A Tea Addict's Journal

I recently acquired two new cakes of tea, with many thanks to the generous help of Tony of Origin Tea. They are the two new productions that Zhou Yu supervised, and I believe these are the first new teas he’s made since about 2007. They are the best new teas I’ve had in recent years.

The first of the two teas is called Zhenren yufeng. This one’s hard to translate properly, but roughly, it means “Regal style of the enlightened man”.

I bet you the name wasn’t conjured up by Zhou Yu himself – it’s very pretentious, and is mostly a marketing ploy, I think. The run is only about 1400 cakes, so at 380g each, it’s 532kg, so they collected maybe something like 800kg of raw maocha to get this much stuff. It’s not a big run. I don’t know where the tea is from, but it’s somewhere in Banna. It says it’s from nationally owned forests in Yiwu, but that’s actually quite a big area.

Then, the second one, is called Yuema wangong. Of course, this is a play on words – the literal meaning of this name is “Jumping horse, bent bow”, with a man suitably doing exactly that in the picture. The real point is that this is Wangong tea, also a small village in the greater Yiwu area that’s been getting a lot of attention these days. This name is something that the actual maker of the tea (Zhou Yu took a supervisory role), an outfit called Baohongyinji, has been using this name for their Wangong tea for at least the last two years, I think.

Taste wise, the second is more immediately appealing – nice aroma, etc, but the first is the better tea. The first tea has relatively mild taste, but it has strong body and good qi. It will age well. Not that the Wangong will age badly, but given a choice, I’d pick the first one.

Too bad the cost of the tea, at over $200 a piece, is rather high. The first second cake is slightly more expensive, but neither are easily within reach. That said, there are way more expensive teas out there that are terrible, like this 5000 RMB monstrosity that is basically green tea puerh. Thank god I didn’t pay for it. There are few people out there who have more experience with puerh than Zhou Yu, and these two cakes show (not that he needs to prove anything) that he knows what he’s doing.

One of the problems I find quite common these days is what I’d call “green tea puerh.” This is stuff that, basically, have been through too much/too hot a kill-green process, and the tea has consequently turned into green tea. Some of you might ask “well, isn’t puerh basically green tea?” Well, yes and no – greens, such as Longjing, have been through higher temperature firing than things like puerh. Whereas puerh will age into something because it’s still alive, teas like Longijng are cooked – fixed in form, and need to consumed as soon as possible.

It’s not entirely clear what the reason for the proliferation of green-tea puerh is, but as Scott of Yunnan Sourcing recently described, it’s as if all the farmers bought a tumbler machine to help them fry the tea leaves, and nobody learned how to operate it properly. So what happens is that they do it too hot or too long, and the tea gets cooked.

The result of such cooking is bad, very bad. Initially, it will yield a pleasant tasting tea with good floral or beany aromas, sweet, and perhaps smooth. What hits you though is if you try the tea two, three, or four years down the road – it’ll be bitter, nasty, thin, sour, all the things you don’t want in an aged tea, because it’s aged green tea. I recently tried a sample given to me by a vendor two years ago. At that time the tea tasted a bit off – but it’s called “honey sweet.” Well, honey sweet has now turned into massively bitter. It’s terrible, and it’s a shame, because the raw materials were good.

I just had a tasting with some friends of five newly made teas. Of the five, three were of the “way too green” variety. This is not a regional thing – this is a processing problem. Two of the teas are fine – one is from Xishuangbanna, while the other is from Menghai. The rest were all green teas in disguise, and no doubt, in a few years, the people paying good money for them (and good money it is – one is selling for 5000 RMB on Taobao a cake) will regret it. Or, they can keep fooling themselves and say it’s aging well.

Pictures were taken with the phone, so pardon the varying lighting.