A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from March 2008

Sample C

March 19, 2008 · 4 Comments

More samples from Will.

Sample C, it says. Looks like dancong, smells like dancong, it’s probably a dancong, so I used my dancong pot.

Trying a new set up here, without using a tray and instead have a bowl to catch all the run off water with a wooden tray holding everything — which is just the bowl and the cup, as you can see here…

And then using a separate bowl to hold all the useless water (picture maybe tomorrow?). Maybe I can water plants with the run off tea.

How’s the tea though?

When I wrote to Will after drinking the tea, asking him what it is, I commented “seems rather bland — nothing too exciting”, and I think that basically captures what I think about the tea. It’s a dancong all right. Fragrant, not much bitterness unless you overbrew it (a plus), and overall decent, but it didn’t really stay in my mouth, nor did it give me a lingering sense of sweetness or throatiness. It’s basically a taste, and then it’s gone. That’s fine for a regular cup of tea, but I will get bored of such things quite quickly. It needed longish steeps quite soon to get more out of it, as I discovered. That’s fine, as it had a reasonable amount to give. That’s one good thing about this tea that’s obvious — it lasts quite a while and yields many steeps.

What surprised me was that this tea is one of the most expensive dancongs on offer at Tea Habitat at a whooping $75/oz. I was thinking to myself that this price seems rather high for not much tea, and not a terribly impressive one at that. Good teas cost money, there’s no doubt about that, but I also believe that truly good teas should not be too tempermental to make, as Will suggested this tea could be. I personally don’t really want to spend $25 or $50 just trying to figure out how to make this tea right. Per gram, it’s on par with some 20 years old puerh. For $75 I can buy half a kilo of some of my aged oolongs, and those are not tempermental to brew and fairly consistent. Half a kilo versus 28g…. I’m not sure if there’s much competition there.

I still remember going through my dancong phase once upon a time, early during the life of this blog actually. Then I quickly burned out, because after a while, they tend to taste sort of similar. I remember buying the second best dancong at the Best Tea House, and not the best one, because the best one cost double and the marginal difference between the two was slight. I think the same law should apply here — the marginal benefits of this tea is probably not enough to cover the marginal cost. Maybe there’s too much of the economist left in me, but as we all know, money talks.

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That sinking feeling

March 19, 2008 · 8 Comments

Those of you who pay attention to things like the market and the economy have probably been treated to a roller coaster ride in the past few weeks of good and bad news, mostly bad. Those of you who don’t have probably still heard a lot about the credit crisis, mortgage problem, and that bit about a coming recession. Those of us who drink tea in the US, unfortunately, will also be victims of this mess, and not just because you worked for Bear Stearns and are about to lose your job.

The thing is, the US dollar has been sinking like a rock. This is most acute in the case of the USD/Yen exchange rate, which has the USD falling by about 15% in the last three months. If the USD keeps at current level for any amount of time, I’d imagine that those of you who love sencha, hojicha, matcha, bancha, or God forbid, genmaicha might start noticing that all your teas, especially the spring 2008 crop or beyond, are going to be a bit more expensive. You might not see the full effect immediately, since somebody in the supply chain might absorb some of the exchange rate cost in order to keep their customers, but at some point or another, this is going to show.

The Taiwan dollar is a lot weaker than the Yen, but even that has risen against the USD by close to 10% since when I left Taiwan. There’s this batch of aged oolong that I want to buy more of from here by wiring money to the Taiwanese tea shop, but now I have to factor in an extra cushion because, well, prices went up. Or I just have to bargain hard to try to get it down, but I don’t feel too lucky.

Then there’s the Chinese yuan, which is not a free floating currency. However, in its controlled floatation, the yuan has steadily risen against the dollar throughout the last year and half (basically since the current regime of limited floatation started). It went from about 7.75 yuan/USD to the current 7.07 yuan/USD, which, again, means that everything will cost you 10% more compared to a year ago. I still remember when the Hong Kong dollar was higher than the Chinese yuan. That was when I first got to Beijing. Since the HKD is pegged to the USD, now HKD is worth about 10% less than the Chinese yuan. Sigh, how times change. The bad thing about this one is that there’s almost an expectation of the yuan rising — there are fundamental economic reasons for this. So, it is easy for those selling Chinese tea to work this cost into their price in advance. Woe to us.

While I don’t claim to be a financial wizard, it doesn’t seem as though there’s going to be any substantive change in the works for a higher dollar. So it seems we’re stuck with more expensive tea in our future, if things stay the way they are. At least those of you in the Euro zone or in the UK need not worry about all this mess. Lucky you.

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Teaware liquidation sale

March 18, 2008 · 6 Comments

After my recent housecleaning (more specifically, tea closet cleaning), I’ve finally gathered all the stuff that I realized I have in excess. I am now offering them on sale. Everything in the below pictures (including the tray) are on offer.

As you can see, cups make up for most of these. Many are small tea or wine cups. Some are Japanese guinomis. There is also a pot, a gaiwan, and a chahe. Most of these cups I have somehow bought or got through one source or another over time. Some I don’t even remember when and where I got them. Others I acquired fairly recently. Some are brand new — never used or almost never used, while others are old when I got them. It’s too complicated if I try to list them all here in detail. If you are interested in anything, please email me at marshaln (at sign here) gmail dot com for more details and we can talk.

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Sample A

March 17, 2008 · 7 Comments

Another sample from Will of the LA Tea Group

Sample A, it says. Dry leaves are tightly rolled, highly roasted oolong of some sort or another. Based on the look of the leaves, I’m going to guess Taiwanese oolong of some sort.

The tea tastes more or less like other very highly roasted teas I’ve had in the past — somewhat sweet, very roasty, with a bit of bitterness coming from the roasting or perhaps the tea itself. It’s so roasted that you can’t really tell what the tea’s original character may or may not have been — it’s just very roasty. No sourness though, which is nice.

Leaves are very stiff — not much to look at here. Most of them have barely unfurled after being exhausted by me, and that means a few hours of steeping.

This is, again, stuff that is often sold as aged oolong of some sort or another, priced variously from quite reasonable to extremely expensive. I think I’ve said this sort of tea is like cooked puerh (or heavily wet stored ones) — “aged” through an artificial process that approximates an aged tea, but does not really end up resembling the real McCoy. Then again, maybe this is just sold as highly roasted oolong, which is fine.

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1999 Menghai Yiwu wild tea

March 16, 2008 · 2 Comments

Dredging up more old samples, only this one’s even older.

According to the envelope in which it came, it is a 1999 Menghai Yiwu wild tea, from Hou De via Davelcorp. This is, if I remember correctly, one of the very first samples I received after I started the blog, which would mean that it has been sitting in my pile of stuff for about two years. The leaves smell slightly musty, but not too much.

It brews a brownish colour, normal given the age and I think storage conditions, which I would consider “normal” storage — not too wet, not too dry. The taste fits the colour and age as well — sweet, mellow, a bit of bitterness, but none too overpowering. In fact, I’d describe the tea in general as rather mellow and subdued. It’s not something that would wow you, nor is it a tea that will hit you over the head with an overpowering bitterness, strength, or anything. Rather, it delivers a steady, if slightly boring, taste that suits its current, slightly awkward age.

I do think the tea can use some more time before being consumed. Right now there is just a hint of that aged goodness that is coming through, but it’s not there yet. At the same time though, I do wonder about those wild tree claims. The tea doesn’t linger in the mouth much — aftertaste is slight. Much of the action happens on the tongue and remains there. That, from what I understand anyway, is more a sign that it is plantation tea than anything else. The wet leaves don’t tell much, apart from the fact that things are a bit broken and some leaves are paper thin. Menghai never really produced stuff that look great when wet though, so it doesn’t say much.

Then again, I think two years ago when this thing was still on sale at Hou De, prices were not outrageous. It’s long gone, of course, and it seems that Hou De no longer stocks anything of this sort, preferring instead to deal in high priced current-year puerh in fancy packaging, or older teas that have been heavily advertised (and thus carry a huge premium in many cases). There are, I think, still gems out there to be had that don’t demand an arm or a leg in return, but those teas, it seems, are hard to find in the online shopping mall for tea.

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Dadugang (Longyuan Hao) “King Tea Biscuit”, 2003

March 15, 2008 · 2 Comments

Yes, yes, it took me a while, but I finally dredged up this sample from the LJ Community 2006 tasteoff. First, the name. “King Tea Biscuit”, in case it’s not obvious, is a nasty translation crime that nobody should commit. The tea’s name is “Qing Dynasty Thousand Years Ancient Tea King Cake”, which, if you literally translate the last three words using a dictionary (looking up word by word) will get you “Tea King Biscuit”, which is actually a little better than the mysterious “King Tea Biscuit”. How we got there is anybody’s guess.

Reading those reviews from 2006, it seems like the tea received a relatively positive reception. It’s been almost two years. What has time (spent in the same plastic ziploc bag it came in) done to the tea?

If we use colour as a judge — not much

(By the way, you might have noticed recently that there is an annoying line of purple at the top of my pictures. My camera, I think, is getting on in age, and has served me and this blog for more than two years… and is now protesting. Sorry for the quality)

Looks just sort of like the same tea as those pictured in the thread I linked to, maybe with a slight yellowing of the silver tips, but if it changed, it didn’t change much. The tea has been stored in relatively stable conditions for the past two years, in one box or another in the comforts of a heated apartment in Boston or Ohio. It’s probably nothing too different from most American homes.

The colour of the tea, when brewed, also doesn’t say much, but it never does anyway. My cup’s tall, whereas the one BBB used looks much flatter, so it probably accounts for most, if not all, of the difference in colour.

The tea…. hasn’t aged well with time. The first cup is rather bland, almost tasteless. A bit of sweetness in it, but nothing too remarkable. Maybe the tea hasn’t woken up yet. As I went on, however, the bitterness really shines through. Bitter, astringent, coupled with some minty effects and a bit of a floral note here and there. The tea never got to sweetness in the aftertaste, nor did it brew out into a sweet water tea that I hoped it might eventually turn to. Instead, it just remained bitter — a weaker bitter, but still bitter. Maybe I’m spoiled by the vast amounts of un-bitter aged oolongs recently, so perhaps my tolerance for bitterness has decreased, but I don’t think my tongue has deteriorated so much that I can’t detect notes of huigan coming through, or some sort of sweet water ending for the tea.

One of the comments in the LJ thread is made by Guang of Hou De, who was obviously questioning the processing method for this tea. BBB’s observation that this tastes more like a white tea is also a note of caution. I am quite certain that teas that were processed improperly in a method that resembles white/green tea processing will, over time, degrade and turn into nasty, astringent, bitter teas. Walt, if you’re reading this, I’m curious how this tea tastes now in your collection (or, for that matter, if anybody else has it, feel free to share your thoughts). I don’t think I made it improperly, since my pot is usually ok with this amount of tea, and in any case, using the pot does tend to absorb some of the impact from the bitterness.

Wet leaves, as Guang noted, is awfully uniform in colour, and quite green (in person anyway). I checked — no signs of pan frying. Doesn’t look too traditionally processed to me.

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Making tea lazily

March 14, 2008 · 6 Comments

I had two teas today, since I was rather busy and made tea in a cup, grandfather style, instead of doing my normal routine. The first I had was a Yunnan black of some sort — no labels, as is my bad habit. It’s one of those where there are a number of golden tips in the leaves, but they do not consist of the majority of the leaves. Most of the dry leaves are more blackish. Nice, mellow, a little sweet, robust…. a bit of that caramel Yunnan taste, and not a bad tea.

Then, later, I had an Assam. It looks quite similar to the Yunnan, with some golden flecks among the black leaves. Smells like Assam. I brewed it also in the same mug. Nice, mellow, a little sweet, robust…. not a bad tea.

Then I started wondering if it’s possible for me to identify these teas using the parameters I did (maybe 2-3g of tea in a 250ml? mug) without knowing beforehand what they are. I’m not entirely sure. The Assam certainly was a little more bitter, perhaps, but I think the difference is slight. I could detect Yunnan notes in the Yunnan black, but only just.

Which leads me to think that in some ways, all our gongfu brewing puts us in a very different mindset with regards to the teas we drink. Of course, the amount of leaves I put in my cup today was small, and so the nuances were subdued. Even after many minutes of brewing, however, their differences are not all that great, and will probably be even less if I didn’t know beforehand what they were.

That is of course a great argument for using gongfu style brewing — it gets the most out of your teas, and what might seem like quite similar stuff when brewed with two teaspoons of leaves for five minutes are probably going to be very different beasts when stuffed into a pot 1/5 full of leaves and brewed for five seconds. The great problem with gongfu brewing, as we all know, is space and time. Space, because it eats up a lot of real estate on a table. Instead of just a mug, you need at least a cup, a brewing vessel, and a water dispenser of some sort. Time, because it takes more attention to repeatedly add water than just adding it every once in a while.

There are, I think, ways of making that easier to do. One is to simply drink multiple infusions together. Instead of downing one cup and then adding water and repeating this process, which takes quite a bit of attention and time, it is possible, I think, to use a pot that is of largish size (say 300ml) and make two infusions of the tea drained into a largish mug that will then be consumed over the next 5, 10, or whatever minutes. When another cup of tea is desired, the process can be repeated. Still takes time, yes, and perhaps a walk to the water heater in the office, but I think it does cut down on the amount of attention it requires (and the strange stares from co-workers) significantly. That’s sort of what I do when I’m on the road traveling with a pot in a hotel room. Drinking infusion by infusion just takes too much effort in a sub-optimal space. Doing that, though, still gives some of the same benefits of gongfu brewing, and if you use the right kind of tea, it will last all day.

How do my dear readers make compromises in the office?

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Chatuo

March 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment

There’s a term that is often used on Chinese forums such as Sanzui to describe people who say things for the sake of pushing prices of a particular tea up. This is most common during the big bubble of puerh prices back in the day when there were many speculators in the market, and very often there were those who went on such online forums and said great things about such and such a tea, how this particular production is really excellent, how that one is made of real old tree leaves, etc etc…. the term they call these people is “chatuo”. Cha, tea. Tuo, support, to hold on the palm of one’s hands (it also means to entrust, but not applicable here). Basically, these are people who were supporting the prices of some tea or another, and in many cases, hoping to push it up by creating demand for a particular tea. There were many cases of such people that I’ve seen, the most well done were those who talked at length about one particular factory’s products, or give a long exposition about one particular tea’s origins, etc, complete with pretty pictures and fancy analysis. Inevitably, they work. People start asking questions about these teas featured (even when they can be very similar to some other teas around the same area/time). Prices go up. It’s all part of the game.

But that’s not the kind of chatuo I want to talk about today, for there are real chatuos out there, physical things that serve a useful purpose. They’re not very commonly seen in China anymore, but sometimes still used in Taiwan. Basically, any dish that supports a tea cup is a chatuo (chataku in Japanese). Very often you might seen ones that are made of ceramic or wood, and those are the most frequently used in Taiwan, I believe. In my last shipment from Japan though, included in it is a set of 5 (Japanese teaware often come in sets of 5) pewter chataku that I bought.

This set is, I believe, quite old. There’s some discolouration, and the metal shows wear and tear. The base of your cup should fit into the circle, and you can lift the whole thing up using one of the wings. They come in all shape and sizes, as you can see on this site about chataku (you can go on to the next page with the “next” buttom at the bottom). In comparison to some of those fantastic looking ones on that site, mine looks very humble. They do, however, work remarkably well, and makes any filled-to-the-brim cup easy to drink from.

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Shanshui aged foshou

March 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Another sample I picked up from Boston

This time it’s an aged foshou, supposedly from Shanshui tea, if I remembered correctly. Smelled very roasty when dry. And it smelled even more roasty when wet

The tea falls firmly into the “roasted aged oolong” category, with a prominent taste of roasted tea in the cup and some sweetness that is obviously derived from age. However, I wouldn’t say this one is overly complex. It is stuff that one can find quite easily in Taiwan, often passed off as 30 or even 40 years old, but are often much less than that. Their strong roast is sort of a style, but often, I think, it’s just a way for the tea maker to pretend like it’s really old when it’s not. I strongly believe that drinking stuff like this against another tea that is properly aged is a good way to educate oneself as to what is just a strongly roasted, somewhat aged tea, and what is a lightly roasted and aged tea…. the notes that they share, such as the fruity flavour or the sweetness of the tea, are what all aged oolongs sort of share. However, I still feel that the best aged oolongs are the ones where the roast is almost undetectable (either because it’s been so long, or it’s never been roasted very strongly to start with).

This isn’t to say teas like this is bad. In some ways, this is more enjoyable than yesterday’s tea, because at least here there isn’t that lingering sourness that can really detract from one’s enjoyment. Yet, it isn’t the best an aged oolong can offer.

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Jing teashop 1983 tieguanyin

March 11, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I picked up a sample of Jing’s 1983 aged tieguanyin on my swing to Boston — one of the persons I met gave me a session’s worth of tea.

The leaves look like an old tieguanyin — not rolled tightly, dark, a bit brittle. Smells somewhat sour.

The colour of the tea, when brewed, is also consistent with an aged oolong

The taste…. this is always the test, isn’t it? The tea is not too bad, with a nice throatiness and good sweetness. One problem though — it’s sour. I don’t know whether or not this is a product of the storage that it went through in my friend’s house, or whether it came like this or not, but since they mentioned “slightly acid aftertaste” in the product description, I’m going to guess that it was at least partly present already when it came.

Sourness, unfortunately, is the bane of aged oolongs, and sometimes it can thoroughly ruin a tea. I think there’s always going to be a hint of sourness in an aged oolong, but it’s a matter of how heavy and how presistent it is. There’s a certain tradeoff in having a sour tea and a heavily roasted one. The heavier the roast, the less likely it is going to be sour (especially when re-roasted). However, when reroasting there is inevitably something that is changed in the tea. The very best aged oolongs I’ve had to date are obviously very lightly or not at all reroasted over time. They give me the most complexity and flavour, and to boot, are only very slightly tart. They are rare.

The sour stuff… you can reroast them and they get less sour, but they develop in a different way over time, and I’m personally not sure if I like that stuff more. Some will tell you that that’s the only way to age oolongs; I beg to differ.

Still, for $21/100g, the tea isn’t too expensive. I do think they might actually be able to re-roast it again and hope it will improve a little more. Then again, trying to keep a tea like this under control in a place like Guangzhou is going to be an uphill battle all the way.

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