A Tea Addict's Journal

“Yiwu” cakes and “Qing” pots

April 11, 2010 · 6 Comments

I find that there are two things that the web will never run out of — puerh cakes purporting to be of Yiwu origin, and yixing pots that are supposedly Qing dynasty.

Let’s just pause for a moment to think — how likely is it that there will be an endless supply of such things on the web?

Take Yiwu tea for example.  I remember in 2006, every cake out there claims to be Yiwu.  Of course, if you’re selling young puerh, you want your tea to be from Yiwu — it’s the most famous of the mountains, and for the most part people have no way of telling if you’re lying or not.  So, you slap the words “Yiwu” on a cake and voila, it’s Yiwu, and you can sell it for 10x what you could if you call it Jiangcheng.  Add words such as “old tree” “wild” and the names of a few villages, instead of just “Yiwu”, and it seems more authentic.  Now you can sell it for 20x the original price.  Never mind that the amount of tea out there that claims to be Yiwu probably outnumber the amount of tea that the whole Xishuangbanna county produced in a year.  It hasn’t stopped people from doing it.  In the last few years producers have gotten more, well, inventive in their claims.  “Yiwu impressions” and that kind of name are now more common.  Consumers have caught on, and so the game has to change for the sellers to stay ahead.

More recently, we seem to be seeing the same thing with Yixing pots that claim to be Qing, at least in the English language world.  Somehow, everybody has a Qing pot to sell, often for the bargain basement price of under $1000.  Many of these so called “Qing” pots are suspect at best, frauds at worst.  A walk around Taiwan or a search online can yield many similar looking pots for a fraction of the price, none claiming to be Qing, and to think that such things can be had for the price on offer, well, I have a whole bunch of Qing pots to sell to you for $500.  When an authentic piece of work can go for thousands in the place where it came from, why would anyone sell it for hundreds online?

Unfortunately I find the tea business to be full of such sorts of schemes and half-truths.  Somehow, there’s always a supply of buyers ready to jump in for things like this.  Be careful out there; tea “masters” abound who are only too happy to take your money from you.

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Better brewed in paper

April 9, 2010 · 1 Comment

These days I’m on the road a lot, and that means that I have to be expedient — can’t brew properly when I’m in a car driving, after all.  Paper cup + leaves is often the way to go, with refills on the way for hot water and hopefully, the water isn’t tainted by coffee, as it very often is.

What I’ve found sometimes though is that some teas are actually better brewed in a cup, grandpa style (it seems like this term is now in much wider circulation than I thought possible), than actually trying to make it in a smaller pot, etc.  Young puerh, especially, seems good for this treatment.  Whereas the tea may be very bitter and somewhat acidic when brewed intensely in a small pot, in a larger cup with a higher water to tea ratio, it actually can come out pleasant, with a nice but not overwhelming sense of bitterness, and the young tea’s acidity is not overpowering to the point where you wonder if you’re drinking drain cleaners.

Of course, there are tricks to the trade too.  You can’t drink it all before you refill — that’s disaster, because the next cup will be insipid, boring, and tasteless.  You are often better off drinking water at that point.  Also, you need a tea that can stand up to the sometimes coffee tainted water, so that if there’s that extra hint of java in there, you won’t notice it all too much.  A wonderful green can be destroyed if you add those kind of water in your cup.  I recommend a youngish (but changing) puerh or a roasty oolong.

The source of water is also important.  Some kinds of establishments are better than others vis-a-vis their water.  If you try to get water from a gas station, you’re pretty much doomed.  Starbucks is actually not a bad place, and they always give it to you for free.  Some places are stingy, like Dunkin Donuts, and want money from you for the water, which often tastes like coffee anyway.  I find it wasteful sometimes, but I will usually ask for a cup of hot water, rather than handing them my tea-filled cup — they are less resistant to giving you water that way, and at any rate, my “leaves floating in brown water” cup often leaves people wondering if I’m trying to do a science experiment.  Just like how kids no longer understand how meat comes from livestock, to a lot of people tea is that brown stuff you find in teabags, not whole leaves.

Time to go driving again, and today I’m drinking some of this.

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Chinatown tea

March 31, 2010 · 5 Comments

I was in Philly the past weekend for a conference, and for much of the time I was there I spent in the hotel or in Chinatown, which was right next to it.  Normally I’d bring my own tea to things like this, so I don’t have to endure bad teabags with coffee-flavoured water (when will these places ever learn????).  However….. I forgot to bring my own stash this time.

So…. I was out of tea, and I don’t want to drink that nasty, nasty stuff brewed with coffee water.  What do I do?

Chinatown

Many of you live near a Chinatown or another, and no doubt some have visited these institutions before.  I still remember when I lived near Cleveland that they had nothing but Foojoy tea and a few other horrible abominations that could pass for “tea”, but at the same time, I also remember that the first revelation I had in tea came from a longjing that I bought at the now defunct Great Wall in NYC’s Chinatown.

I ducked into an underground market in Philly’s Chinatown, and walked into their tea aisle.  It’s quite well stocked.

It’s actually extremely difficult to buy any of this stuff with any confidence, because you know that for the most part, they’re not particularly great, and since there’s no way for you to look at the leaves or taste it first, you’re really taking a gamble.  Over the years the type of tea that they sell have been upgraded, at least in terms of packaging.  Instead of the ugly little tins for the old style, CNNP brands, now you have all kinds of Taiwanese and Mainland producers who vie for your attention.

I was, at first, attracted to a tin of Keemun, thinking that you can hardly go wrong — even the worst Keemun can be pretty ok, with inferior water and what not.  Then, however, I chanced upon a tin of puerh — specifically, one that is labeled “Nuoshan pu’er cha”.  Nuo, in this case, is Nannuo’s nuo.  It reminded me of the Nor-sun that I bought a few years ago in Columbus and which turned out to be quite all right.  I took a chance and bought this, $3.98 a tin tea.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the tin is that it smells — it has this odd medicinal smell that is somehow slightly citrus like.  The leaves are very broken, as you can see.  When I tried it out, it brewed a dark, dark liquor.  It does not, however, have that fishy, pondy cooked tea taste, but it’s definitely cooked (mostly, anyway).  Once you get rid of that odd citrus smell, which disappears quite quickly, the tea is remarkably decent.  At the very least, it probably beats all these loose puerh that online stores like Adagio sell at a much higher price.

I tried it again yesterday, now that I’m back at home.  You can taste the odd citrus flavour the first infusion or two, and then it goes away.  The tea is soft and smooth, and actually delivers that nice, plummy taste in the later infusions when brewed longer.   Definitely a winner for $3.98.

Moral of the story?  Try your local Chinatown, if there’s a sizable one next to you.  You never know what you might find.

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Haven’t done this for a while

March 15, 2010 · 1 Comment

I’m actually going to talk about a tea that I drank.  When’s the last time I did that?

Among the teas I bought from Taobao recently is a cake from a producer that I knew from back in 2006.  They made some nice Yiwu, and I’ve always been on the lookout for them.  According to things I’ve found online, they are located about 100m from the Sanhetang workshop in one of the Yiwu villages, and the cake I bought off Taobao (since soldout — thanks to me) is a Manzhuan cake.  I happen to like Manzhuan cakes a lot — more depth than Yiwu sometimes, and less watery.  There’s also less faking going on.

The leaves are fairly good looking

And the tea brews a darkish colour, for something that’s from 2005.

It’s got some sour notes early on, which I think is 1) fairly typical of some Manzhuan teas and 2) also a characteristics of a 4-5 year old tea, again depending on storage conditions, etc.  It has that nice, deep, lingering sensation at the back of the mouth that I love from my younger pu, and a sweetness that comes through after an initial bitterness.  My kind of pu.

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Heartbroken

March 5, 2010 · 8 Comments

It’s been many days since I blogged.  This is probably the longest break I’ve taken with blogging since I started this thing.

I’ve been rather distressed recently with a broken teapot.  Postal services are often your worst enemies, and in this case they’ve proven to be quite capable of destroying my teaware.  Of course, much of the blame lies with the person who sent this to me, and unfortunately, there is not much I can do now to fix this problem.  I used glue, but you can still see it.

Then again, in some ways, it’s not that bad.  I’m not a dealer.  This isn’t going to be sold again.  Resale value, therefore, has little meaning.  Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not upset about it.

Sigh

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Airing out tea

February 13, 2010 · 1 Comment

Some of you already know this.  You’re supposed to air out a tea, if it’s a traditionally stored puerh.  The problem with traditionally stored tea is that if you don’t air it out, all kinds of nasty, “storage” smell remain, and will affect how much you can enjoy your tea.

This point hasn’t been illustrated as clearly as what I recently did with a bag of tea that a friend brought back for me.  It’s from one of my favourite stores in Hong Kong that sells such things.  The tea is very wet stored — you can smell the storage from a mile away, and is not for those who don’t like that kind of taste.  When I first opened the bag and brewed some, it was horrible.  It smelled fishy, moldy, rotten.  The first few cups I couldn’t drink at all.  I started wondering if I got a bad batch.

The friend, however, knows what he’s doing.  When he visited the shop, he noticed that the stuff in the jar, which is what they usually use to fill these smaller orders, was rather moldy.  He thought it better to buy some that were “cleaner”, so he asked the owner to show him a few bags of the stuff from the back.  The owner duly complied, and my friend picked out some from a good looking bag.  This is all good, except, I think, because the bag was relatively unopened, the tea still retained much of the storage smell, and it’s not pretty.

Fast forward two weeks — I’ve had the bag opened for that long, just sitting on my table.  I thought it probably best to let it air out a bit, to release some of the more “toxic” flavours from the bag.  I tried it again yesterday — no more fishy smell, or rotten carcass.  It’s gone.  Now, instead, much of the sweeter note that I love from this store emerged.  No problems — it’s just a matter of airing out the tea.

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To blend…

February 1, 2010 · 3 Comments

or not to blend?  That is the question.

Lots of people have discussed this before, and a long, long time ago, I think I said something about it too, although it’s been so long that it might as well not exist.  The thing here is mostly concerning puerh — whether or not these single mountain teas are really such a good idea.

We all know that traditionally, teas were blended.  I have seen evidence from the nineteenth century that clearly state how cakes produced in Yunnan were blended with different leaves, and it seems to be for commercial reasons too — nice leaves on the outside, bigger leaves on the inside.  This is very much like the blending that takes place at factories like Menghai, where they also did similar things.  There were specific formulas that they used to create these blends, and if you look at a proper 7542 you will see that the front surface of the cake has leaves that look different than the ones on the back, and if you cut it open, you’ll find that the leaves inside are, once again, different.

This says something not only about the cakes themselves, but also consumption of the cakes.  Traditionally, in places like Hong Kong, cakes were broken into bits, and then were again blended by the teahouse.  They don’t break one cake at a time for you to savor.  If they’re breaking cakes that day to prepare for business, they do it in a whole batch — dozens, if not hundreds, of cakes are broken at the same time into small chunks, bits, and loose leaves.  These teahouses have their own house recipes for how to blend cakes, and will therefore create different tastes according to these custom blends.  What you get at A Teahouse is not going to be the same as B Teahouse, and loyal customers swore by them, declaring that one was better than the other.

So that was how things used to be.  Individual drinkers did not drink cakes on their own.  They had it outside, in public teahouses.  The concept of storing your own tea was pretty foreign.  Tea was stored by those in the trade, and what you bought, you drank.  Most of the older texts I’ve read say nothing at all about puerh — it’s not a tea they consumed.  Instead, they all drank stuff along the coast, probably green tea of various types, or maybe some oolong mixed in it.  Puerh was not on their radar.

These days, however, most of the teas we see produced are various kinds of single mountain, even single estate teas.  Bulang this, Banzhang that, they are all locale specific (allegedly) and vintage specific.  Of course, given the appellation problems, there’s no guarantee that what’s in the wrapper is what’s advertised, but if we take it at face value, what we have right now on the market are a bunch of year and location specific teas.

So, isn’t that just like wine?  Winery, year, and varietal/region specific, right?  What’s wrong with that?  Or maybe we can compare them to single-malts?

I think neither of these are great comparisons.  Wines are often blends, even if it’s a bottle that says “Merlot” and “Sonoma Valley” on it.  15% of the wine can be not from Sonoma Valley.  It doesn’t have to be all Merlot either.  For the stricter appellation regimes, such as those of French wines, you still have leeway for blends depending on the region.  They often specify the allowable amount of blending, and each appellation is different.  If you don’t like it and want to make something outside of what’s allowed by the AOC?  There’s always Vin de Pays, a much looser set of regulations on what can go into the bottle.

Single malts also are rarely single-sourced, single year.  While they do come from a single distillery, say, Lagavulin, the “16 years” on the label is really the lowest age of the whisky in the blend.  Standard bottling of these whiskies are usually blends of various years, and not all from a single year.  If you want those, you can go for specific vintage bottling, or single cask, or any of those things.  By and large, whisky makers blend their whisky to create a fuller profile or whatever the desired taste might be.

That’s not what’s going on with puerh tea.  These days, the market is filled with teas that are mostly single year and single source teas, stored, generally, in the comfort, or danger, of your own home.  What I think will happen is that the taste of these cakes, many years down the road, will often be aggressive, sharp, and focuses on certain notes while completely missing others.  That’s the nature, I speculate, of such single-profile teas.

Does this mean we should all just buy Menghai 7542?  No, I don’t think so.  Even then, you’re still going to end up with 7542 of one vintage.  One of the things that the teahouses used to do when blending is to blend different ages and different types of puerh together.  They might also take into account storage conditions, cost, and other factors.  Someone who knew what he was doing would be responsible for deciding what to do with the blend.  So, 7542 is not the answer.

Instead, I think the answer might be for us to start blending our own tea — an aged Bulang with a young Yiwu might make for a pretty interesting combination.  Or, a blend of wetter stored teas with drier stored ones.  I am not convinced now that drinking these single sourced teas in 20 years will be our answer to the Songpin of yore.  I think we will be sorely disappointed if we wait that long.  Better start learning the art of blending now.

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Appellation control for tea

January 20, 2010 · 9 Comments

One of the most confusing things about buying tea is that there is virtually no naming scheme and standards.  I can go buy some green tea from a wholesaler and resell that as “jade green spring”, which sounds awfully like biluochun “green snail spring”, and perhaps lead you to think that it might have something to do with biluochun, even though my tea could be some cheap Sichuan green of no notable character.  Tieguanyin from Fujian and tieguanyin from Taiwan are entirely different beasts — the ones in Fujian are generally named for the varietal of tea plant from which the tea came, while in Taiwan tieguanyin also includes specific sets of production procedures.  Likewise, Longjing is a famous tea, and is supposed to be from the Hangzhou area, but somehow, Taiwan has Longjing too, and no, Taiwan’s Longjing does not taste anything like the mainland version, at least the good stuff.  And then you have things like “Zhejiang Longjing”.  And let’s not even get into puerh naming conventions….

It seems like what really needs to happen, at least with Chinese tea, is a strict regulatory regime that makes it possible to tell something about a product when it comes to its name.  When I see the word “longjing” I should know that it is coming from a defined area, with a defined characteristic, and maybe even certain defined manufacturing procedures.  This is like how appellation d’origine contrôlée is done in France, and it works pretty well.  When you see Epoisses de Bourgogne, you know what you’re getting.  It’s going to stink, it’s going to be creamy, and it’s the same every time.  If you put that name on, and you didn’t make it there or follow the proper rules, then you are going to get sued.

This is of course part of the problem — the lack of a robust legal system that can handle problems such as infringement on these names, and the lack of an authority established to deal with such issues.  I remember reading about a Chinese town that wanted to copyright their namesake alcoholic beverage, because other people from a different town started making it, and it was being bastardized and worse, its reputation was damaged because the other product was not as good.  For people whose hometown has a product which has a name-recognition value, it is in their best interest to have a system that will protect such a product.

It is, of course, also in the interest of the government to do so, because goods that can command the trust of the consumer is going to be able to command a higher price.  The lack of appellation control means that when I see “Yiwu” printed on the label of a puerh tea, I actually have no idea what’s in it.  It could be indeed the best leaves from Yiwu, it could be really bad leaves from Yiwu, it could be leaves from other places in Yunnan, or worse, it could be from places that are outside Yunnan.  There’s no way to tell, and the only way I can even guess is to drink and see what I think of it.  Nine out of ten times, however, Yiwu and other famous places like it will have tea that isn’t really produced from materials made from that area, just like “Anxi tieguanyin” is often not Anxi tieguanyin at all.  Really experienced drinkers will know the difference, but for the vast majority of consumers, no such possibility exist.

One of the inherent problems with tea is that it is often made by small farmers, and sold to larger distributors/consolidators/wholesalers who blend, process, and resell the tea to the consuming public.  The leaves themselves are anonymous, and farmers are usually only selling bags of tea they carried to the factory with no distinctive marker of any kind at all.  When you look at the raw leaves, you really can’t tell very well whether it’s from Yiwu or not.

The Taiwanese have come up with a rather interesting method of dealing with this problem, namely, regular tea competitions among farmers.  Farmers are asked to submit batches of tea for these competitions, and the teas are then graded, winners announced, and the teas are then resealed in government authorized packaging with the grades accorded to the tea.  The point of these competitions were twofold — to encourage better tea, of course, but also to grade and sell them in a way that guarantees some level of quality.  For an entry into the competition, the farmer has to submit a certain amount of tea (13.2kg for Lugu) and the judging panel basically takes a random sample out of this batch to evaluate the tea.  The whole batch eventually gets sold, and because of the labeling and the grading, they are usually sold at prices much higher than they would otherwise command without such certification.

Now, doing so would be hard for all levels of tea, and in all fairness, there’s probably no good reason why this needs to be done for the large scale, commercial, and mass-consumed tea that slosh around the market every day.  At the same time, some basic form of appellation control that at least gives a modicum of origin assurance would be nice.  Just like how for wine there’s AOC, Vin de Pays, Vin de Table, etc, one could imagine such stratification for different kinds of tea.  Some farmers might go for the highest rating and aim to produce high quality, but possibly lower yield, tea, while many will be content to make tea for the mass market.  Some will do both, and it is up to government authorities to build an infrastructure to support this kind of choice.  What we have right now, however, is nothing, and nothing is damaging the entire market.

Western buyers are not alone in this either, as Chinese buyers are just as confused as everybody else.  Most experienced tea people know that when you buy Dahongpao, oftentimes the tea in the bag is not really Dahongpao.  On top of the varietals you have all kinds of other things, such as Monkey Picked, etc, that are often used by shops to denote their own blends or processes.  If there’s an appellation control, at the very least they can tell you it is “roasted in house using x leaves” or something along those lines.  As it is, we have none of that luxury.  For the Western buyers who have to deal with names like Snow Monkey, Leopard Monkey, Naked Monkey, or whatever else, the situation is only worse.

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Spoilage

January 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I opened a bottle of spoiled wine yesterday.  It was not a great loss, as it was only a cheap Cotes du Rhone that I had kept for a few years.  It went through various types of poor storage, including a year and half in a U-Haul storage facility.  The cork probably dried out at some point, and nature took its course and turned it into vinegar.

This reminds me of the risks inherent in storing tea as well.  Humidity, for the most part, is not a risk factor in much of the US, but depending on the environment in which you store the tea, it can affect the tea negatively, perhaps fatally.  I am always reminded of this accident and wonder if the tea I have stored in my parents’ home in Hong Kong is safe and sound.  Granted, it’s not a shed on the hill, and so it’s probably not nearly as humid as the storage conditions of those tea, but Hong Kong can get somewhat wet at times, so it’s still a bit of a risk factor.  I tried to minimize the risk by having the teas stored on a few shelves near the ceiling and away from the windows and light, so that they are, for the most part, shielded from excessive moisture, heat, and sun.  Yet, since I am not there, it does worry me that some, if not all, of it might turn out badly.

This is of course one of those risks that we all have to take when we decide to keep things like tea or wine at home.  They can age poorly.  If you leave it to others, they assume the risk, but then you have to pay them for assuming that risk in the form of higher prices.  Nothing is free in life, after all.

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Buying tea from taobao (2)

January 7, 2010 · 2 Comments

So last entry we stopped at actually looking at listings.  Let’s now turn to those.

Over the years pictures on Taobao has really improved.  I remember when I was in China in 06, very often the Taobao listings would have no pictures at all, or a really bad, grainy, and small picture that might as well not be there.  Since then, most listings have gained multiple pictures, and now as long as you believe what’s in the listing, you can find some pretty decent looking photos to rely upon.  When you scroll down from the “search” menu to look at the listings, it’ll look like this

The ones in the center are whatever listings that show up under your filters, while the ones on the right sidebar are “related” or “promotional” products, which means they might have nothing to do with what you were looking for.  Obviously, go with the ones in the middle.  Now, let’s try one of these listings.

Now, once you’ve been through a few listings, you’ll notice a few things.  First, the listing layouts change.  Here, the sidebar is on the left, while the listing info is on the right.  That’s not always true, and it seems like Taobao allows seller a great deal of flexibility in customizing their listing.  This is, I suppose, both good and bad, in the sense that it can make it a little harder to navigate, especially if you don’t know Chinese.  There are a few things that are constant, however.  The circled area above is a seller’s feedback.  This is in the newer system of stars, sort of similar to eBay’s.  The older system just shows feedback rating numbers, which, of course, is pretty useless.  A seller with low feedback is not necessarily worse — he’s just a lower volume seller.  So far, I haven’t been socked in buying things in the sense of having my money taken but no goods delivered.  I have, however, bought not very good tea, but that’s an entirely separate issue.

Now, most proxies will do this for you, but this is the part that really matters, the price:

Along with other vital info, that is.  The big red number is the price of the cake (which is almost always per cake), with the shipping cost right under it in small print.  The number in yellow, though, is the number of times this item has already sold.  So for this cake, they’ve sold 120 through Taobao, which is relatively high, especially since Taobao often operates off-site when it comes to final transaction.

Now, since you’ll be using a proxy, you won’t be doing the actual bidding.  However, right above the bid button is another piece of info that usually nobody will tell you about — the number of items remaining that this merchant has on hand.  In this particular case, it’s 185.  So you know that if you bought one cake, there’s more where this came from.  This is actually somewhat useful, as sometimes they’re only selling one cake and one only, while others you can tell the seller has lots of it.  If the proxy service you use is good, and you are buying in bulk, you can sometimes ask them if they have bulk pricing.  Taobao merchants often do.

The third thing to look at, in this case, is a feedback on the specific item

The rating here is close to five stars, and 8 people have rated this item.  If you can read Chinese, you can click on the link and read it all.  Otherwise, it’s fairly useless.

Now, for the actual item description:

Just make sure the first tab is the one highlighted, and if you keep scrolling down, you’ll see the item description, complete with pictures, all that.  Often times the description that a seller posts is very generic and the only thing that matters at all is the pictures.  The rest are all useless, repeated info.  Sometimes you can try scanning the description for dates, but even then, they often don’t mean that much.

The sidebar on the left has other functions too, besides telling you the seller’s rating.  If you looked at a cake and like the seller’s goods, you can click on one of the links on the left to go through a particular category of tea that the seller has.  Oftentimes in a standard seller page, there’s a big orange button that links you to the whole store, but that’s not present here.  That’s often a good way to browse for cakes, instead of searching for them.  You can see how the seller has sorted them by year of production, and then by the different “series” that they have produced.

Now, some of you might recognize this cake and say “hey, I’ve seen this one before….”  Yes, that’s correct, if you are one of those who hound sites that sell puerh, then you might have seen this cake from Yunnan Sourcing. This is the Guanzizai 09 Banzhang/Man’e cake, and if you look at the prices….

A comment on my last entry suggested that it’s not always cheaper to buy from Taobao, and this pretty much shows you why.  The Taobao price for this cake is only marginally lower than YS’ price, but if you factor in the proxy fees and the potential for a higher shipping cost, then it’s really not a worthwhile venture.  In general, I find Taobao to be good for things that one cannot find online, or can only find online at very inflated prices at certain vendors.  Price comparison is always good, and it’s useful to do your homework.  Most of the things I look for are not available online anyway, but when browsing, it’s good to check to make sure you got the right thing from the right place.

Now….. how do you pick cakes?  Well, that’s a harder question to answer.  Unfortunately, there are lots of cakes out there that look good in pictures but don’t taste very good, or have low potential.  It often comes down to trial and error.  There is also the possibility of fake tea, although that really has diminished over the years.  I find that the most likely brands for fakes are still Dayi and Xiaguan, while the rest are either not expensive enough to be worth faking, or small enough so that nobody bothers.  There are usually some signs that a tea is fake, starting from a “too good to be true” price.  What I have done in the past is to buy one cake first from a vendor to make sure the cake is genuine or good, and then if I like it, I can always go back to buy more.  This is where the “items remaining” number is handy.  I have had some finds there, and also a few duds.  In that sense, it’s not too different from the online tea buying experience in general.  Look for good looking cakes, preferably with pictures of the liquor of the tea, as well as the brewed leaves.  They all give you signs of what the tea is up to.

Maitre_tea also ask about buying Yixing on Taobao.  I’ve looked at the selection, and I think I can say that if you’re looking for a new, modern piece, and if you are willing to take the risk, go ahead and give it a shot if the price is right.  However, Yixing involves a lot more complexity, while puerh is more of a standardized product.  I will avoid all claims of “antique” on Taobao, but as long as you know you’re buying a new piece and it’s advertised as such, it’s again not much different than buying online in general.  In these cases, I would say that usually the merchants who seem to provide more pictures and information tend to be the better ones and will be more reliable.  Good luck!

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