A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from September 2011

The retaste project 7: Best Tea House Brick

September 28, 2011 · 4 Comments

Photobucket

This thing was one of the earlier purchases I made in terms of puerh – bought about 10 years ago. When I bought it it was already labeled as “Preciously stored old raw brick”, with a nice wooden box to go with it to convey the preciousness of the thing. I remember back then it was pretty harsh. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I tried this tea – it was probably at least four or five years ago. In the meantime, it’s been aging peacefully in this nice little box, hopefully getting better.

One of the earliest things I’ve learned about puerh (not early enough, apparently) was that there’s an order to the world of puerh. Cakes were best, tuos were next, then there are the bricks, and finally there are the other random stuff. Bricks, in other words, were basically at the bottom of the totem pole – crap, in other words. This brick more or less confirms that theory, because it is filled with crushed leaves. Other than the nice surface

Photobucket

the rest of the brick can best be described as sawdust.  There’s not a single whole leaf in the thing after the surface layer.

The taste is actually quite nice now – it is aged, and definitely has that aged taste to it, but not with a nasty streak of bitterness that it used to have. While I wouldn’t call it mellow, it is not terrible either. The problem, really, is in the longevity of the tea – because of its sawdust nature, it doesn’t last very long. Ten plus infusions later and it’s giving you tasteless water. What’s the point of carefully aging it if it won’t last?

Photobucket

These days bricks are more hit or miss than before, when it was a sure miss. Very often bricks are now made when the producer has enough stuff leftover but not really enough to make a cake run, or if they sorted out the secondary/less desirable leaves and make bricks out of it. There are exceptions, but not too often.  Which is why I almost never buy bricks.

Categories: Teas
Tagged: , ,

Tea purgatory

September 19, 2011 · 23 Comments

Quite a few of you have the same problem – how to deal with teas that are really inferior, so that you don’t want to drink them every day.  However, you have too much of it, so you have to get rid of it, somehow, especially if you paid for the privilege.

These teas are often acquired with the best of intentions – you bought it thinking it might be good, and end up being a disappointment.  You bought it as an impulse (say, while you were traveling) and when you got home, it is no longer so good. Sometimes you got the tea because you used to like it, but your tastes changed. Or, you got it from some other means – a gift, an accidental find, etc. Either way, now you’re stuck with this tea that isn’t really quite that good.

I have a lot of these teas, as I’m sure a lot of you do too.  Giving them away, or selling them, seems wrong, because they’re not particularly attractive.  After all, you don’t really want to give bad tea to people, especially if they’re newcomers.  The only tea I happily give away is cooked puerh, since I almost never drink teas of that genre, and I know there are others out there who will appreciate it way more than I do.  The rest of the time, however, whether it is bad black tea, bad young puerh, or bad oolong, I’m stuck with it.

One way for me to get rid of such teas these days is to drink it at work, where I’m condemned to drink such things grandpa style, for lack of proper implements (or time) to do it right. I could probably bring a tea set to work, but since I just started less than a month ago, bringing such things, even in Asia, might be a little off.  So these days, I’m drinking some terrible, terrible work tea – a box of very run of the mill Assam, an old can of cooked puerh from Mengku that I had stashed away for no reason, and some 4 years old baozhong that I’ve been aging myself.  The baozhong is probably the most interesting of these teas, seeing as it was purchased fresh in 2007 and now approaching five years old in the same bag.  When I opened it it smelled distinctly like a slightly aged oolong – a little of that slightly plummy, sour fragrance, but when I brewed it, grandpa style anyway, it was still mostly like a duller green baozhong.  It clearly needs some more time.

I suppose this is a good thing, in the sense that I’m drinking some of these leftover teas that I’ll never otherwise touch and which will forever linger in tea purgatory until I fish them out for some reason. Now, they’re being consumed in a willy-nilly manner at work, purely for the caffeine effect and not much else.  I do need to find a more permanent solution to the work-tea problem though, because otherwise I’m going to be stuck with bad tea for a long time, and then my good teas will be in tea purgatory.

Categories: Teas
Tagged: ,

Buying the packaging

September 13, 2011 · 11 Comments

Every tea mall in China has at least a few stores that only sell packaging.  They sell bags, boxes, tins — you name it, they’ve got it, and in the past few years the packaging has gotten more and more elaborate.  They range from simple foil bags these days to ceramic jars inside a ginormous box.  Generally speaking, teas sold in such packaging tend to be poor quality and overpriced.  My friend L’s shop once did a business with some guy who wanted 100 cakes of very regular cooked puerh, and who wanted them to buy the best packaging, because it’s for gifts.  L charged him double the cost.  That guy, in turn, sold the tea for about 10x profit.

So, when you get boxes like this, be cautious, very cautious

Photobucket

This is some dahongpao, with individual foil bags inside for one serving each.  At least the foil bags aren’t too small, so that I don’t have a problem with the serving size.  Teas packaged like this, however, are rarely any good.  My parents got this as a gift, and when it’s a cooked puerh, I’ll usually reject it.  Since it’s a yancha, I figured I’d give it a try.

Photobucket

Mercifully, the tea is actually a medium roast, unlike many of the newer yancha made in the Mainland these days which are light roast, and thus absolute abominations.  The tea already emits a nice smell when it hit the still-warm teapot.  The leaves are a dark colour, almost black, but not quite.

Photobucket

Not nearly as bad as I feared.  The tea is ok – has a decent body and fragrance, even a little qi.  Not the greatest, but not the worst.  I’ll skip the box next time though.

Categories: Teas
Tagged:

2007 Chenyuan Hao Yiwu

September 12, 2011 · 2 Comments

A friend from Malaysia sent me a big package of tea awhile ago.  I still haven’t repaid the kindness, and have been drinking the stuff very slowly since I started work.  This past Saturday when I finally had some time to drink some tea, I brought this cake to Best Tea House to share with Rosa.

Photobucket

This is made by an outfit called Chenyuan Hao, which is a Taiwanese maker of puerh much like Xizihao and others.  I’ve had their teas once, way back when.  I wasn’t particularly impressed back then, but it’s been some years and this is a very different production – whereas I think most of these pre 2004 productions tend to be made by someone else, by 2006/7 these guys were all running around on the mountains themselves, doing their own thing, so quality control went up drastically.  The cake you see here has probably been stored in Malaysia for a few years, and was wrapped tightly in plastic when it arrived, where it stayed until I opened it this weekend.  The cake is about 250g or so, and is a most generous gift, since I think their teas are not cheap by any stretch of imagination.

The tea also came with a dizzying array of identifying marks from the tong

Photobucket

So how’s the tea anyway?  The simple answer is that it’s excellent.  The tea brews strong, is thick, has staying power, and even when I left (halfway through the session, as I had to go somewhere) the tea was still brewing quite strong after 10+ infusions.  It left a clear note in the throat that didn’t go away easily, another mark of a nice tea, and just generally was excellent.  The Malay storage has a distinct taste to it, which I’ve had elsewhere before and which showed up here.  If there were more of this tea, and if they’re not outrageously expensive (which they may very well be) I’d buy more of this.  If it’s too pricey, then one cake is enough.

Thank you, Su, for the gift, and I still need to put together a package for you.

Categories: Teas
Tagged:

The retaste project 6: Lam Kie Yuen 2004 Yiwu, home vs store

September 5, 2011 · 3 Comments

Photobucket

As you can see, I have two cakes of this tea.  One, the left, I bought very recently — about a few weeks ago.  The one on the right, on the other hand, is from about 5 years ago when the tea first came out.  I’ve had it in my collection ever since then and it’s been mostly sitting on the shelf.

Photobucket

I obviously cannot convey smell and sight, but it is very obvious, when you have the cakes in hand, that the one on the left is of a duller complexion, while the one on the right has much shinier leaves.  The smell is also very obvious – the left one smells of a slightly moldy storage, just like any traditionally stored tea would.  The one on the right was also traditionally stored a little before I bought it, but it does not smell of the storage at all.  Instead, it smells fragrant, like a youngish puerh would.  On the other hand, if you rely on the stains on the wrapper and neifei, you might think the right hand cake has been traditionally stored, but you would be wrong.

Photobucket

The reason I bought another cake of this is purely for comparison purposes.  I wanted to see how different my cake is compared to what has been stored at the merchant’s all these years.  Also, I want to compare a cake that has been through the “tuicang”, or “removing storage” process, versus one that is more or less fresh out of the storage.  By smell and sight alone, the difference is already enormous.

Photobucket

I had thought that the difference in colour for the brewed tea would be very different too, but I was wrong on that.  The colours are, surprisingly, more or less the same, and remained so with the second infusion (both 3 minutes long).  The tastes, however, are quite different.  The left one is duller, rounder, less bitter, smells/tastes more of the storage.  The one on the right is very much sharper, more bitter, but also retains more of the “high” fragrant notes and lingers a bit more.  The one on the left is closer to consumption, but in the process, has lost something.  The one on the right is still pretty feisty.  There’s slight evidence of traditional storage, but that’s only if you know what you’re looking for in the wet leaves and what not.  Otherwise, it’s really not that obvious.

The second brew yields something that’s more differentiable in that the home stored tea is a little more interesting still, whereas the merchant stored one yields more of the same – the traditionally stored taste with a bit of green edge in the end.

The next step in this comparison would be to let the recently purchased cake to air out for half a year or a year, and then revisit and see how different they are now.  By then, it should’ve lost the storage taste and develop something more fragrant, but it will most certainly be a fragrance that’s different from the home stored one.

Categories: Teas
Tagged: ,