A Tea Addict's Journal

Confessions of a white paper cake hunter

October 10, 2011 · 4 Comments

I’m a white paper cake hunter. I like finding teas that are, basically, what they call “white paper” cakes or “three have-not” cakes. Generally speaking, that means cakes that have a no name brand, with no neifei, no wrapper, and no neipiao. In other words, there are no identifiers anywhere that tells you what it is. If I broaden the definition a little, it also means cakes from tiny factories and other workshops that might as well be no name.

Now, hunting for these things is easy, but finding good ones is much harder. If you browse on Taobao you can find hundreds of these no-name cakes, but very few of them will be good. Most of them fall into the “crap that will never get better” or “is this even pu?” category. Sometimes, once in a while, you’ll find winners.

I think the allure of such teas for me is that I derive pleasure in locating good teas that are unnoticed, the same reason why I sometimes take a gamble on teaware that nobody wants to buy. Sometimes you get lucky, and will get away with a great tea.

The same can be done, to a lesser and less interesting extent, on established websites that sells to the Western market. I routinely try a lot of the little known cakes that people like Scott from YSLLC sells. Recently, a cake I tried, which simply calls itself the Tongchanghuangji Yiwu, turns out to be quite decent.  I bought myself a few cakes, and will look forward to enjoying it in the future. I find teas like this to be much, much more satisfying than crowding into another well-known, and well-hyped teas that everyone has heard of. The latest Dayi fads simply don’t interest me. Perhaps this reflects the contrarian in me, and also a bit of an adventurer streak at least in terms of tea drinking. It also is probably because this is what makes the hobby interesting to me – that I’m finding new things that I will then have to analyze and come to a conclusion based on what I find. Following is so boring.

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The retaste project 7: Best Tea House Brick

September 28, 2011 · 4 Comments

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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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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

September 5, 2011 · 3 Comments

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The beauty of imperfection

August 31, 2011 · 21 Comments

This is one of the most beautiful pots I own.

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It is also one of the ugliest.

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The reason I say that is quite simple – if you look at it from afar, the pot looks quite nice.  If you look closely, it has all kinds of flaws.  The shape is uneven, the body is slightly collapsed on one side, and the lid, oh the lid — you can see how it seems to be sinking on one side, and it’s not even round — in fact the pot is not round.  It is more like an oval.

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As you can probably imagine, the lid doesn’t fit all that well.

Yet, there’s beauty in this.  All too often, I find newer pots to be entirely without character or personality.  A pot that is made exactly to shape and size is, in my opinion, very boring — I can find a million of those in any tea market, anywhere.  Give me a tea mall and I can find you a thousand perfectly made shuiping pots of all sizes.  I can assure you, however, that walking through a tea market for a whole day will not yield one that looks like this pot I have here.

All those supposed tests for trying out a new pot — whether or not the water will stop if you cover the air hole (this doesn’t), whether or not the lid will fall if you fill the pot with water and the flip the pot around (I haven’t tried, but I’m sure it will) and whether or not the pot has all its elements lined up perfectly in a straight line (no, once again) are, when you think about it, completely useless for tea brewing purposes.  There will never, ever be a situation where, mid-pour, you just need to stop the pour by covering the air hole.  Nor is there any real reason behind why a perfectly fitted lid will brew better tea (think the airhole that allows flow doesn’t leak air? think again).  So, these so called “well made” tests are, in effect, tests of whether or not a pot is made to perfection.  Why, yes, sure, they can be done by hand, but so can a machines.  Why do you need paintings when you have photographs, if perfection and precision is what you want?

I like this pot because it has personality, and because it’s full of contradictions.  Looking at the pictures, you may think it has very rough skin, but in fact, when you touch it, you’ll find that it’s silky smooth.  Its shaped with quirks that you only find in older pots – a slightly upward bending spout, a joint line that isn’t even remotely concealed, clay that still shows you what’s in it, and of course, the lack of any filters.  Pots like this one make me very happy – they tell a unique story that you can’t find anywhere else.  No wonder MadameN calls them my concubines.

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A hidden treasure

August 19, 2011 · 13 Comments

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If you saw an eBay listing with this item and a few other unattractive pieces of random wares on a cardboard box in a blurry image, how much would you pay for it?  What if it’s listed under “kitchenware”?  Keep in mind I already rinsed this thing — it was much dirtier when I got it.

What if I told you this is a Japanese vintage pure silver kyusu?

Of course I was taking a gamble when I bought this lot of what looked like random junk.  The nasty cup and ugly little salt container (or whatever that is) really didn’t inspire the shopper in me, but the pot looked interesting, even though it was on top of a dirty cardboard box and the lighting was dim.  I could tell that it was metal, and the handle might be bone or ivory.  The dark sheen on the pot made me think it might have been a silver-plated pot, rather than a real silver one.  I figured for the price I paid (shipping cost more) I could afford the gamble, and it paid off.  This pot definitely falls into category 3 of my musings on buying from places like eBay.

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You can see the maker’s mark and the silver mark on the right side of the spout.

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There is, unfortunately, a catch – the angle at which the pictures were taken means that I couldn’t see that there’s some damage to the pot, namely along the handle.  Looks like another job, perhaps, for Herman Silver.

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All in all though, I’m pretty happy.

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The retaste project 5: Yiwu Shunshixing

August 18, 2011 · 1 Comment

The retasting continues, although in this case, it is also a cake that I haven’t tried since I had it in the store.

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Yiwu Shunshixing is an outfit headed by Zhang Yi, who was the village head in Yiwu in the mid 1990s and who was instrumental in the making of the cake Zhenchunya Hao, which now sells for an obscene amount of money.  The cakes he makes correspondingly cost a lot, relatively speaking.  I bought this cake in 2006, and I’m pretty sure this is a 2004 or earlier production, although I no longer remember what year it’s from.  Anything older than 2004 is pretty expensive on the market, and quite hard to find, as they were made in small batches.  I think mostly collectors have them.  I bought the last two cakes from the shop, if I remember correctly.

I should also note that Chinese shop names are confusing, because the same characters get used repeatedly in various combinations.  This is mostly because commercial enterprises of the old style all want names that mean something along the lines of prosperity, smooth-sailing, stability, etc, and so they stick to the same words.  When two outfits sound about the same, it does not, in any way, mean they are related.  In fact, assume they’re not unless you know otherwise.  I sometimes see people confusing names of tea makers thinking it’s some typo of another name they’re familiar with already, when in fact they are completely independent productions.

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The tea is stone pressed and looks pretty nice.  The neifei is “submarine”, meaning it is hidden inside the cake instead of being affixed on top of the cake.  I haven’t found it yet.

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The tea itself is quite interesting – it has a typical Yiwu taste, probably from somewhere along the lines of Mahei or Luoshuidong.  The tea is still somewhat bitter — more so than I expected, really.  It has a very light tartness, but the bitterness dominates, even though it does fade fairly quickly.  The tea itself is not bad at all, but neither does it blow your mind.  It does remind me a little bit of how the Zhenchunya Hao used to taste some years back — that’s not exactly the nicest tasting tea back in the day either, and is now famous mostly for the wrong reasons.

The tea does withstand a lot of repeated infusions, but I think I have better tea than this one.  Back in the storage it goes and I doubt I’ll pull it out again for a few years.  Maybe it’ll surprise me then.

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A full accounting

August 16, 2011 · 16 Comments

If there ever were a point at which a person can have too many teapots…

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I must soon be approaching it.

Unpacking and then organizing all my stuff after my move has led me to reassess what I have, and at least think about (and perhaps act upon) what I should keep and what I don’t need/want anymore.  What you see above are all my unglazed teapots – there are a few missing, because they live in boxes and I didn’t quite feel like taking them out.  Of these 100+ items, however, I really only use these ones on a very regular basis

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A number of others I use more sparingly

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Some I used to use a lot, but for various reasons, I don’t anymore

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And some that I know I’ll never, ever use, because I got them for more or less decorative purposes, and they are sized and shaped in such a way as to making tea brewing almost impossible

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Among all the Yixing pots here, there are a few tokoname, which are more or less easily identifiable.  There are also the ugly ducklings — Santou pots, which are less obvious.

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After I took this picture I realized that one eluded my eyes and hid among a bunch of yixing pots.

So, what does that leave me?  There are still dozens of pots that I have not accounted for, basically.  One reason is because quite a few of them are in bad shape, cleanliness wise.  I need to wash and clean them before I can actually use them, and am currently in the process of doing that.  I also need to start doing a better job of rotating my teapots so that I have less “rarely, if ever, used” ones and more “frequently used” ones instead.  In other words, I need to spread the tea around.  Finally, I need to start culling the collection.  There are some items here that I know I’ll never use (personal preference), or are just not practical (usually too big).  So, those need to go.

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