A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from August 2011

The beauty of imperfection

August 31, 2011 · 21 Comments

This is one of the most beautiful pots I own.

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It is also one of the ugliest.

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The reason I say that is quite simple – if you look at it from afar, the pot looks quite nice.  If you look closely, it has all kinds of flaws.  The shape is uneven, the body is slightly collapsed on one side, and the lid, oh the lid — you can see how it seems to be sinking on one side, and it’s not even round — in fact the pot is not round.  It is more like an oval.

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As you can probably imagine, the lid doesn’t fit all that well.

Yet, there’s beauty in this.  All too often, I find newer pots to be entirely without character or personality.  A pot that is made exactly to shape and size is, in my opinion, very boring — I can find a million of those in any tea market, anywhere.  Give me a tea mall and I can find you a thousand perfectly made shuiping pots of all sizes.  I can assure you, however, that walking through a tea market for a whole day will not yield one that looks like this pot I have here.

All those supposed tests for trying out a new pot — whether or not the water will stop if you cover the air hole (this doesn’t), whether or not the lid will fall if you fill the pot with water and the flip the pot around (I haven’t tried, but I’m sure it will) and whether or not the pot has all its elements lined up perfectly in a straight line (no, once again) are, when you think about it, completely useless for tea brewing purposes.  There will never, ever be a situation where, mid-pour, you just need to stop the pour by covering the air hole.  Nor is there any real reason behind why a perfectly fitted lid will brew better tea (think the airhole that allows flow doesn’t leak air? think again).  So, these so called “well made” tests are, in effect, tests of whether or not a pot is made to perfection.  Why, yes, sure, they can be done by hand, but so can a machines.  Why do you need paintings when you have photographs, if perfection and precision is what you want?

I like this pot because it has personality, and because it’s full of contradictions.  Looking at the pictures, you may think it has very rough skin, but in fact, when you touch it, you’ll find that it’s silky smooth.  Its shaped with quirks that you only find in older pots – a slightly upward bending spout, a joint line that isn’t even remotely concealed, clay that still shows you what’s in it, and of course, the lack of any filters.  Pots like this one make me very happy – they tell a unique story that you can’t find anywhere else.  No wonder MadameN calls them my concubines.

Categories: Objects
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A hidden treasure

August 19, 2011 · 13 Comments

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If you saw an eBay listing with this item and a few other unattractive pieces of random wares on a cardboard box in a blurry image, how much would you pay for it?  What if it’s listed under “kitchenware”?  Keep in mind I already rinsed this thing — it was much dirtier when I got it.

What if I told you this is a Japanese vintage pure silver kyusu?

Of course I was taking a gamble when I bought this lot of what looked like random junk.  The nasty cup and ugly little salt container (or whatever that is) really didn’t inspire the shopper in me, but the pot looked interesting, even though it was on top of a dirty cardboard box and the lighting was dim.  I could tell that it was metal, and the handle might be bone or ivory.  The dark sheen on the pot made me think it might have been a silver-plated pot, rather than a real silver one.  I figured for the price I paid (shipping cost more) I could afford the gamble, and it paid off.  This pot definitely falls into category 3 of my musings on buying from places like eBay.

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You can see the maker’s mark and the silver mark on the right side of the spout.

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There is, unfortunately, a catch – the angle at which the pictures were taken means that I couldn’t see that there’s some damage to the pot, namely along the handle.  Looks like another job, perhaps, for Herman Silver.

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All in all though, I’m pretty happy.

Categories: Objects
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The retaste project 5: Yiwu Shunshixing

August 18, 2011 · 1 Comment

The retasting continues, although in this case, it is also a cake that I haven’t tried since I had it in the store.

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Yiwu Shunshixing is an outfit headed by Zhang Yi, who was the village head in Yiwu in the mid 1990s and who was instrumental in the making of the cake Zhenchunya Hao, which now sells for an obscene amount of money.  The cakes he makes correspondingly cost a lot, relatively speaking.  I bought this cake in 2006, and I’m pretty sure this is a 2004 or earlier production, although I no longer remember what year it’s from.  Anything older than 2004 is pretty expensive on the market, and quite hard to find, as they were made in small batches.  I think mostly collectors have them.  I bought the last two cakes from the shop, if I remember correctly.

I should also note that Chinese shop names are confusing, because the same characters get used repeatedly in various combinations.  This is mostly because commercial enterprises of the old style all want names that mean something along the lines of prosperity, smooth-sailing, stability, etc, and so they stick to the same words.  When two outfits sound about the same, it does not, in any way, mean they are related.  In fact, assume they’re not unless you know otherwise.  I sometimes see people confusing names of tea makers thinking it’s some typo of another name they’re familiar with already, when in fact they are completely independent productions.

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The tea is stone pressed and looks pretty nice.  The neifei is “submarine”, meaning it is hidden inside the cake instead of being affixed on top of the cake.  I haven’t found it yet.

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The tea itself is quite interesting – it has a typical Yiwu taste, probably from somewhere along the lines of Mahei or Luoshuidong.  The tea is still somewhat bitter — more so than I expected, really.  It has a very light tartness, but the bitterness dominates, even though it does fade fairly quickly.  The tea itself is not bad at all, but neither does it blow your mind.  It does remind me a little bit of how the Zhenchunya Hao used to taste some years back — that’s not exactly the nicest tasting tea back in the day either, and is now famous mostly for the wrong reasons.

The tea does withstand a lot of repeated infusions, but I think I have better tea than this one.  Back in the storage it goes and I doubt I’ll pull it out again for a few years.  Maybe it’ll surprise me then.

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Categories: Teas
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A full accounting

August 16, 2011 · 16 Comments

If there ever were a point at which a person can have too many teapots…

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I must soon be approaching it.

Unpacking and then organizing all my stuff after my move has led me to reassess what I have, and at least think about (and perhaps act upon) what I should keep and what I don’t need/want anymore.  What you see above are all my unglazed teapots – there are a few missing, because they live in boxes and I didn’t quite feel like taking them out.  Of these 100+ items, however, I really only use these ones on a very regular basis

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A number of others I use more sparingly

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Some I used to use a lot, but for various reasons, I don’t anymore

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And some that I know I’ll never, ever use, because I got them for more or less decorative purposes, and they are sized and shaped in such a way as to making tea brewing almost impossible

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Among all the Yixing pots here, there are a few tokoname, which are more or less easily identifiable.  There are also the ugly ducklings — Santou pots, which are less obvious.

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After I took this picture I realized that one eluded my eyes and hid among a bunch of yixing pots.

So, what does that leave me?  There are still dozens of pots that I have not accounted for, basically.  One reason is because quite a few of them are in bad shape, cleanliness wise.  I need to wash and clean them before I can actually use them, and am currently in the process of doing that.  I also need to start doing a better job of rotating my teapots so that I have less “rarely, if ever, used” ones and more “frequently used” ones instead.  In other words, I need to spread the tea around.  Finally, I need to start culling the collection.  There are some items here that I know I’ll never use (personal preference), or are just not practical (usually too big).  So, those need to go.

Categories: Objects
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Bathing together

August 10, 2011 · 12 Comments

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in bleach

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Looking for a base

August 7, 2011 · 10 Comments

I had tea two days ago with two new friends in Hong Kong here.  It was a pretty interesting session, with exchanges of ideas of the question of aging.  One of the teas we had was a Mengku Yuanyexiang which was provided to me through a friend.  This particular sample was stored traditionally, and exhibited a taste that the two friends said they had not encountered before in this tea.  Considering that both of them have had various versions of Yuanyexiang before a number of times, this is surprising.

One of the most important thing that we all agreed on, I think, is that taste in a puerh is fickle, and changes constantly.  Mr. L, for example, mentioned how he showed some friends from up north that there’s a significant difference between tea that has been properly aired out versus tea that has not.  In the case of tea that has been through traditional storage, the process of airing-out is quite important in making the tea taste good when drinking it.  Many who dislike traditional storage don’t know that breaking apart the cake and letting it sit for six months will greatly enhance the mouthfeel and the taste of the cake, and draw conclusions about traditional storage based on an erroneous understanding of the process and the result.

Likewise, even for teas that don’t go through traditional storage, the taste of the tea changes all the time.  The condition of storage in each individual home, or in different cities, will alter the tea in obvious ways rather quickly.  One hurdle for many newcomers to puerh is to get past that veneer of taste.  This is something that I’ve written about before, but it still bears repeating.  Chasing taste is futile.  Mr. L told me a story of him buying a cake of 7572 back in the day from this one vendor here, and loved the taste.  When he went back to the same store to buy a whole tong, what he got was something different – still 7572, but without that taste he liked.  The owner insisted that it was the same batch, and he had no reason to doubt that claim.  Turns out, after much searching for years for that same taste, that it might have been because that one cake was stored outside a tong that made a difference — the tea soaked up the storage smell of wherever that owner’s storage unit is, whereas the tong didn’t get as much “air time”.  So, chasing such things get be quite futile, and expensive.

This is also important for those of us who rather enjoy the taste of some young puerh – just because you like it now doesn’t mean it’ll turn into something you’ll like even more.  In fact, among those who love the floral and sweet and fragrant flavours of a young puerh, the aging process can be a real disappointment.  It is really quite important to try real, well aged teas of proven vintage and provenance and to know whether or not you even like that taste to begin with.  If you do, great, store tea.  If you don’t, why bother?

It has been proven again and again that many currently good tasting teas often don’t age all that well, whereas a lot of nasty, sour stuff can turn out to be quite decent over time.  I’m not saying only bad tasting tea becomes great when they age, but current taste and future taste are, in and of themselves, not particularly related.  What’s more important is what we call “base” here, which means, roughly, the underlying strength of a tea.  Without such a “base” a tea is doomed to mediocrity, and I think this applies not only to puerh, but all types of tea.  It’s quite difficult to describe without confusing people how to identify “base” in a tea, but I think it is safe to say that it involves physically activating multiple areas of the mouth, throat, and body.  It has nothing to do with whether or not a tea is sour, bitter, or sweet.

Categories: Information
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The retaste project 4: 2001 Mengku Yuanyexiang

August 2, 2011 · 6 Comments

This is a tea that I bought along with the last tea I had, the 2002 Mengku.  Back in the day this was a hot cake, and although the market is now calmer, the tea’s price is a good 7-8x what the 2002 Mengku costs, even though they were made by the same factory and only one year apart in the production date.  I tasted this tea back then right after I purchased it, and the notes are here.  I remember my assessment at the time being that it was slightly nicer than the 2002 version, but not by a wide margin.  Back then the price difference was something like 10-20% difference.  Now, of course, it’s multiples.

This is the thin paper version, and one of the annoyances of teas with such thin wrappers is that they survive storage very badly, especially if they’re out of the tong, which is the case here.

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I realized that I opened the wrong cake, but I just took a look again at the original cake I had in my 2006 post and this one, and in terms of appearance, they exhibit no obvious differences.  It’s the same tea.

The cakes are very distinctive in shape, as are all Mengku factory cakes.  They have a flat surface front and back, especially back, and the edge of the cake is a straight wall, rather than a sloped, tapered edge like Menghai ones.  The cakes are quite unmistakable.  The cake is made up of mostly smaller leaves.

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The cakes did get darker in the five years since I last checked them.  There was some greenness when I drank them last, now they’re more of a blackish colour than anything else.

Now, although the thin paper has always been advertised as “dry stored”, many of the samples I’ve had from other sources in the past five years of this tea have mostly exhibited a “lightly traditionally stored” taste.  It’s not immediately obvious like a normal traditionally stored cake, but once you really savour the tea the storage taste does show up here and there in the shadows.  Most of the tea came from the same place, I believe — one batch of tea that was mostly sold through the Best Tea House in Hong Kong.  Cloud, who originally posted about this tea, also mentions the existence of a lightly traditionally stored version of the thin paper tea.  While no doubt the completely dry stored version surely exists, I don’t think I’ve actually ever encountered it even at the Best Tea House.  Maybe it was all snapped up.

Because of the storage condition that the tea went through, the colour is a bit on the darker side, especially when compared with the 2002.  The colour here is quite consistent with what some others have posted before, for example on Phyll’s blog back in the day (if you’re alive, contact me!).  Given the depth of my cup and the slightly dark lighting conditions, plus a few years of extra storage in Hong Kong, they’re not far apart.

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The tea is actually quite nice, indeed a notch better than the 2002.  Because of the storage difference (the 2002 I have doesn’t seem to have gone through any sort of traditional storage) the taste of this Yuanyexiang is a bit older, and has traces of some older teas I’ve had before.  I’m sure that given another five or ten years, it will turn out quite nicely as a good, aged tea to drink.

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The storage taste is only barely discernable, if you know what you’re looking for.  When I brewed it hard later on with long infusions, it becomes slightly more obvious, and sniffing the wet leaves, likewise, gives a hint of the traditional storage smell.  The leaves are still far from dark brown and exhibit youth in them.  This is a good tea.  Whether or not it’s worth the price of admission now is a question that’s really open to debate.  I tend to think that teas like the 2002 Mengku is a far better value for money, mostly because it’s so much cheaper, widely available, does not have the “fame premium” that you need to pay for the tea, etc, and still have roughly the same quality.  I also know some people who, having stored this 2001 Yuanyexiang for a few years, decide that they don’t really like it much after all.  That’s the problem when “chasing” famous cakes — just because someone else likes it a lot doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy the tea, especially if you plan on storing it for future consumption.  In some cases, you can try reselling them, but in others, you’re stuck with cakes that you don’t want to drink.  It’s a tough call.

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