Ok, this is by no means professional or anything, but I tried.
I guess this is self-explanatory enough. One thing I didn’t mention is that you need to make sure when you are doing the little folds, you’re doing them tightly so that they pull in all the excess paper, but not so tight that you tear the paper. Some wrappers are especially fragile and easy to tear.
Categories: Old Xanga posts · Videos
Tagged: aged puerh, skills, young puerh
Since I was on the topic of colours of teapots
The top right is yesterday’s pot. The bottom right is my dancong pot. I think you can see why I say it’s the closest, but still not purple…
Enjoy 🙂
Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: teaware, yixing
Everybody knows that Yixing clay is supposed to be good for tea. Everybody also knows that Yixing is often called purple clay, but how often have you ever seen stuff that can truly be called purple? They’re most likely red, brown, dark brown, beige, green, or blue even, but purple?
I found a pot that may, I think, qualify as purple
The only other pot that comes near this colour is my dancong pot, but that, when put next to this one, appears dark brown instead of purple. I didn’t mess with the colour balance on this picture, and it’s taken under sunlight. The pot really is sort of purple.
Is this the original yixing clay? Is this how Yixing zisha is supposed to look?
The pot I got for what is basically a song, and I think it might be a Republian (1911-1949) pot. The maker’s mark is Gemingchang, which is a Republican period workshop. It’s not the world’s best made pot. But the clay intrigues me. It’s purple. It’s a bit rough to the touch. In fact, I’ve noticed over time that many older pots seem to have rougher surfaces than the ones that are made these days (real zhuni excepted). The reason, as I was told, is that nowadays the clay is mixed much more finely, whereas back in the day without machine or high tech tools, the most they can do with the clay is a coarse ground. That would make sense, I suppose. I also wonder though if the clay themselves changed over time. I’m sure it has.
I used this to make the biyuzhu again today, this time with a lot less leaves. Compared to the zhuni pot, this time it came out a little less fragrant, but the depth and the throatiness was much more pronounced. The tea still lasts forever, even with less leaves…
Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: teaware, yixing
Today I am drinking some unaged (unless you consider a few months “aged”) Taiwanese oolong, supposedly organic. This is a sample provided by some Taiwanese gentleman from whom I bought some stuff.
The tea itself looks pretty unremarkable. Tightly rolled Taiwanese stuff, smells and looks about right.
The taste is ….. hate to say, pretty generic Taiwanese gaoshan oolong like. I find that when young, they’re really not that remarkable, at least to me. I remember once upon a time, I used to love this stuff. I would drink it all the time…. in fact, for a while, that was pretty much the only thing I’d drink. Then, somehow, it fell out of favour, and hasn’t been back ever since. I’m not exactly sure why that is the case. Tastes obviously change, but it seems as though the switch from lighter to darker tea is quite common among those people I know.
Anyway…. digression aside, the tea itself…. is not bad, but nothing to write home about. It’s clean, but that’s about all I can say about it. I’m sure I’ll love it if it has 20 years on it, but alas, it does not.
I do wonder if it’s time I start storing my own oolong, but oolongs are a pain to store. I need a lot of tea caddies.
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: Taiwan oolong
I tried Iwii’s sample 4 today, despite my earlier statement that I would not drink young stuff in a while….
Pretty normal looking young stuff, a bit of silvery buds, otherwise mostly just green leaves. The liquor (no picture, sorry) is orangy… in line with teas that are probably 2-3 years old. The taste is interesting — when I drank it I thought “Hmmm, tastes slightly, ever so slightly, Yiwu-ish, but I think this is one of those fake Yiwus, maybe a Lincang that sometimes can appear to be like a Yiwu or something”. It’s a little sweet, but has more bitter than a Yiwu, and is a bit more minty in a slightly negative way. It has some qi, not a lot. Aftertaste is a bit on the weak side. Turns out, after I talked to Iwii, that this is a Jiangcheng tea from Wisteria in Taipei. Jiangcheng, as many of you may know, is where a lot of fake Yiwu leaves come from. This is not to say Jiangcheng tea is bad in its own right, but just that Jiangcheng teas are often not that great compared to Yiwu stuff (at least, the best of Jiangcheng don’t compare to the best of Yiwu). Since Jiangcheng teas are far cheaper, using those to fake Yiwu can yield healthy profit margins, and is a well known tactic of unscrupulous merchants.
This is a Jiangcheng tea that is advertised as Jiangcheng, so no problems there. It’s a solid tea, nothing fancy, nothing too bad, but compared to the Longpa that I had a little while ago that’s also from Wisteria — that tea beats this one by a mile. No contest.
I did manage to take a picture of the wet leaves
Good spring leaves. Smallish buds. If given the choice, I don’t think I’d buy this tea — since there are far better teas that are offered under the same roof, not because this tea is bad.
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: young puerh
No, I did not drink jasmine today. I drank this
This is biyuzhu, one of those teas that I hunted in Taipei. After I finally found the right bag of tea to open, I get to drink it at least since the last time I did — which was when I had a sample from the store.
Basically, this is a high grade Taiwanese oolong, mostly buds, un-reroasted, aged probably 20 years or so. It was next to the bag of “wet stored” tieguanyin in the same big tin, and I asked for a sample of it to try before I decided it’s good and bought 600g of it. I thought 600g is enough, but I think I will need more.
It brews the same reddish colour that almost all aged oolongs will produce
Except that it has a very refine aroma, one that is more floral than fruity. This tea is probably the first one that I tried that I felt was truly un-reroasted. At that time, I didn’t know what it was, and simply marveled at its rather strong fragrance. Since then, through a number of tasting of other aged oolongs, I realized that this is the product of little to no roasting after the initial processing. The fact that it doesn’t taste sour at all is a feat in and of itself. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did. After a few strong infusions, the tea settles down to deliver a steady stream of aromatic elixirs that make me feel very happy. When I asked my fiance how she would describe the tea’s aroma, she said immediately that it tasted like jasmine. Indeed, the taste is quite similar to jasmine, excep that it lingers on and on long after it’s been swallowed, and the aftertaste, rather than simply dissipating into nothing, changes over time. Initially, you get the coolness that hits the throat, then it turns a bit sweet, and finally, a more plummy taste that only an aged oolong can deliver.
Mind you, this was achieved through the (mistaken) use of lots of leaves
One problem with this tea is that the tea expands, a lot. The plus side is that I got more than 20 infusions out of it. Most aged oolongs tend to be the less tightly rolled kind, so I sort of forgot how much tea this is once it expands…. it gave me a bit of a caffeine buzz and at one point made me slightly queasy.
But I love it.
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: aged oolong
I don’t know what all the things in tea which make it bitter, but I know that one important component of that is caffeine, which is supposedly quite bitter on its own.
When I make aged oolongs (and to a lesser extent, well aged puerhs) no matter how long you brew it, it’s hard to get any sort of bitterness out of the tea.
If I put one and one together, does that mean that these teas contain very little caffeine? That the caffeine, over time, broke down into some other things? What happens to that stuff? What else makes tea bitter? Obviously, none of those things are present in their original form anymore in these aged teas. New oolongs can be quite bitter if overbrewed, but aged ones don’t. Roasted oolongs tend to be less bitter, and I guess the heat has a lot to do with it.
Does that mean that when I drink a tea a day, and I’m only drinking aged oolong, I am actually drinking very little caffeine?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions in any conclusive manner. They are mere speculations. But it’s something worth thinking about…. any knowledge welcomed!
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: aged oolong, musings
I was fishing around in my box full of weird stuff, samples, leftovers, and that kind of thing, and among them I found this
If I remember correctly, this is a sample from Aaron Fisher. I cannot for the life of me remember what this is, but sniffing it (and trying to get past the Lapsang Souchong induced smokiness — there’s a bag of LS next to it) I think this is a cooked puerh. I don’t know where it’s from. The shape is odd — there’s a sort of cylindrical shape to the original piece, I think, and this is just a small chunk of it.
I brewed it… and yes, this is probably a cooked puerh, although, it might be one of those older ones where there’s a bit of raw tea mixed in? Or stored differently? I don’t know. It is definitely a very good cooked puerh — soft, but robust, with a tinge of youth in there somewhere. It also does something that most cooked teas don’t — lasts very long, which made me think this is not cooked after all, yet there are so many things in the taste that remind me of a cooked pu. I don’t know. I should label my tea.
The wet leaves, as you can see, are dark, but not pitch black. They remain somewhat flexible. Aaron, if you’re reading this, do you remember what it is? My bad for forgetting…
A word about my tea service these days:
Trying to forego the tray was a bit of a tough decision. I remember when I first started using the tray, I found it liberating, beause I felt like I could do whatever I want and get away with it. Now, however, I found not using the tray makes me more disciplined in my brewing, and also, as a side benefit, conserves a bit of water. The large bowl serves as a kensui for the waste water. I might get a real kensui to sub in or this bowl, which I think should see more useful service as something else (fruit bowl?). Then again, I’m pressing the pewter bowl into service — that was originally a fruit bowl as well. In fact, other than the yixing pot, I think the only other things that are intended for tea in this setup are the chataku (the pewter cup holder) and the tray in the bottom.
Incidentally, tea works just as well (if not better) as Pledge in buffing up dark wood.
Update: Aaron just told me that this is probably from a 500g tuo from the 80s, one of those cooked puerh where the process of fermentation was incomplete or lightly done, so that they taste sort of raw-ish in the midst of the mostly cooked flavours. I think this came up when I was telling him about how I’ve seen people selling some 80s tuo that are obviously cooked as raw tea, and thus this tuo came into the picture….
Interesting drink, and thanks for the sample 🙂
Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: cooked puerh, teaware
One of the things I’ve learned from my intensive drinking of aged oolongs is that the Taiwanese and mainland oolongs age differently.
Broadly speaking, mainland oolongs, which tend to be most likely tieguanyin, are going to be sweet, very sweet, when aged. They are not often necessarily very fragrant when aged. The fragrance is often subdued, coming in the form of an intense aftertaste rather than an up front kind of way. The aftertaste though, when the tea itself is good, can be very strong and very long lasting. This might partly be because tieguanyin from some years ago tend to be better than the ones we drink now…
Taiwanese oolongs, on the other hand, tend to have very strong up front fragrance. This is especially true for the stuff that haven’t been reroasted, which tend to be more fragrant than others. They don’t, however, have that deep aftertaste that tend to come with the mainland stuff. This is a common complaint from my friends in Hong Kong who like to drink oolongs — that Taiwanese teas are shallower, and mainland teas are deeper. It’s not that obvious these days, I think, because there has been a gradual convergence in style, I think. You can really tell, however, with the older stuff — they are very different beasts.
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: aged oolong, Chinese oolong, Taiwan oolong
Another sample today, this time Iwii’s sample 5. The tea is distinctly younger than the other stuff I’ve tried so far from him. The leaves are green!
Looks more in line with maybe a 2-3 years old tea than a 5-7 years old stuff that I’ve been sampling from him.
The liquor looks similar
In fact, looks more like yesterday’s tea. The taste is a very potent yet subtle one, good mouthfeel and strong minty effect all around, nice throatiness, good qi, some hints of sweetness in the back, but it’s not a very obvious one at this point and is quite subtle, but there…. all in all, very good. It is better than yesterday’s tea, no offense to the Douji folks. Not leaps and bounds better, but definitely better.
If I remember correctly, Iwii said this is Wisteria’s Longpa from, I think, 2006? Zhou Yu has my respects, and this tea, anyway, is very good.
The wet leaves are uniformly plucked, good processing, mostly whole leaves… did I say this tea’s good?
Too bad his teas cost an arm and a leg. I guess a few cakes are ok, but anything more can really cost your wallet…
Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: young puerh
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