A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from May 2008

Growing out of a tea

May 3, 2008 · 5 Comments

It’s a little bit sad when you realize you’ve outgrown a tea — that it’s no longer good, even though once upon a time, you thought it was a nice tea.

I remember I used to really like this stuff

It’s some supposedly 30 years old loose puerh from Best Tea house in Hong Kong. I remember the first time I bought my 150g of it, I went through it probably in two months. The second time I bought it, it took longer. I still have the third one, and it’s been around for two years. I’m not even halfway through it.

Drinking it again today, I think now I’m quite sure this is a Vietnamese tea, not Yunnan, or at least it’s a blend of the two. There’s that distinctive Vietnamese sort of taste to it. It’s really not very good, when it comes down to it. Sure, if you need something aged and don’t want a cooked tea, this will do. And it does that fairly well, despite the fact that I don’t like it so much anymore. It’s not horrible. It’s not bad in any real sense of the word. I just don’t really enjoy it as much anymore.

The biggest problem is that this tea isn’t very cheap. When you compare it with stuff that you can buy in Hong Kong for maybe a quarter of the price, one wonders if it’s worth bothering. The tea is dry-ish stored. I don’t think I’ll be buying my fourth pack.

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Pot experiment

May 2, 2008 · 3 Comments

No, not that kind of pot.

So I tried to do the “drink the same tea in different pots” bit yesterday and today, especially with a view of trying out the “new” pot with young puerh. My selected victim was my Zhangjiawan puerh

Using the “new” pot first

And then, today, the pot I normally use

Both of the second infusion

And the leaves

Now, I am by no means claiming this to be scientific. After all, I don’t have a scale, I am not measuring carefully the volume to weight ratio. I’m not calibrating the temperature of the water precisely….

But somehow, the “new” pot has things coming out darker and the flavour generally “older”. It added a year or two to the age of the tea, methinks. I don’t know how that happened.

I might’ve put in a little more leaves, which might explain the difference, somewhat. If you look at the wet leaves, the left side is from the “new” pot. I’m sure the fact that it has been sitting around the pot for a day has changed it a bit, or has it? I don’t know for sure. I do remember, however, thinking that the leaves look awfully dark sitting in the pot when I made it yesterday.

So, no conclusions. Just…. lots of questions.

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