A Tea Addict's Journal

2005 Yisheng

January 7, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went to Maliandao today, predictably enough.  What else am I going to do on a sunny, cold sunday in Beijing?

I didn’t exactly make it very far today.  I walked into the Puerh Chadu, not having been there in ages, thinking that maybe I can find a few 02-04 things.  Chayuan, nice as it may be, is too new.  Most of the stores there only carry stuff from 2005 onwards because they haven’t been around that long.  While some are moved from somewhere else, so they have older stock, most of the time they just sell very new teas.

I ended up in the third store I saw.  They had a tea from a maker called “Dou Ji”, which I’ve seen online, so I figured it’s not a bad idea to at least look at it in person and check it out.  There are simply far too many puerh brands out there, and the more you see, the more you know.

I stayed there till almost 6pm.

I ended up trying three Yiwu teas, one is 04 spring and two are 05 spring.  The 05 springs, despite being from the same company and the same period, taste different.  They’re not hugely different, but different enough for anybody to notice.  One was obviously better, more rounded, fuller in flavour, body, texture, etc.  The aroma is especially good, tasting obviously like a Yiwu that is beginning to age… or at least like all the aged Yiwus that I’ve had.  I don’t know why, but there is something particular about this aroma that I like.

The 04, on the other hand, felt a little stale.  While it’s still good, and actually more full flavoured in the aged taste, it’s somehow missing something.  I ended up purchasing 3 of the 05 spring that I like.

Then I went to the store that L partially owns.  L’s in town, and I figured I’ll go see if he’s there.  The manager of the store saw my cakes, and screamed “oh no you didn’t!”.  Turns out she has a few jian of this, and could’ve easily sold me a few for less (she didn’t say how much less).  Oh well.  She did give me a sample of the tea she has quite a few weeks ago, and which I never tried.  I should try it now to compare with the cake I got and see if it’s actually the same stuff, or if it might be the other 05 spring batch that I didn’t like as much.

One of the persons in charge of making this particular cake was in town, and he came to the store shortly after I arrived.  We brewed up a Mahei cake from 04, which I thought was utterly unimpressive.  It’s a lot worse than a lot of Yiwu teas I’ve tried.  The conversation with this guy, however, was good, and it was interesting to see his take on the puerh market these days.  Among the things he told me…. 5kg of raw leaves makes 1kg of maocha now, whereas a few years ago only 3.7kg of raw leaves could make 1kg of maocha.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, although it does leave me a feeling that something’s going to be really wrong with the puerh market in a few years’ time.

 

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Mystery Keyixing bricks

January 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Back to the City of Dust… where everywhere in the apartment has gathered a
fine (or not so fine) layer of stuff.  It’s also bone dry here.  And last,
but not least, is the internet… it’s too slow.  It’s much slower than when
I left, no doubt thanks to the reduced traffic capacity thanks to the
damaged cables that are still being repaired.  I’m asking my girlfriend to
post this for me, as I simply could not get to the edit screen, and forget
about uploading pictures….

I tried the Keyixing brick I bought here again.  If you need a reminder…
it’s the one that seemed to be aged raw puerh, supposedly re-pressed from
loose maocha.  There’s this odd aroma when I first try it.  It’s not quite
typical aged puerh tasting…. similar, but not exact.  It almost reminded
me of cooked puerh, but it’s not quite that either.  The best way to
describe the aroma is that it’s crisp.  In fact, the whole tea is crisp —
and a little thin.  The aroma is shifty, and not weighty enough as a good
puerh.  I debated for a long time whether this is a really lightly fermented
cooked puerh or not, but I decided, from looking at the spent leaves, that
it can’t be.  If it is, it must be cooked with some new method, because no
cooked puerh I’ve seen ever looked like this.

The tea is a bit bitter, but the bitterness does go away and turn to
sweetness.  There’s an obvious huigan, lingering in the back of the throat.
There’s a hint of “throat feel”, but not significant.  The bitterness is
most obvious in infusions 2-4, after which it dies down and gives way to
more prominent sweetness.  I wonder if further aging will make the tea
better and less bitter.  I suspect it will, as it still tastes quite young
in many respects.  I don’t think this can be more than 10 years, although
the colour of the tea suggests it’s probably more than 5.  I’d think it’s
between 5-8 years of age.  I also think there are leaves of various age
mixed in, as the leaves don’t look too uniform in age.

Not a bad tea, certainly not too bad for the price I paid, but not great.
Another experiment, so to speak, and an interesting one.  Too bad it will be
years before I know the answer to any of these questions.

 

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Tea shopping

January 5, 2007 · 1 Comment

I finally bought a few things after having had a whole bunch of free tastings at various shops. I do, after all, need to keep up the appearance that I’m somehow shopping for tea all along.

I tried three things today. One is actually a Wuyi tea that I brought over to the Best Tea House (for Rosa to try). She wants me to buy a whole jin of it, because it’s so cheap and yet tasting quite decent (for the price). It’s 1/2 of the price of the cheapest Wuyi tea on offer at the Best Tea House, and I personally think it’s even better.

The second is a small 100g cake of supposedly Yiwu tea. I don’t think it’s Yiwu, or at least it doesn’t taste like the Yiwu that I know. It doesn’t have that “Yiwu” taste. Not that great, and very expensive for what it is.

The third… is better. Some unknown origin old tree tea. Good chaqi, nice feeling down the throat that lingers for a long time… it’s hard to find tea that actually does it, and I am still wondering what it is that causes such a feeling down the throat (and why it’s only present in some, but not all, teas). It’s a bit of a mystery to me still, since you’d think that the same chemical will be present no matter what, but apparently not. Teas that look almost identical can have a great variation in how that particular sensation develops (or fails to develop). I think this is why YP thinks it is such an important indicator of a tea’s quality.

It is increasingly difficult to buy anything from Hong Kong though, simply because prices are high. I can usually find the same thing for much cheaper. I know I probably paid more than I need to for what I got today (which wasn’t much), but I can sort of justify it as payment for all the free teas I’ve had over the past two weeks.

Back to Beijing tomorrow, then Shanghai, then Beijing again, then Hong Kong, and then the States for a little bit…. the next few months will be busy!

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How do you make puerh?

January 4, 2007 · 2 Comments

How DO you make puerh?

Conflicting versions abound. From my understanding, puerh making is very simnple — picking of the leaves, kill green, some rolling, and sun-drying. There it is in its entirely, raw puerh maocha is done. Then you steam it (enough to soften the leaves) and press it. Then you have compressed maocha.

Puerh, properly speaking, isn’t quite finished until it’s gone through at least some fermentation. Raw maocha just compressed is more like green tea.

Technically, I think, maocha can be classified as green tea, because it goes through the essential processes that green tea goes through, but there’s a crucial difference in processing temperature, which allows something in puerh tea to retain its bioactivity and continues to ferment naturally (into something that tastes good) whereas green tea of our normal kind is processed at very high temperatures, and the tea gradually loses flavour over time and turns into something nasty.

However, some now process puerh with additional steps such as the withering of leaves and the intentional breaking of leaves (to encourage fermentation before kill-green). This, generally speaking, is what you do to tea that is destined for oolong. This process creates honey or fruity like aromas, along with lower bitterness and astringency (relative to raw puerh). It makes a nice tasting tea right away… which will mean the tea is easier to sell. It also means you have something more like oolong, and the aging prospects…. are suspect.

There are other raw puerh that are processed like green tea, and tastes like green tea (a la longjing type green tea). They might not age as well either. The jury’s still out on the long term prospects of these teas. Xiaguan mixes some of them into their tuocha, but it’s only a certain percent, not 100% of it. What happens to these things 20 years from now?

This is what we were debating in the Best Tea House today with Rosa and Tiffany. We don’t really know. Nobody seems to really know. So many developments are so recent that nobody really could figure out what’s a good way of making puerh, what will really age well, what won’t, etc. I’ve heard at least 10 different versions of what makes a tea a good tea for aging. The only common point so far is that it should be strong, somehow. If the tea is mild and weak right now, it won’t do well (Yiwu is weak in many respects, but not in chaqi and thickness of the tea). Is that the only indicator of a good raw puerh?

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Provenance

January 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

One of the things that distinguish a Hong Kong tea vendor from a mainland (at least Beijing) tea vendor is that Hong Kong tea vendors tend to be very imprecise about the provenance of their tea. Most vendors in Hong Kong cannot tell you if the tea you’re tasting right now is from 1989 or 1991. Most vendors also cannot tell you which mountain its from, or whether it’s a fall or spring tea, or what not. Some do, like Sunsing, but that’s rare. At the Best Tea House, for example, such information are usually qualified… i.e. “I think this is from xxx” or “we started selling it in 200x”. The Mengku Yuanyexiang, for example, is, I believe, a 2001 cake, but Tiffany always thought it’s from 2003, because they started selling it in 2003. They don’t always sell everything right away, and that is fairly standard practice. Usually they are not in a hurry to sell… and why should they, with prices going up so fast?

This is in stark contrast to Beijing tea sellers, who will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the cake in question, from the production date, raw material origins, storage location, etc, down to every last detail. Sometimes it’s probably true, but more often than not, I think it’s probably at least sometimes fabricated. I’ve heard so many times from people in Beijing that their tea has always been dry stored since production in, say, 2001, etc etc, except that I find them sometimes to be slightly wet stored, damp, etc. They will always tell a story, but the story is not always true.

The other thing is… how many people can tell the difference of a tea when it’s ten years old? As far as I am aware, nobody knows what a 10 year old Banzhang tastes like. Pure Banzhang (substitute any mountian here) cakes didn’t appear until about 10 years ago. Before that, all we’ve got are recipe cakes, or cakes with leaves of unknown or only somewhat known origins. Who can say for sure where the leaves for the original 8582 was from? The season it was picked? Anything? Yet, we’re drinking them up like there’s no tomorrow (with prices to match). I recently heard someone tell me that this 1997 brick was made with Banzhang area materials. Huh? How do you know that? It’s not written anywhere. By taste? How many people can taste that much of a difference among these locations?

Yet, it is on this sort of information that prices are driven up. XXX cake is expensive because it’s a pure Yiwu from, say, 2001, and the 2002 and 2003 have correspondingly lower prices. If the materials (and the quality) are about the same… why buy the 2001 when its price is, say, 100% more? Your money won’t make 100% return in two years unless you’re a very good investor, so wouldn’t it be better to pay the 100% lower price to get the tea that is 2 years younger? There’s an opportunity cost involved. I guess if I were 65, I might pay the higher price to get the further aging, but otherwise… I’m willing to wait. This is mainly why I only buy cheap or loose aged puerh for current consumption, and buy mostly 5 years or younger compressed teas… because they are correspondingly much cheaper. At the end of the day, 15 years from now when I am drinking some of my current purchases (when they’re finally ready for consumption), I probably can’t tell the difference between the stuff I bought in 2006 or 2007.

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Bangwei 2006 Fall cake

January 2, 2007 · 4 Comments

While editing texts stuff like Xanga is ok, uploading pictures is still not really possible (too slow and unstable). So for now we have to do without pictures…

I tried the sample of Bangwei 2006 Fall cake that I received with the purchase of two Yiwu cakes from that guy on Sanzui. I have to say I really liked this tea, and thought it’s quite nice. There’s a robust aroma, with a hint of smoke, in the first few infusions, and the tea is not too astringent and also got a nice cooling feeling down the throat. The leaves are big, meaty, and soft. I gave up drinking before the tea gave out… around 10 infusions (I had to go somewhere). Even in the less than ideal setup of my home here, the tea tasted quite nice, so I can imagine if I were actually able to brew in a better environment, then the tea might taste even better.

It’s also selling at only about 2/3 the price of the Yiwu cakes, which makes this a little more attractive as well. I also think I need to diversify my holdings of tea. Right now, I have a disproportionate amount of stuff from Mengku for some reason (not all from the Shuangjiang Mengku factory). I also have some Yiwu, and a few other cakes, but in general, my holdings are pretty concentrated in a few areas. I should really branch out into some recipe cakes, and also some stuff from the “new” six mountains…

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Sunsing

January 1, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I went to Sunsing today for the first time since I got back. I don’t usually go there, mostly because their stuff, aged or otherwise, are all quite expensive (in some cases even more than Best Tea House). Also, the service I’ve gotten there before has always been sub-par. I’ve always found them to be a bit snotty and hard to deal with.

I tried three teas there today. The first two were Yiwu teas… one 2006 spring and the other 2006 fall, both made by Sunsing themselves. They are supposed to be Mahei teas, and honestly…. I found both to be pretty poor, especially considering the price they wanted for it. They were not smooth, not that fragrant, not that thick…. and just not that interesting. The fall one is especially poor, and charging the same price for both fall and spring, when there’s an obvious difference in quality, is a little…. meh

Then I tried the 2004 Yongnian cake… it’s a Manzhuan, and I don’t think I really liked that one either. The Manzhuan cake from Beijing that I bought was much better. Price is again a factor.

I think the next few days I’ll actually make some purchases. So far, I’ve only gotten a few loose puerhs in Hong Kong (and picking up the tong of tea I ordered in the summer). There are a few things that I want to buy and deem good enough for the price, and will start going around to buy them….

Time’s running out, but then, I’m going back to Maliandao. I think I learned something this trip to Hong Kong though… so that’s progress, at least.

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Water

December 31, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

I went to the Best Tea House today before the New Year’s festivities. Among the things we tried was using the different water with an older tea (1980s). The result was astounding…. whereas the filtered tap water is a bit thin, bland, and boring, the tap water infused with mineral water was nice, aromatic, and thick. The difference was night and day. This tea was tasted at the request of somebody who bought a piece of this cake from the BTH a few months ago (he wanted to try the difference between what he has and what the BTH is offering right now) and let’s just say he was impressed with the results and decided to try it out at home.

I’d encourage everyone of you to go try out different kinds of water for your teas, and try to figure out what’s best for what kind of tea. Otherwise…. you might not be brewing the teas to its full potential. After all, it’s the only other ingredient in the making of the drink.

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Luk Yu Teahouse

December 30, 2006 · 3 Comments

Seems like the internet is back to normal faster than I thought. Give it another day, and I can probably start uploading pictures again. Right now it’s still quite slow (think…. 28.8k slow with lots of packetloss)

I went to Luk Yu Teahouse 陸羽茶室 with family today for lunch. It’s a fairly famous old restaurant in Central, best known for rude waiters who only treat you well if you’re a regular, and a murder case a few years ago where a guy was gunned down in the middle of the dining room. Either way though, it’s a bit of a landmark and is not bad for food.

As many of you probably know, going to eat dim sum in Cantonese is “yum cha”, literally “to drink tea”. When we first sat down at the table and mom started looking at the food menu, the waiter commented “so fast?”. The expectation is that you will first sit down, drink some tea, talk, slowly look at what kind of food there is, wait for everybody to show up… and have a very, very leisurely lunch (or brunch, as is usually the case). A lot of Cantonese families I know would go at 9am and stay until well past 1. They sit, chat, read newspaper, etc, and it’s a time for the whole family to get together. Dim sum, the focus of this activity in the West, is only what fills the belly. It’s really a time when you are catching up with family, and tea serves as a lubricant for the conversation.

I think the kinds of tea that are ordered are often jasmine, shuixian, nongxiang tieguanyin, or puerh, with lighter teas being less popular (although I think they are also gaining in popularity). We got a puerh today. There’s no specific thing you order. You just tell them what tea they want, and they give it to you in a pot. There’s no asking of vintage, raw or cooked, or anything. It comes in a big pot where the water stews the leaves. It’s what’s called “cow-drinking”, which basically means drinking in big gulps rather than small cups for fine tasting. They also have gaiwans, if you prefer that, although with 10 people at the table gaiwan is quite impractical.

Usually, the puerh that is offered at these places are cooked or raw-cooked mix puerh, low quality, and quite nasty. The stuff at Luk Yu, while not fantastically good, is not bad. It’s all raw, at least the sample leaves I pulled out of the pot when we were done were definitely all raw puerh. It’s got some age. I can’t tell how long, but it’s not short. Drinking it from a big pot of stewed leaves also doesn’t help. After all, the tea’s just there to help you eat and talk. My family all commented though that the puerh there was better than the usual puerh you get outside, which is often dark and bitter (when overbrewed). I think for what it’s supposed to do, Luk Yu’s puerh is quite good.

I think tomorrow’s a tea shopping day 🙂

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Earthquake means no internet

December 29, 2006 · 2 Comments

As many of you might have heard, there was a fairly serious earthquake in Taiwan a few days ago. Among the damages it did was the severing of the underwater fibre-optic cable that carries much of the internet (as well as voice) data traffic between Asia and North America. For the past few days, there was no internet access here (for all intents and purposes) between here and the United States or Europe. Much of the net is still extremely slow or simply times out for me here, so updates will be a little more sporadic (and definitely picture-less) until things get back to normal.

Among the tea things that happened recently was a triple tasting of three different kinds of loose puerh…. which was rather interesting with varying levels of black liquor and aged taste. I also met a new tea friend, KL, who is quite nice and has interesting things to share. We might meet up again in a few days to try more tea.

Anyway, hope you all had a nice Christmas break, and are drinking lots of tea :). I think the internet will get faster as the repairs get underway, but at the same time, I am logging on at 2:30am on the Friday night before New Year’s, not exactly a time when net traffic is high (and even then it took minutes for me to get to this page). I think during much of the day it will simply be impossible to do anything on the net, still, until they replaced the damaged sections of the cables, which can take 2-3 weeks….

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