A Tea Addict's Journal

Family portriat

June 22, 2008 · 6 Comments

While I’m still unpacking and organizing things….

It’s missing the big one — one being used to brew Darjeelings, among other blacks. And come to think of it…. also one that I used to use for puerh but has been sitting in a box for quite some time now. Perhaps I should whip it out again…..

I do have too many teapots.

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Green is the new black

June 21, 2008 · 6 Comments

As Mr. Lochan pointed out — the picture I posted yesterday is, indeed, a picture of a darjeeling first flush for this year.

The tea tastes like a first flush, but looking at it…. I personally had a lot of trouble with the very green colour. Not because the tea was bad, but because there’s a slight disconnect between what it was and what I expected. You can tell right away when drinking the tea that it’s obviously a darjeeling first flush. But that, usually, comes with a certain thinking that perhaps the tea should be darker…. which is utterly untrue.

Just goes to show how little the colour of a tea tells you about really anything.

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Quiz time

June 20, 2008 · 11 Comments

What tea is this? This was taken under natural sunlight

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Crawling back out from the boxes

June 19, 2008 · 2 Comments

Moving, especially long distance moving, entails lots of packing and lots of unpacking. I’m still surrounded by boxes, half packed, half unpacked. It’s frightening to think that it takes about 5 largish boxes to hold all my tea stuff. It’s also obvious to me that, despite my earlier attempt to unload some of my teaware, I still have far too much of it.

So, while my tea stuff are still being unpacked, I have been subsisting on a few samples kindly provided by Mr. Lochan of Lochan Tea. These are all 2008 first flush FTGFOP darjeelings, or “Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe”. There are a total of 8 samples, and I’ve only tried two, numbered 3 and 4. It’s quite interesting brewing teas you know very little about. I remember once upon a time, when I was first exploring the world of tea, when first flush darjeelings were one of my favourites — especially the greener kind that gives a nice fragrance. I’ve since left that world and pursued other kinds of teas, but brewing some of these reminded me why I liked them in the first place.

I use a 300ml (or thereabouts) yixing with a generous but not over the top amount of leaves, and pour them into a big mug to drink. I suppose you can think of this as a cross between my usual brewing and a more English style, although brew times are short — under a minute at most, usually about 15-30s. The teas are obviously very high quality, especially sample 4. A nice depth and overall very fine fragrance, qi, and body. They are also quite long lasting — sample 4 I brewed for two days. Wikipedia says a joke for FTGFOP is “Far too good for ordinary people”. I can see why…. and I’d imagine this stuff doesn’t come too cheap.

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Moving

June 13, 2008 · 2 Comments

After the trip to LA, now the move… I’m going to be moving somewhere east of Ohio this weekend, which means… packing up all the tea, teaware, and all other worldly belongings I have. Fun it is not.

Before I left though, I went and visited Sherab today for lunch and some tea. We ended up with a whirlwind of four teas, all drunk within about an hour and half. It’s too bad this country is so big — makes meeting tea friends a rather difficult operation.

Anyway, as I have to pack up almost everything and then go on the road, nothing much interesting will come of it — so until I’ve settled down, hopefully by the middle of next week, I’ll continue on my little break.

Cheers

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A wedding and a tea meeting

June 11, 2008 · 5 Comments

Weddings are sometimes fun, but tea meetings with like minded addicts are always enjoyable. It was nice escaping to the clear blue skies of LA, going to the wedding of my cousin who gave out jasmine blooming tea balls as wedding favours, and then, on Sunday, meeting with a few of those from the LA tea group whom I’ve corresponded with before.

Two of them I’ve already met — Jason and Phyll — but the others I’ve only emailed on a number of occasions and exchanged teas with, but never met. It’s always good to know who is sending you leaves in sealed foiled packs. It gives me a little more confidence in drinking stuff coated with mysterious white powder sent by them :).

We started with two greens, each different and rather interesting, especially when we experimented with the “mineral rocks” (ch. maifanshi) that you can get from Asia which are supposedly used for adding minerals to water. They do seem to make a difference, even when there’s only one rock in the fairness cup and thus the water is only exposed to the rock for a short amount of time. I’ve always been rather skeptical of the ability of these rocks to do much of anything, mostly because they are exposed to the water for not very long periods and I wonder about the solubility of the minerals in these things… but I must say I’m sold.

After the two greens, we had two aged oolongs (one of mine from the Candy Store, and one an aged baozhong). The little rock still did the trick there, as we tried our tea with and without the rock…. when it’s in the fairness cup, the tea tasted better. Odd, and possibly placebo…

I think we ended with two Wuyi teas, one is simply called “Laoshucha” or “old tree tea” from Will, and another which is a dahongpao. The laoshucha clearly does have some nice qi.

If I seem to be short on the description of teas… that’s because I wasn’t paying all THAT much attention to them. It was far more interesting to meet old friends again, and in some cases, meeting friends whom I’ve only known through the cyberspace until now. Tea, after all, is a social drink, and it is nice to be able to do it finally in its proper setting — among a group of friends, instead of drinking alone. It might be nice to finally be able to live in a city with more than a plurality of tea drinkers whom I can regularly meet with again, but until then… there’s always this blog.

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Retry

June 5, 2008 · 2 Comments

Well, so I tried the tea today, with my stainless steel kettle, gaiwan (which I almost forgot how to use), small drinking cup…

Result? Inconclusive, as usual, but I ended much earlier than yesterday. The tea, somehow, wasn’t that interesting today. I do feel there was a little less complexity, or perhaps, it was a little less rounded. Seems consistent with the use of a porous pot — they are supposed to smooth out the rough edges. As should the water treatment.

The best, I suppose, would be if I could do this to somebody else, blind, but it is too involved and I am too lazy 🙂

This blog will be on a short break for a few days — traveling for a wedding in LA on Saturday, and then, meeting with those crazy people who drink tea on Sunday. Stay tuned 🙂

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Retrying Chen Guanghe Tang Yiwu Yecha, Fall 2006

June 4, 2008 · 2 Comments

I retried the Chen Guanghe Tang 2006 Fall Yiwu Yecha. I remember when I tried it last, which was quite a while ago, I thought it was no good. And I remember I was not the only one who thought so — some other bloggers and friends who are non-bloggers also thought it not very good (especially in comparison with the Chawang). This is my original post on the Yiwu Yecha. The impression stuck with me in Taiwan, where I found a place that sells those things for about $20 a piece. I thought it wasn’t that good anyway, so why bother (there were other, better things to be had for $20 a piece). So, the tea left my memory.

Until today, that is, when I tried to look for a young puerh to drink to counter the fried pork chop I had for lunch. Young puerh is great for cutting that feeling of pure grease in your mouth. I found this tea among my many bags of samples, and figured, why not.

(Sorry for a lack of pictures in recent entries — lighting in this apartment is atrocious in the summer when there’s a lot of foilage outside, and lacking a tripod, I’ve basically given up trying to take pictures).

The first thing I should say about this repeat, aside from the obvious fact that it has sat in the bag for a year and half, is that I am not using a single piece of equipment that I did last time. Last time it was filtered tap water, boiled in my Braun kettle, brewed in a gaiwan, through the fairness cup, and into my drinking cup. Everything, from water (still filtered tap water, but this one from Ohio) to cup has changed. So has my tastebuds. So has the tea itself, after more than a year in the bag.

The tea is decidedly better this time — more depth, more interesting notes, more body, less of the blandness I experienced last time. I think a good bit of it can be chalked up to the teaware — I have noticed, very obviously, that the tetsubin adds to the depth of a tea, especially puerh. It makes the throatiness much more obvious. The pot I use, the one that is rather odd looking and fairly porous, will filter out some of the nasty notes in a young puerh for me. That, and the extra year, might have made all the difference that needs to be made. Assessment: not too bad.

Now… it’s only fair if we give this tea a spin in conditions closer to what I used last time around — so, tomorrow, gaiwan and my trusty Braun kettle will do the work. Let’s see how it goes.

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Seasoning a tetsubin

June 2, 2008 · 3 Comments

The other thing that I discovered yesterday was by accident. We were making a red bean paste dessert for the guests, and when it boiled, it boiled over a little bit and spilled some onto the range. I didn’t think much of it, and when I went to heat up some more water as our first pot ran out, I put my tetsubin on the same range and started heating it.

It caught on fire, since there was some red bean paste on the bottom.

That, however, turned out to be a sort of blessing, for I finally found out how some of the other tetsubins I’ve seen get that old, black sheen — I think it’s from smoke and deposits on it, or some such. Maybe it’s also just the seasoning from putting some oil on it and then firing it, but it seems like good old smoke will do the trick on its own (or am I wrong?). My tetsubin, in some of the places where there was that fire, now has a bit of a black sheen to it whereas the other parts are still brown as before.

Now I am thinking…. a brazier might be in order….

Oh boy, the list of stuff to get is, indeed, endless

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Tea selection

June 2, 2008 · 2 Comments

It’s often not too easy to find the right teas to introduce people to making tea in the way we often do. Stuffing a pot full of leaves and then brewing is, usually, not what most people had in mind when they think of “tea”. Selection thus becomes extremely important — because picking the wrong tea can forever turn somebody off and make for, generally speaking, a very bad outing.

I hosted two people today from Central Asia. They’re, of course, not new to tea at all. Drinking tea is an age old tradition in the steppes, and they are quite familiar with tea — except, of course, tea is very different there. It’s usually black tea, made over a samovar with an extremely concentrated liquor, but then, they dilute it with water. Tea is also served with an immense amount of pastry and other foods. Not quite the same thing.

So, what to serve these new guests? It’s always a bit of a difficult question, made all the more difficult by my lack of good green tea or white tea. The only white tea I have are about three years old, which, actually, might make them good candidates, because I find some of the higher oxidized white teas actually do fairly well with age. Greens, of course, don’t do so well, and besides, I don’t have anything ready.

That leaves oolongs and puerhs (leaving out blacks — I figured they have enough black teas on their own). Puerh is almost always out of the question. Raw, young puerh is always a no go with people new to Chinese teas, or at least I think it should always be that way. While sometimes they can be nice, the downsides are high and I don’t like running those risks. Cooked or older puerh can be a possibility, but without knowing the tolerance of my guests for, say, mud, it’s hard to gauge.

That leaves oolongs. That is still quite a variety of stuff. I considered serving them the remaining sample D of dancong, but there wasn’t enough to serve a party of four sufficiently. It has to be something I have a little more of, something that I can use my bigger oolong pot for. I have some young gaoshan oolong that will probably do, and I think under other circumstances, I might’ve just brewed those. But… I don’t like new gaoshan oolong much. They’re, well, rather unpleasant after a few cups. They can also be a little bitter if you’re not used to that sort of thing.

I finally settled on a gaoshan oolong after all, but one that is aged maybe 5 years or so. It still tastes mostly like a gaoshan oolong, but it has lost a good bit of its bitterness (only really noticeable if you try very hard to overbrew the tea). It’s a little more mellow that way, and a little more easy going. It also paired well with the eventual food we had, including cakes, fruits, etc. We were accompanied by an endless swarm of flies (we just had a storm two days ago and it seems like the flies bred like nuts recently).

The tea held on for the whole afternoon, probably 15 or 20 infusions in all. I originally thought we could move to an older tea after a while, but the guests decided they like this one just fine… and we just kept going with it, chatting about various things all the while.

So, the lesson I learned is that slightly aged oolongs can be great for guests. There was another lesson learned today, but that’s for tomorrow.

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