A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from July 2012

Ugly, dirty ducklings

July 27, 2012 · 24 Comments

Or are they old ducks?

I love ugly pots. If you’re generous, you can call them rustic. Less generous souls will call them poorly potted, with bad craftsmanship and bad form. Either way, I love them.

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Buying pots like these though entails some risks and problems. The most annoying and difficult to deal with are dirty pots. There are two kinds of dirts that you can encounter. The first is easy – just tea and other sundry dirt that can be easily cleaned. Then there’s another kind of dirt which is extremely difficult to clean. They appear as a sticky substance that clings strongly to the pot’s inner surface (always inner, never outer). Then on top, there’s often a white, limescale like substance. It’s nearly impossible to remove, with vigorous scrubbing necessary.

With bigger pots, scrubbing is at least possible. With small pots though, that’s really, really difficult. Both of these pots are infected with this unique brand of substance.

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Keep in mind what you see here is already after three cleaning attempts – I’ve already removed a lot of the residue, but much remains. I honestly don’t know how anyone or anything can get that dirty. The spotted pot, especially, is puzzling. It’s part of a pair. The other pot in the pair is in great shape – stained, but doesn’t have this white stuff. This one, however, is covered in it.

I have some inkling of what this might be. I think water does eventually leave some residue in a pot. For example, my most often used young puerh pot has some of this white stuff too after years of use.

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But it should really come with dark tea stains, like this

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Not some sticky substance that clings tenaciously to the clay. Sigh, I just wish I can find that perfect chemical that will melt this stuff away.

Categories: Objects
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Digging for gold in basements

July 25, 2012 · 7 Comments

The best and the rarest teas that you’re ever going to drink is most likely to come by serendipity, unless, of course, a few hundred thousand dollars to you is spare change that can be blown on tea. For those of us not in the 0.05%, that’s not really an option.

Thankfully, these chances to drink nice tea come more often than you think, especially if you hang out with the right people and get to tag along when someone with a lot of tea happens to invite you over. Or, you can get lucky.

During a recent visit to a friend’s place I was given a 3/4 of a puerh cake to examine. I was told that this was given to them by one of their moms, ostensibly for stomach issues. The cake looks like this

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The center is loose because I had to pry it open to see the neifei. Unfortunately, the neifei decided to stick to the surface leaves that I pried open, instead of sticking to the leaves underneath. Either way:

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And closeups

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And the back

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When I saw the cake, I thought this is something very old. There are traces of a bigger ticket on the surface of the cake that fell off. Everything about the cake, from the type of neifei to the leaves to everything, suggests to me that this is something quite old. I was tasked with taking it home and trying to determine what it is.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a back story for this tea, other than that this is a cake from a family that’s been in the US for decades, and that some member of the family (the grandfather, I think?) was a customs officer in Yunnan before the war. Ok, sounds good.

Now, I do not profess to be an expert in antique-era cakes, namely cakes produced prior to the nationalization of the tea firms post 1949. I’ve had somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen examples of these things, at various places in various conditions. Prices for these things these days are astronomical – a full cake, retail, would probably set you back about $100,000 USD. That’s not a cheap tea, and one brew will easily cost $1000 or more. These are not teas that mere mortals drink, not on a regular basis anyway. They also do not offer the greatest bang for the buck. But, you try them because they are what they are – rare teas that offer a glimpse to the past, because they offer unique tastes and qi that other teas simply do not possess. So many things have to happen for these teas to survive – and chances are, many of these aren’t even the best examples of teas, because the best ones have long been consumed. So, take it for what it’s worth.

It is in that spirit that I tried this tea. After all, I had no firm idea what it is. Searching around, I think the very faded neifei looks very much like the horizontal ones used by Tongqing hao, with the few characters that I can make out and the border decoration. The tea brews dark, very dark, like they are supposed to.

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The taste is very hard to describe – the first few infusions have a very strong, unique taste that I find to be common among these very old teas. It’s smooth, and full bodied. The tea is still very slightly bitter, with a clear cooling sensation down the throat. The qi is strong, soothing, and obvious. Very often you see people bandy about qi as if every tea has it – well, not really. This is what you’re looking for when you drink a tea for qi, and when someone tells you that the 10 years old cooked puerh they were drinking has qi, well, please take it with a grain of salt. This is what good, strong qi should be. There’s no faking it.

It’s really rather luxurious drinking this tea by myself. The only other time I had an antique tea mostly for myself was when I had Tongqing at Wisteria, but there their tea was loosened up years before, so the qi and the taste were both less immediate. This tea, for some reason, is slightly more compact than other antique teas I’ve seen – possibly because it’s never changed hands in the past decades and has been stored in a drier environment than Southern China. The leaves are very brittle, and break on command. In retrospect, I probably should’ve been more careful peeling the leaves away to check the neifei, but at that time, I had no idea what this was.

Teas like this fade quite quickly – within about ten infusions the initially intense taste will die down, but what replaces it is a very consistent tea that lasts much longer, with the same throatiness and soothing sensation. In some ways, I think these antique teas have gone over the hill a bit – they are not as strong as, say, a Red Label. On the other hand, there’s a soothing calmness to these antique teas that make them very attractive. Twenty or thirty infusions later, when the taste from each individual infusion becomes very weak, I grandpa’ed a few more cups of the tea, which also allows for good shots of the wet leaves. You can see the tea is still brown, not black, and the leaves are not stiff or carbonized in any way – they’re still very flexible. Also, unlike cooked puerh, they retain their shape and consistency when lightly rubbed.

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And finally, you can boil these things. Boiling old teas will yield a strong jujube taste, but once you do it, the tea is spent and there’s nothing left to do with it other than send it to the garbage bin or the compost pile.

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Two kettles later, I called it quits. I think I wrung everything there is to wring out of these leaves. Is it great tea? Yes, maybe, depending on your perspective. It’s not as exciting as an oolong or a newer puerh. It’s not as impressive as a 30 years old puerh. It’s not as fragrant as a green tea. It does, however, possess an old man’s quality to it – it has depth and strength. This is also probably the most potent of the antique teas I’ve had – again, might have to do with its storage conditions in the United States, rather than Southern China. Having said that, it’s not a tea you’d drink every day, or even every month. It’s also not a tea you buy to drink, unless you have too much money to burn. For the approximately five grams I had, this tea cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1200-1500 USD. In other words, it’s worth more than its weight in gold. Having tried it is already good enough.

Categories: Teas
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Poof! It’s gone

July 20, 2012 · 9 Comments

Back in the heady days of 2005/2006, when everyone was getting interested in puerh, there was a plethora of new workshops, tea merchants, and factories that sprung up around this new craze. Everything from tiny workshops of a few people, to individuals going up the mountains, to big investments in big factories were going on at the time. There are actually two levels of manufacturing puerh tea. There’s the farmer who does all the pre-processing, and then there’s the presser, who collects the tea and then gets them pressed into whatever shape s/he fancies. When we talk about producer of a tea, we’re really often talking about the presser, whose function is basically that of a middleman – they collect maocha and then press them into cakes. Technically speaking, there isn’t a lot of skills involved, and the amount of involvement a presser makes in his or her cakes is entirely up to them. They can spend months living in Yunnan and hike four hours every day to go to the forest where the trees are and watch the farmers harvest, making sure everything is right. Or they can just stop by the side of the road, try two or three maocha from a farmer, and pick one they like and just press those without having actually any idea what’s in the bags. As you can imagine, the former type is rare, the latter is common.

So when we look at the market structure of puerh, there are actually two kinds of markets involved. The first is the market between the farmers and the pressers. The farmers don’t generally directly see the end consumers – they sell, primarily anyway, to the pressers. The presser then resells what s/he buys to the collector/consumer (via intermediaries, or not). Back then there was really only one kind of farmer – the smallholding farmer who has a plot of land that he controls, and who sold to whoever they wanted, usually for the best price they think they can get. The pressers, however, are much more varied, and ranged anything from Menghai factory to the individual tourist going in for a few tongs.

It is pretty obvious where the value added for the farmer was – s/he tended to the trees, harvested the leaves, and processed them to the point where it became maocha, ready to be pressed into cakes. Some did the pressing themselves with what they had, other sold their tea by the bag in loose form. The pressers’ value added, on the other hand, is much more varied. As I mentioned already, some really do provide a valuable service, while others are nothing more than people who got the goods from A to B, a typical middleman, with the added step of hiring someone to do the pressing and the transportation. There’s no real skill necessary for pressing – it could, but it need not involve any. The most skillful are the ones who can discern what’s good and bad tea, who took careful steps to ensure that their tea was exactly what they thought they were getting, who protected the process to make sure nothing went wrong, and who, in some cases, blended the tea and created new things from a collection of maocha. That’s what factories like Menghai make their money too – they have the know how to blend teas, and also the ability and skill to amass large quantities of tea so to achieve their blends’ unique tastes. Production of cooked puerh, of course, involved another set of additional skill and input, but we’ll ignore that topic for now.

One of the most interesting thing about this market dynamic is that the chief producers of the tea, namely the farmers, don’t really get a lot of direct feedback from the consumers, at least not in 2005/2006. All they saw were the prices that the pressers were offering, as well as, sometimes, specifications from the pressers. The farmers varied in their skill in processing, the tools they had at their disposal, and also their experience in handling tea. Some have been at it for decades. Others were relative newbies who, until the mid 2000s, were living off their family’s rubber trees. All of a sudden, the influx of demand for young, raw puerh outstripped supply greatly, so prices went through the roof, increasing more than tenfold within the space of two years. As farmers rushed to meet this demand, as you can imagine, a lot of things were done that were not necessarily good.

One of the things I remember the most about trying new cakes back in the day was that out of every three or four cakes, at least one was intensely smokey. They can smell and taste like someone just lit a fire under the cake and roasted it for hours. The smoke can be so intense that even after many infusions, you can still taste the smoke and not the tea. This was a really regular occurrence back then, and there were always issues surrounding whether or not these teas can indeed age into something decent. The belief is that over time, smoke will dissipate and what is underneath will shine through. The question, of course, is how, and how long.

I am reminded of this because I tried a sample today sent to me from Hster, of the 2004 Tailian Youle. She drew a cigarette on the label she provided me, because, well, the thing does taste like cigarette. You can’t tell by looking at the leaves though

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The tea looks great on the surface, but when you brew it and sniff the cup, there’s an unmistakable smell of smoke. The taste confirms that. Ten cups later, smoke is still in your mouth.

It really struck me today when I drank this, because I haven’t had a smokey tea for a while, certainly not a new tea. It seems like the transmission mechanism that I talked about a little earlier does work, in a certain way – consumers don’t want smokey tea, and so over time, smokey teas get phased out. Obviously, farmers now also have better skills and more practice, and are oftentimes equipped with machines that they did not possess back in 2006, so that they can do things to the tea that wasn’t possible before. Chief among the reasons for smoke, at least from what I have seen, are either bad pan frying process so the smoke from the stove was getting in the way, or they used fire to dry leaves because the weather was too wet, causing it to be smokey. Whatever the reason, the technical issues that led to smokey teas are no longer present, or smokey teas are selected out because the market no longer wants any of them, so that these days, of the teas that make it to market, very few, if any, are smokey.

Smokey tastes do indeed fade, but the problem is they can take a long time. Hster’s cake has been in Bay Area storage since 06, I believe, and 6 years hasn’t really done much for the smokiness of the tea. I’d suspect another 20 years won’t do much either, maybe only dissipating it slowly. Is it worth the effort? Probably not. People have said that many of the older, classic recipes from the 80s or earlier were often somewhat smokey, but I think people no longer tolerate that. I can tell the tea underneath this Youle cake is pretty ok, but when there are better, non-smokey alternatives out there, it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for this tea. In more humid or wetter climes, the smoke might go away faster, but maybe not.

Categories: Teas
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Tea in Korea

July 19, 2012 · 14 Comments

Generally speaking, I don’t drink much green teas because I find them to be relatively one dimensional. Although it was the type of tea that got me started drinking seriously, I now consume less than 100g of green tea every year. That’s one big reason why I rarely drink Korean teas – they are, by and large, green teas. While the ones I’ve had are generally pretty decent, I just don’t have the room or the inclination to drink them with any regularity, so much so that a can of tea I bought two years ago from a Korean farmer still sits in my tea cupboard, unopened. It’s a shame, really, but I have too much tea to drink, so my experience with Korean teas is limited.

Since I was going to Korea though, there was no reason not to drink some local tea. My previous experiences in Korea is that, for the most part, there’s no tea in the country. Even at restaurants, the most you’re ever going to see are some bad teabags. This time I was pleasantly surprised that the quality of teabags in the country has improved – they are no longer the scum of the earth type of tea that I experienced ten years ago. It also helped that I brought my own tea, so I wasn’t very desperate for caffeine. It is rather telling though that at a place like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, they only had three types of non-flavoured, non-tisane teas, versus maybe a dozen or more that you’d expect when you’re in California. The local taste is really for coffee, and flavoured teas.

Since this was a family oriented trip, I didn’t have much time to spend trolling teashops. I did find enough time to go visit Insadong, which is a touristy area that sells a lot of cultural goods – paper, ceramics, arts and craft things, and among them, some teashops. The last time I was in this area was over 10 years ago, but not much has changed – I still recognize a lot of the shops that I went by last time, which, in and of itself, is pretty incredible. Some, such as one that sold puerh back in the day, is still selling puerh now. The prices, however, are extravagant.

In fact, tea in general seems pretty expensive in Korea, for reasons I don’t understand. Perhaps it is the tariffs that kills it (if I’m reading correct, tariff for green tea is 500%). Either way, we’re talking about some pretty expensive teas here, with a relatively limited selection of greens that are differentiated primarily, for the untrained eyes anyway, by the youthfulness of the buds. I didn’t hold out much hope for anything too fascinating.

While walking around Insadong, however, MadameN and I ran into a rather large shop that I don’t remember from my last visit. The store is called O’sulloc, which, upon googling it after returning, seems like a big tea producer in Korea. Mattcha, who has been writing about Korean teas for years now, says they used to sell to the Western market, but no more. We went to the third story of the teahouse, avoiding the large crowds at the second floor who were voraciously devouring shaved ice. It was rather quiet up there, and dark, with prices to match the surroundings. Looking at the menu in the dimly lit environment, I tried to pick out what looked the most interesting – we had two teas in the end, the Unhyang and the Samdayŏn.

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After a “cleaning” cup of green tea, we each got served our own tray of tea.

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Lighting is bad in there, so bear with the bad pictures. This is a picture of the Samdayŏn, although I couldn’t quite tell the true colour of the tea itself, because the interior of both the pot and the cup are reddish in nature, which obscures the colour. The taste of the tea though is very interesting – it is a taste that I don’t think I’ve ever had before. The “post-fermentation”, whatever it is, did something to the tea, and there is also a scent that is probably from the cedar that they stored the tea in. The leaves used for this tea is some kind of sejak base – very small, fine buds. The colour of the leaves is a reddish one – looks a little like a good Oriental Beauty. This is an odd one.

In comparison, the Unhyang is less exciting, tasting more or less like a highly oxidized roasted oolong. The problem common to both teas, really, was the relatively low amounts of tea they used in the pot. I think we each got maybe 3g of tea in the pot, which really was nothing, and was not sufficient to get a good sense of the tea itself. The water used was also lower in temperature to start off with. I think both of these teas, because of their processing, can stand higher temperature and probably would be much more interesting brewed stronger, but alas, that wasn’t the case. At the prices they want for a mere 30g of tea, I find it hard to fork out that much for something that was only decent. A nice curiosity tea, perhaps, but not one I’d go for with any regularity.

There were some other shops that looked promising, at least, but we neither had the time, nor the energy to go through them. I didn’t really get a chance to shop again either, so this trip’s tea activities were relatively limited This is inherently the problem of trying to tea shop in a place you’re not too familiar. The shops that you end up at tend to be in the more touristy areas. You have very little time, and very little information on which shop is good and which one isn’t. You have a limited amount of energy and stomach to try a lot of teas. You are, sometimes, constrained by language barriers. If I had a few months in Seoul, I’m sure I could do better and find more local shops that might have interesting things for less money, but I don’t. At least I’ve spent a fair amount of time shopping for tea in other places, but even then I had trouble getting good tea within half a day.

Now imagine if you ask a friend of yours, going to China for the very first time, to buy you some nice tea while you’re there, preferably some yancha or puerh…. you can imagine what will happen then. Which is why I always tell people don’t ask your friend to buy tea for you unless they know the area really well and they also know tea really well. Otherwise, you’re quite likely to end up with duds that disappoint.

Categories: Teas
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Essential teaware

July 12, 2012 · 6 Comments

Let’s say you need, at a very minimum, a kettle, a pot, and a cup. If we start with the kettle, you need at least something to heat the kettle with, and maybe different kettles for different purposes. Some people prefer electric water boilers that have temperature control settings, others opt for more fancy setups with charcoal burners and clay kettles, and still others fuss even about the type of charcoal they’re going to use for aesthetic purposes or some pseudo-practical reasons. Still others think it is imperative to buy, say, a clay kettle, a tetsubin, maybe a silver kettle, and a number of heating mechanisms to match. Kettles are pretty simple, so there isn’t a lot of variables there, and I think we have exhausted most of the possibility and the baseline of what might be considered essential.

Then you move on to the pot. Here’s where it gets complicated. Obviously, as everyone surely knows, you can only ever use one kind of tea per pot, otherwise the apocalypse will hit and humanity will end. So, for every kind of tea you drink, you need a different yixing pot. That will easily end you up with a dozen or more pots, one for green, light oolong, dark oolong, aged oolong, raw puerh, aged puerh, cooked puerh, maybe subdividing the oolongs into different regions, and reserving a few of different sizes for the times when you have guests. Some will most certainly tell you that certain kinds of clay are only good for certain kinds of tea, or better yet, that having different clays brew the same tea will provide different results. If you’re serious, then, you need more than one per tea type.

You also clearly need a gaiwan, since without it you cannot possibly test out teas in a neutral way, so you need at least one, maybe multiple, of those. If you’re serious, you may also need a cupping set, or three. Likewise, if you want to drink sencha, a kyusu with a yuzamashi and some yunomis are indispensible. Or if you want to have any matcha, then you need a chasen, a chashaku, at least one chawan, a natsume, a sieve, and a chakin. You also need a decent kama, probably with a matching furo, if you want to play seriously. Now, so far we’ve only covered Chinese and Japanese teas. If you want to, say, do an English tea service, well, the list goes on and on.

Of course, we haven’t even gotten to cups yet, not really anyway. There are many, many theories out there on cups, but everyone who has ever done one of those taste comparison test will almost always tell you that different cups will make things taste different. A general rule of thumb I have encountered is that smaller cups are for oolongs, bigger, wider cups for puerh, but then you need to consider issues such as the thickness of the cup, the glaze, which affects the cup’s tactile feel on your mouth and possibly the tea, as well as the shape and curvature, which will influence how the tea flows to different parts of the mouth. If you are into smelling, you need a wenxiangbei to go along with that. Cups that are naked without chatakus, however, look funny, so you need those too.

Now we’re getting into the territory of accessories that are necessary, and the list here can only grow ever longer. For example, how can anyone make any tea without the aid of the toolsets that you see selling in Chinatowns everywhere for $14.99? Or, for that matter, what can you do without that tea tray of yours that holds all of your waste water? You also need a fairness cup, which will help you dispense the tea, especially if you have a lot of guests and you want to get your tea to them in a reasonable manner. Pouring each cup individually directly from the pot, unless you’re doing a traditional gongfu style pouring which is uninterrupted by lifting and moving, is going to be disastrous. So you need one of those chaozhou trays as well in additional to your regular tray. If you’re one of those people who are into setting up endless arrays of similar looking but slightly different tea settings (chaxi) then you clearly need many variations of teawares that do the same thing, otherwise it gets boring very fast. You may also find it essential to have items to hold the dry leaves, to showcase the dry leaves, etc

We haven’t even talked about implements that store leaves, or store water, or store teaware. But I think you get my point. After all, instead of having all that stuff, you can just do this

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As I’ve mentioned long ago, teaware is probably the last thing you should be spending money on, given limited budgets, in terms of how much it can improve your tea. Once you’ve moved past the basics, such as getting a proper gaiwan or a yixing pot or some such, additional money spent on teaware is almost always a waste, if your goal is a better cup of tea. Now, of course, there are other reasons why one might want to buy teaware, as I know full well. However, don’t ever let anyone tell you that any piece of tea equipment is essential – it’s not. For example, I use a toothpick to clear my spouts when they’re stuck. I find those to be far, far more effective AND safe for my pots than the implements that come in those teasets and will damage your pot. I also rarely use many of the pots that I own. Sometimes, less is really more.

Categories: Objects
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Tea learning

July 4, 2012 · 20 Comments

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One of the things I often advocate for newcomers to tea drinking is to sample widely. Learning about tea is, on some level, not very difficult at all. It requires experience and an active mind to reflect upon and learn from the experiences gained. To gather this experience though, the only way to really do it is to drink a lot of tea. Reading about it or hearing about it really doesn’t do much good, for it is only theory that lacks backing from practical experiences.

The practical problem with active sampling are twofold. The first is simple – samples are not very cheap, usually, and so it can actually be quite expensive when you buy a lot of them from different vendors. At a site like Yunnan Sourcing, you can easily drop a hundred dollars or more on a dozen samples, and that’s before you have to factor in shipping cost. If you’re not getting your samples for free, this can be quite a major expense on its own.

Then there is the more nuanced problem of what to do with the samples. It’s quite easy to say that sampling widely will give you experience in tea drinking. In practice, however, that’s not so simple. Of course, trying all kinds of teas will most certainly give you experience. However, it is experience on a relatively shallow level. Certain kinds of teas, such as really bad or really good teas, will probably manifest themselves quite readily. Others, however, are not so obvious. It is actually easier to try teas if you, say, cup them, but then it becomes work and the process is not very enjoyable. This is, ultimately, a hobby, and not a job (for me anyway) so taking the fun away like that is basically missing the point.

What instead happens is that some teas require multiple tastings to reveal themselves one way or another. Sometimes the first time you brew a tea it doesn’t come out quite right not because it’s bad, but because you are still adjusting to it. It helps when you’re using the same teawares all the time, so that the only variable is the tea. In some ways, by doing so you’re basically cupping the tea without cupping it – you’re testing whether or not the tea is good for your style of brewing. Even then, however, a good tea drinker should be adjusting to the tea and trying to brew it as best s/he can, which means that the first try can come out horribly wrong. Cupping also has its own limitations, as it can tell you whether or not a tea is good, but the skill in bringing out the goodness still requires your active intervention – unless you’re planning on drinking the tea grandpa style, the input of the brewer is an integral part of what makes a cup of tea. This is why I almost never write reviews anymore based on one impression (when I do write them anyway, which is getting rare too), as there are too many variables and is just not very reliable. Forming an opinion based on a few cups of tea is only reliable if it’s really obviously bad or good.

Now, having had a lot of experience in tea does speed up the process of identifying issues and problems in an unknown tea. Right away, for example, it is possible to tell what kind of condition a puerh has been stored in, or whether an aged oolong has been reroasted, so on and so forth. It also helps compartmentalizing teas faster – you can basically draw on an ever expanding library of tastes and sensations and know what tea this is most similar to, and therefore what you can expect from it. Teas are never the same, however, and different people brewing the tea also yield different results. So, there’s only so far you can go with the “scientific” approach. Trying to analyze teas based solely on aroma, appearance, etc, is only possible if you’re dealing with industrial level generalities. Samples, therefore, are first impressions.

There is also knowledge that you can gain from drinking the same tea over and over again that you cannot from sampling. This may involve the tea changing on you – a traditionally stored puerh gradually losing its storage taste, for example. Or, it can just be that you start noticing nuances that were there, but were not necessarily obvious the first few times you try it. Or perhaps you experiment with different parameters, water, ware, etc. and notice that it performs differently under different circumstances. This type of knowledge is not possible if you only have 25g of a tea. It can really only come with drinking 200, 300, or even 1000g of the same tea. After a while, you get a sense of what to expect, and when the results don’t meet expectations, then it becomes a learning moment. You just can’t do that without a lot of the same tea. When I say “same tea” I also don’t just mean the same kind of tea, such as a tieguanyin, but rather the exact same tea – from the same place, harvested around the same date, etc. Each batch of tea from a farmer is going to be slightly different, no matter the circumstances, once again complicating the issue.

The important thing of all this tea drinking and learning is not so much the drinking itself, but the critical reflection and evaluation that takes place simultaneously. Forget about what others tell you – what do you feel and think when you’re drinking this tea? How does it compare with what you have tried? How does it challenge what you already think you know? No teacher can tell you any of this – they can point you in the right direction, but they can also lead you astray. My experience with tea teachers that I have encountered is that by and large they’re interested in selling you tea, and as such they will tell you what will suit their current inventory of tea the best. Tea learning is, at the end of the day, a solitary experience. No one knows what you’re tasting, so no one but you can teach yourself.

It is hard sorting through all this knowledge gained from tea drinking, and even harder to retain all of it. I found my early blogging efforts, basically writing down my impressions of the tea I drank every day, to be a worthwhile exercise – it helps me process what I’ve had and what I thought, and once in a while I go back to my own ideas back then and realize how I have developed as a drinker, as well as how a tea may have changed over time. Many of my earlier perceptions are flawed, if not outright wrong, or at least have been modified over time by my experiences since then. Writing about it constantly here helps me work through those thoughts. Of course, this can also turn into work, and when blogging, just like drinking, turns into work, it’s no longer fun and you should stop. However, as Confucius said, learning without thinking is useless, and thinking without learning is dangerous. If you want to improve as a tea drinker, there’s always work involved.

Categories: Teas
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