and one of the things is the much more pronounced bitterness from that cake.

Another of the things I noticed more obviously this time is the sheer amount of broken bits of leaves in this tea. I threw one whole piece of the cake in without breaking it apart, but every infusion I got a lot of bits of leaves in the bottom of my fairness cup. This is from something like the 12th infusion:

Sorry it’s dark, but you can see there’s still a fair amount of stuff (I clear out all the broken bits every round, so what you’re seeing is all coming from one infusion).

You can also see the amount of broken leaves from the wet leaves. For example… I poured out the wet leaves, but inevitably some leaves are left in the gaiwan… look at this:

And the leaves that were poured out:

Closeup:

The amount of small, little pieces is very high. I couldn’t pick up any leaves without getting my fingers covered with little pieces, each no more than about 1mm-2mm long on each side.

This prompted me to go back to the one piece of the tea left remaining in my bag. I took it out and took some pictures. What I did today to get the tea I brewed was to break the one big piece remaining into two halves, and I used one while keeping one. I split the piece down the middle horizontally, so that I basically peeled half the piece off. You can see the one intact side of the cake:

And the side that I peeled off

Not a lot of broken bits obvious in these cases. I tried tapping the piece thoroughly to see what comes off, and this is the result:

This still doesn’t come close to the amount of fluff that I got from the tea. I have a lingering suspicion that mixed in with the cake is a lot of leftover bits of leaves that is a result of processing/transportation. Instead of sifting them out before pressing…. they all got dumped into the cakes and pressed together inside. Otherwise, I simply could not explain the amount of broken tea that is in this, seeing as I didn’t break the piece into small bits before brewing it.

Is this deliberate? I haven’t seen a high quality cake that has such broken leaves. I’m sure the broken leaves contribute to the roughness and the bitterness of the tea. They infuse faster and stuff come out faster. Could this possibly be good for aging? I don’t remember older cakes being filled with such fannings (this is fannings). All I can think of is that somebody is being sloppy.

I tried the SE Asia trade fair cake today, the sample of which came from Hou De. This tea is also made by Chen Guang He Tang, the same company (really, same guy) who made the two Yiwus I tried a few days ago.

I got the center of the cake, with a neifei to boot. The piece is literally the centerpiece…

I added a moderate amount of tea to the gaiwan and brewed. The first two infusions were a little strange… there was a strange metallic note to the tea, and also a sort of vegetal taste that I don’t usually find in younger puerhs. In fact, I felt like I was drinking vegetable water at one point. The tea is not very thick, although not too thin either. It’s bitter, and remains so throughout. The vegetable taste goes away after a while, turning into a more traditional Menghai area tea taste. There’s always some huigan to the tea, and the level of huigan is somewhere between the Yiwu Yecha and the Yiwu Chawang.

Sweetness doesn’t really show up until at least 7-8 infusions in. The tea starts showing some sweet notes then on the tongue. Bitterness persists though. The tea was never too rough on the tongue — quite smooth, in fact, despite the bitterness.

Overall I think this is an above average cake, but not a whole lot better than that. One of those teas that is only enjoyable after some years of aging, I think. Right now it’s really too bitter to be a pleasure to drink. If the bitterness is obvious to me, then it must be even more obvious to those who don’t drink this sort of thing regularly, since I generally find myself rather insensitive to tea-related bitterness these days when compared to other people.

2nd infusion

4th infusion

One thing I’ve noticed about these Chen Guang He Tang teas is that they consist of leaves that are more broken than usual.

In the whole gaiwan I couldn’t really find any leaves that were intact. These were the best looking ones

I suspect this has to do with the level of rolling they went through during processing. I suspect these teas are more heavily rolled than the usual ones we see in the market these days. Heavy rolling, according to what I’ve read, also contributes to the higher level of bitterness apparent in his teas. If this is true that heavy rolling is involved, then obviously Mr. Chen thinks that heavy rolling is good for aging. Is it? Only time will tell, I suppose.

On the other hand, I find that a lot of the leaves of his teas are actually quite thin and fragile to handle when wet. They seem to break more easily. Maybe it’s just a question of the general quality of the leaves… and that the stuff he uses are somehow thinner? Not sure.