A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from July 2025

Water redemption

July 9, 2025 · 3 Comments

So a few days ago I talked about how I was a little shocked by how bad a tea I know well has turned out because my water changed. I moved a few hours away to another city, but the local water is still quite heavy on minerals – same appearance of heavy sediments when boiling. Also, whatever mix of minerals there are here, it is making an otherwise sweet (maybe even slightly boring) aged oolong a bit bitter, on top of still kicking me with that fishy note. The local water supply authority claims their water’s total TDS is not that high – but the boiling sediments suggests otherwise. This also has to do with local piping – so hard to say with certainty what the end product is from the tap vs from the source analysis.

So I went looking for something to soften the water. Local supermarket and such, unfortunately, are not of great help. Europeans, as many of you are (or know), love their mineral water. They love their water with some taste – think of the ever lasting popularity of Evian, for example, a water that I think even when drunk alone is not that tasty. It is also a water that is over the threshold of what’s acceptable for general tea brewing – it’s too heavy and makes teas taste weird in unexpected ways (like my recent experience). And the supermarket’s stocks are basically all waters like that – many even harder than Evian. Except one – 14.4ml/L Laurentana from Italy. Minor issue – it’s carbonated.

Well, no matter, boiling it will get rid of the gas, and I don’t intend to only use it – I ended up doing an about half/half mix of it with the local tap water. Success! No more fishy smell/taste. The bitter edge is gone. The tea, more or less, is back to its normal self, slightly boring, a little sour, aged oolong taste. It’s been a somewhat instructive reminder of how much water can change your perception of your tea – instantly relegating a tea that I normally drink happily in large quantities into a category where I basically don’t want to touch it at all, just because the water changed. If you don’t like a tea that other people all seem to love, or if certain categories of teas seem to have weird/offputting tastes or smell (especially if, after you leave it around for a while, a heavy ring of deposit form at the edge of the liquid), it’s time to test out softer water. Of course, water that is too low in minerals, like RO water, can have the opposite problem. A happy balance somewhere in the middle is the best.

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Water shock

July 7, 2025 · 5 Comments

I’m currently on the road. The place where I’m at boasts that their tap water is great. Ok, lovely. I can taste the minerals in the water. It’s heavy. Boiling it in the kettle at the hotel, the water leaves a lot of minerals after even one boil. When I brew a lighter oolong with it grandpa style, it leaves weird solid deposits on the bottom of the cup. No matter, the tea tastes fine. Heck, it even makes hotel black tea bags taste pretty decent.

That is until I tried it with an aged oolong I’ve been drinking fairly often recently. It’s a roasted tea that’s well aged. It goes down pretty smooth, usually, with nice fragrance. However, I brewed this one cup in the hotel mug – and the tea, instead of its usual fragrance, smelled fishy. It’s the same kind of smell you get when you drink cooked puerh, except, well, it’s not that at all. I frankly was not expecting it, and tried smelling it a few more times. Funny enough, taste wise, the tea tastes about the same as normal. But I can’t ignore that smell – it’s so obvious and so offputting I ended up dumping the tea instead of drinking it further.

I’ve said it on multiple occasions – water, being the second most important ingredient in your cup of tea, is actually quite important to the quality of what you’re drinking. People often spend a lot of time and money on finding the best tea to drink, but completely ignore the water they used it with. Folks regularly drink with reverse osmosis water, or distilled water, or water that is just unsuitable for the tea in question – like this particular case of fishiness. If someone living here got a sample of this tea, they would think it’s awful and smell funny. Can’t blame them – the water here does make it smell funny. The tea isn’t the problem, but the water and tea combo is.

It’s just like when you use, say, silver cups to drink dark teas. The silver highlights the bright notes in the tea and mutes a lot of the deeper notes. That’s great for a green or light oolong, but is generally not ideal for darker teas. Unlike silver cups though, water is (relatively) cheap. Everyone serious about drinking tea need to be regularly checking in on the water they use, and make sure that it’s not doing funny business to the tea they’re drinking. I have, in the past, recommended using something like Volvic as a baseline. It’s still valid – Volvic is generally a pretty reliable water to test your teas with. It being widely available worldwide is a plus as well – people drinking teas on separate continents can compare notes.

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Village names

July 4, 2025 · 2 Comments

A bit of a history lesson from an old tea drinker here. Back when I first started drinking tea in earnest, around 1998 or so, I mostly hung out with older tea people here in Hong Kong at the Best Tea House. The crowd was mostly an older generation who grew up drinking dim sum tea, and then discovering this new style that was getting popular starting in the late 80s and early 90s. They would tell me that when they got into tea, especially in puerh, the scene was still dominated by the old sellers who only had traditionally stored teas. When they asked at these shops if they had any dry stored, new cakes to sell, the store owners looked at them funny and asked “why? That stuff is undrinkable.” Back then, teas were identified only through names made up to denote different batches. So you have Red, Blue, and Yellow Marks, you have 88QB, you have traditional characters and simplified characters (nobody called these 8653 back then), you have things like Snow Mark and Water Blue Mark (shuilanyin) etc. The definition of batches were based on the wrapper plus maybe some characteristics of the tea. Where did the tea came from? Nobody knows. You knew they were from Xiaguan or Menghai tea factories, but that’s about it.

Enter Zhenchunyahao, and you have the emergence of Yiwu. Now, Yiwu isn’t a new name, per se. For people who owned and drank the antique, pre-war teas, they are familiar with the name Yiwu, because it was where a lot of these antique tea outfits were based. Their neifei would say they are from there, etc. This is also why the Taiwanese who made Zhenchunyahao went to Yiwu – their express goal was to recreate antique teas, so they went to the one place they knew where the antique tea shops were from. Zhenchunyahao had three productions – 95, 96, and 98. The next batches that started getting made with a place name attached (or advertised) was things like the very early Yichang hao – which was Yiwu – in 99.

It’s not actually true though that antique tea outfits all came from Yiwu. And as puerh gained popularity, people found references to other mountains – the old six great tea mountains of Gedeng, Mangzhi, Manzhuan, Yibang, Yiwu (Mansa really, but let’s not quibble), and Youle. People also started calling teas from north of the river by their mountain names, because that’s actually where a lot of tea was and is still being produced. By early 2000s, you started seeing cakes produced not only with Yiwu on the name, but also some of these other places. Bulang, Jingmai, Nannuo started appearing on cakes by around 2003. Some of these names, like Jingmai, have totally fallen out of favour. Back then, from what I understand anyway, one of the reasons they were more popular was because they had good road access. To go to some of the more remote areas meant dirt roads or even having to hike. Nannuo could be reached by car easily. Also, for western facing vendors, one of the earliest to appear was 101 plantations, which I just googled to still exist. They were one of the OG Jingmai producers (along with He Shihua, another name consigned to history).

By around 04/05, and certainly in 06, more specific names, especially village names, began appearing. At first it was villages in Yiwu – places like Mahei, Luoshuidong, and Yishanmo. Even Gaoshanzhai was sort of far out, and nobody had heard of Guafengzhai yet – certainly not in 06/07 when I was in Beijing and hanging out at tea shops every week. 06 was also when Laobanzhang became a thing. I remember how hyped it was, how everyone raved about the strength of the tea from Laobanzhang. Prices were astronomical by those standards – a few hundred RMB a cake! For new tea! Insane!

Since then, every year you would have one or two places that became the village du jour. Names like Bingdao, Mengsong, Xikong, Xigui, Walong, etc etc. Most of these only became known to the general public after 2009/10. I cannot remember the precise years when they appeared now, but every time someone “discovers” a new village, it would get hyped, prices would shoot up, and everyone floods the market with a cake claiming to be from there.

Does it mean that these places never produced tea before? No. I think two forces are at play here. One is an infrastructure one – as roads were built and communication improved, information about more remote villages went out. Producers, especially boutique producers looking for an edge, would namedrop these new places as pristine, undiscovered fields of ancient trees. There’s usually some truth to these, but as is the case with all such nomenclature, it’s a giant case of “trust me bro.” I remember when CGHT came out with those Tongqinghe cakes in maybe 2009. What’s Tongqinghe? Nobody had heard of them. He claims he went out there with some armed guards or something because it’s close to the border and found this great new tea that’s super strong. I think in the past, what had happened was these teas would’ve been brought to the more central locations like Yiwu and sold that way, but as producers were looking further out for more “authentic” teas, they instinctively narrowed geographic designations to match this new reality. All of a sudden, a new village was on the map as the next best thing. But how much of the cakes actually consist of real tea from those particular villages? Honestly, only the producer knows. How are we, the average consumer, going to be able to tell if something is from a new place if nobody has sold tea specifically from this place before?

Then by maybe 2015 or so you start seeing people talk about Guoyoulin. Technically, this means forests that is owned by the state and is a legal designation of protected areas. However, it is possible to have permission to carry out some commercial activities in these forests so long as they’re not harmful to the overall environment. Again though, because there is no appellation control regime in China for puerh, anyone can slap any name on pretty much any cake they make. Go to any tea market, or on Taobao, and you’ll see Guoyoulin galore. Just like how the Laobanzhang “three stamps” wrapper is probably the most common wrapper of cakes on Taobao, Guoyoulin, while an interesting concept, has no real meaning so long as there’s zero enforcement of what is actually in a tea.

Sometimes you can sort of date things based on village names – a 05 cake claiming to be from Xikong, for example, is at best a retcon and at worst just a fake. Is a 2025 Xikong any more reliable though? Yes and no. Now there have been enough productions of these places (and thankfully, not much new villages anymore, relatively speaking) so that you could theoretically go back ten years and say “yeah, this tastes like all these other ones from this area from different vendors.” But when it’s different – you could just as well chalk it up to different season, maybe different areas within the same village, or different production processes, etc. Place names are, in many ways, more of a marketing device than something of actual value when it comes to evaluating a tea.

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