A Tea Addict's Journal

News from Beijing

August 26, 2010 · 1 Comment

Behind the Great Firewall of China, there’s not much you can do, blogging wise, unless you happen to use Sina.net as your platform or you find a proxy.  So now, jet lagged and hovering somewhere (time wise) in the middle of the Pacific, I am writing this of my two day trip to Beijing, a week after the fact.

All my friends in Beijing seem to be better off now than they were last time I was there in 2007, which is heartening.  I don’t mean that only in terms of material wealth or some such, but also in terms of their tea philosophy, if I may use such a term.  Everyone seems to have found their own preferences and tastes, and are pursuing them actively with more involvement on the production end of things.  People who used to be mere merchants are now makers, or at least closer to a maker now than they were a few years ago.  It’s always nice to talk to folks who are passionate about what they’re doing.

Which brings me to the tea that I’ve had — too much tea in the span of a few days to really discuss in detail, but a few things jumped out as interesting.  One of my friends is now a part owner of a teahouse, and he also goes to Fujian every year to source stuff on his own farm for his shop.  Among the things he’s doing is making white tea.  It’s not just any ordinary white tea though — he roasts them ever so slightly, and then ages them.  Here’s a comparison of a 2006 yinzhen vs a 2010 one.  You can figure out which is which.

The aging gives the tea a bit more sweetness and mellows out the flavours, although it also means the tea loses some of the fragrance, as is normally the case with aged teas.  Four years is not a long time, and I’d imagine the tea can change a little more.  White teas are always ageable, but it’s nice to see that he’s producing them specifically for the purpose of aging (thus the roasting).

I also tried some puerh while there.  Beijing stored puerh really isn’t ideal, but if done carefully with a lot of water containers boosting the humidity of the storage unit, it is possible to produce nice, round tasting tea that doesn’t have that typical dryness one might associate with overly-dry storage conditions.  I think that’s actually quite important, as dry tea makes for bad tasting tea.  My friend L is now storing tea in bags, all within a big cooler (think camping) and slightly moistened.  He found a guy in Kunming who goes up to the mountains all the time and spends a lot of time thinking about how to make good tea, and the results show — soft, supple tea that tastes good.  I wonder how they’ll age in a decade, but so far it’s promising.

On the other hand, I visited Maliandao again and it seems like things have normalized a little there.  While two more tea malls have opened up since I was there, for the most part business seems to be down.  Granted, I was there on a rainy day, which most definitely put a damper on traffic, but I think a lot of stores aren’t doing as much business as they used to.  Xiaomei’s store is still there, but now the clientele is mostly of a wholesale nature, with very little retail sales going on.  As I predicted long ago, everyone who wanted to build a tea collection has one already, so there’s very little impetus to buy more.  I certainly felt that way — walking around the shops, I had very little interest in trying or buying tea.  I’m sure there are hidden gems here and there, but I don’t have the time to go through them one by one and try them all out.

The best part of the trip was simply seeing everyone again, and having tea with them.  Tea is ultimately a social drink — while it can be great alone, it’s better with friends.  Too bad that part of tea drinking is often what’s missing in the Western experience.

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Storage checkup

August 16, 2010 · 4 Comments

I first put tea in my parents’ place in Hong Kong in 2006, and have been adding to it ever since.  This is the first time I am checking on the tea since I started storing tea there.  I took everything out and cleaned the shelves on which they’re placed, checked a number of cakes, and then put them all back in.

Honestly, I was a little worried.  Hong Kong is, after all, quite humid.  I put the cakes on the top shelves on a bookcase that is partially covered, so it was the maximum protection I could find in the entire apartment from light while avoiding the problem of smelly wood.  Air condition is often on during the summer months, so it probably helps alleviate terribly soaked cakes, but I remember coming home one spring and could feel that some cakes were somewhat wet.

Thankfully, when I opened the cakes, none of them were moldy in any way, shape, or form.  In fact, they all seem to have aged somewhat, with the silvery tips now gaining a somewhat brownish tint, and the leaves turning dark instead of staying green.  Stuff in a tong are greener than stuff outside of the tong, as one would expect, but in general there’s aging going on here.

I tried some of the tea too — by taking the shavings from a number of cakes, I’m essentially doing an “average” taste test.  Results are encouraging, with the tea tasting strong and smooth(er).  So far, so good.

So, I put them back where they belong, and hope that next time I check them, a few years from now, they would have aged even more.

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Korean and New Zealand teas

August 14, 2010 · 5 Comments

I just went to the Hong Kong International Tea Fair yesterday.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a tea expo, and this one was a bit different from when I went to the one in Shanghai during the height of the puerh boom.  Partly perhaps also because it’s Hong Kong, the kind of tea merchants who were here were much more international, and also quite diverse in their offerings.  Most of the sellers were, of course, from China, but very often from provinces that are lesser known, such as Guizhou or Hunan.  The selection of green tea was very diverse, whereas the more popular things, such as various types of oolong from Fujian, were fewer.  As for puerh, there were a smattering of makers there from the big factories, such as Menghai or Haiwan, but even Xiaguan was not there.  There were some producers from Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and other places as well.

I think much of this was a product of the fact that many of the better known companies or types of tea simply don’t need the exposure at a tea fair, so they’re better off not coming and paying the expo fees instead of actually showing up.  For the lesser known, this is a great way to get some exposure that they otherwise won’t have.

I saw a few things that I know relatively little about.  The first is a company called Zealong, which makes oolong in New Zealand in the Taiwanese style.  The taste of the tea is very clean and crisp, and reminds me of decent Taiwanese high mountain oolong.  The company, according to their reps, was started by someone from Taiwan, and now has a few different teas.  It was interesting, although not terribly cheap.  I can imagine some place like New Zealand growing some interesting teas though.

I also met two Korean tea makers, and bought some of their products.  Korean tea tends to be green tea of various types, but one of them also made a white tea that had higher levels of oxidation, much akin to something like a baimudan with some age.  I bought some for personal consumption.  More on those later.

Another stop in Beijing before heading home on this trip.  Seeing some old tea friends from up north should be pretty interesting.  Stay tuned.

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Teas from different places

August 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

Haven’t really been able to post anything recently, but I took a few pictures of different places where I had some tea…

No, I didn’t add sugar.

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Grandpa style techniques

July 19, 2010 · 11 Comments

Life has been pretty busy the past few weeks, and I’m getting ready for a trip, so things have been hectic.  Tea has been mostly confined to grandpa style tea.  Having been doing it recently though, I have a few ideas.

1) Never, ever go below the halfway point in the cup when drinking, and preferably keep it at 2/3 full at all times.  You need that amount of tea to re-add water and not end up with a really diluted cup.  This is pretty obvious.

2) Use a lidded cup, if possible.  Don’t cover when making the tea initially.  However, start covering the cup once you’re refilling the cup the 2nd or 3rd time.  This way, the extra heat retained helps extra the tea a little more.

3) When pouring the water, especially a little later (or when the tea has cooled) pour with vigor, and pour along the edge of the cup.  That way, your water will stir up the tea a little and it helps mix the old tea and new water together a little.  I noticed a difference between pouring in the middle and pouring on the side.  Pouring on the side helps the flavour a little later on.

4) It’s actually a good way to drink tea this way as a method of evaluation.  In a way, grandpa style is just a big mug of competition tasting done over a long time.  There are nuances that you’ll get from the tea that you don’t necessarily get from brewing normally.  One of my puerh, for example, displays a smokiness that is not evident when brewed “normally” but the smoke comes out in a grandpa brewing.

5) Don’t add too much leaves.  It’s very easy, when used to gongfu brewing, to use too much leaves for grandpa style.  It’s very toxic.

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Narratives and taste

July 6, 2010 · 2 Comments

I just read a post by Felix Salmon, and I must say the same phenomenon happens a lot in tea as well.  It’s probably also happening with increased frequency.  When you get a story with a tea, the tea somehow, sometimes, anyway, becomes better, or more interesting.  When I talk to friends who are not particularly interested in tea, telling a story has a way of drawing them into a particular drink than if it were simply just some generic “aged oolong”, which does not sound too glamourous.  “Stored for ten years on an organic Taiwanese tea farm”, then you’re getting somewhere.

Most of this, of course, is just some marketing claptrap.  They exist because they sell the teas in question. But then, sometimes there are stories like the old jian of Liu’an that they supposedly found in some medicine shop.  Hard to beat those.

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Running out of tea

July 2, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’m running out of tea.

No, not completely, just at my current location.  I still have lots of tea at home, and another stash in Hong Kong, hopefully growing older (but not too much moldier) and waiting for me to consume them at some point in the distant future.

Right now, though, I’m running out of tea.  I’m down to about 1/10 of a 300g bag.  It’s very distressing.  It also tells me just about how much tea I consume over a week or a month.

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How fast do you drink your teas?

June 24, 2010 · 7 Comments

I just read a blog post about rating wines based on how fast they’re drunk.  It’s actually a pretty good idea, and I noticed the same about my tea drinking habits.  I bought, for example, a few cakes last month from Taobao.  I judged them completely by the cover and nothing else — just the listing, description, with some pictures, and that’s it.  It’s a risky way of buying tea, but when they are not expensive, it’s not bad.  I’ve already talked about the Dingxing, which is not bad at all.  This and this turned out to be quite nice.  This, however, was horrid.  It’s one of those cakes that is very bland, probably poorly processed and stored in a dry environment (Kunming) and just all around uninspiring.  You can’t tell from the looks, however, as all looked somewhat promising.

Now, a few weeks later, the first two cakes are almost all gone — I sent parts of them off, but I drank a fair bit too.  The last cake is almost entirely intact other than the two times I tried it, and honestly, I probably won’t try it anytime soon again.  It’ll stay around, probably for a few years, and I’ll hope and pray that by then, it might have done something, but generally speaking if a tea is weak, it’s going to stay weak.  “How fast do you drink it” seems to be a good metric for measuring a drink’s quality.  I do the same for my oolongs as well — the better stuff get drunk faster, and the worse ones stay around forever.

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Mandarin’s Tearoom 2010 Mingqian Shifeng longjing

June 21, 2010 · 3 Comments

Longjing is my first love.  I’ve talked about longjing a long time ago.  It was the tea that got me into tea drinking.  It’s the tea that my grandpa likes to drink a lot (yes, in grandpa style), and it’s also the drink of choice for folks from my area of the country.  All this oolong stuff is just silly, and puerh is obviously crap.  Longjing (and maybe biluochun) are the gold standards of what constitutes a proper tea.

I used to be pretty serious when brewing longjing — gaiwan with a fairness cup to cool the water, a soft pour, quick(ish) steeps.  The resulting brew comes out very, very light in colour.  The best longjing, as my old post already mentions, are usually very faint in colour — almost white, rather than green, is the norm.  If your leaves are dark green and the tea comes out yellow, it’s probably harvested later or low grade stuff.  If someone sells you a mingqian (pre-Ming) longjing for $400 a pound and it’s the colour of pine needles, it’s no good.

Another physical trait of decent longjing is that they tend to be hairy, and the buds should ideally be very thick and round.  They should look “fat”.  If the leaves look “skinny” to you, it’s probably not a very good grade, although of course individuals differ, and the ultimate test is still in the taste.  Using appearances to judge tea is a very flawed way to do so, but for something like longjing it is actually possible to get some idea of what the tea is like before even trying it.

I don’t drink much longjing these days, mostly because they tend to be expensive, and I don’t drink much of them to warrant a purchase.  Every year I might drink it a handful of times, and the rest, unfortunately, turn to yellow tea, old, somewhat weird tasting, but still drinkable.  They are hardly worth the cost, however.  Not being near the source also doesn’t help — longjing is something you need to purchase in person, rather than from some online vendor.  Being in the US hasn’t helped my longjing habit.

I did receive a sample recently from Toki, however, so I broke it out and gave it a spin.  It was a generous sample, so I didn’t use all of it.  First off, the leaves

The colours here are a little off — my house has poor lightning for pictures, which is why these days I don’t take as many pictures.  You can see the white tuffs of hair on the right hand side on one of the leaves, and scattered around.  Different longjing from different vendors always look different.

These days when I make longjing, I generally use a gaiwan and make it the old fashioned way — in the gaiwan as a sipping cup.  If that’s how people used to make it for hundreds of years, then I see no reason why we should go all fancy on it.  It is, in other words, grandpa style with gaiwan.

How much leaves to put into these things is key — too much and you risk stuffing the cup and making it incredibly nasty.  Too little, and it’s going to be bland.  For this sort of brewing, if it covers the bottom of the cup it’s probably about right.

Now, how’s the tea?  Fragrant, with a nice minty feel down the throat.  I find it to be beany, which is normal for this kind of longjing.  It’s not too astringent even when brewed for a while — which is a good thing.  I’ll probably make it once the gongfu way, but drunk this way the tea is quite nice.

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Price stickiness

June 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Economists use the concept of “sticky prices” to describe the phenomenon where prices rise or fall slower than they should based on supply and demand, because of various kinds of reasons which I will not cite here.  It happens every day around us, and as tea drinkers, I think we are generally quite familiar with it.

One of the things that took place in the puerh market in the past few years is a sort of normalization after the euphoria of the 2004-2006 “bull” run, so to speak, in which speculation in tea reached fever pitch.  I remember the days when a jian of Menghai cakes, brand new out of the factory, can be flipped for a profit almost instantly and repeatedly.  It was the definition of a bubble — nobody was actually drinking any of this stuff, but everybody was buying and selling it.  If you were the sucker who was left holding the tea when the bubble crashed in 2007, well, sorry, too bad for you.

These days, as I peruse the selection on Taobao, I am seeing a lot of tea that I used to see for a higher or similar price back when I was in China in 06/07.  There are cakes that have remained more or less at the same price for the last four years, and in some cases, prices finally started falling for some of them.  Imagine you’ve been a big buyer during the boom, and you have tonnes of tea…. initially, you wanted to hold on to it, hoping prices will recover.  By now, however, it’s pretty clear that prices are not going to recover, so you are finally trying to offload the tea (since you are probably not going to be able to drink the 10 tonnes of tea you bought) so that you can get some cash back.  I remember predicting, at that point in time, that there will be a lot of decent, few-years-old tea that will be available for a reasonable price in the marketplace as people start to unload their collection.  I think we are finally seeing that happening.

Of course, not all of these tea are good — in fact, many of them are horrid, either due to poor storage or poor initial quality.  Selecting the right tea is key — and selecting them for the purpose that you want it for, be it further storage or immediate consumption.  I think in the next few years though, we’ll see more and more of these 5-10 years old tea hit the market and the “aged” tea prices will finally be more reasonable than they have ever been.  It’s a good time to be a tea drinker.

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