A Tea Addict's Journal

Growing out of a tea

May 3, 2008 · 5 Comments

It’s a little bit sad when you realize you’ve outgrown a tea — that it’s no longer good, even though once upon a time, you thought it was a nice tea.

I remember I used to really like this stuff

It’s some supposedly 30 years old loose puerh from Best Tea house in Hong Kong. I remember the first time I bought my 150g of it, I went through it probably in two months. The second time I bought it, it took longer. I still have the third one, and it’s been around for two years. I’m not even halfway through it.

Drinking it again today, I think now I’m quite sure this is a Vietnamese tea, not Yunnan, or at least it’s a blend of the two. There’s that distinctive Vietnamese sort of taste to it. It’s really not very good, when it comes down to it. Sure, if you need something aged and don’t want a cooked tea, this will do. And it does that fairly well, despite the fact that I don’t like it so much anymore. It’s not horrible. It’s not bad in any real sense of the word. I just don’t really enjoy it as much anymore.

The biggest problem is that this tea isn’t very cheap. When you compare it with stuff that you can buy in Hong Kong for maybe a quarter of the price, one wonders if it’s worth bothering. The tea is dry-ish stored. I don’t think I’ll be buying my fourth pack.

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Pot experiment

May 2, 2008 · 3 Comments

No, not that kind of pot.

So I tried to do the “drink the same tea in different pots” bit yesterday and today, especially with a view of trying out the “new” pot with young puerh. My selected victim was my Zhangjiawan puerh

Using the “new” pot first

And then, today, the pot I normally use

Both of the second infusion

And the leaves

Now, I am by no means claiming this to be scientific. After all, I don’t have a scale, I am not measuring carefully the volume to weight ratio. I’m not calibrating the temperature of the water precisely….

But somehow, the “new” pot has things coming out darker and the flavour generally “older”. It added a year or two to the age of the tea, methinks. I don’t know how that happened.

I might’ve put in a little more leaves, which might explain the difference, somewhat. If you look at the wet leaves, the left side is from the “new” pot. I’m sure the fact that it has been sitting around the pot for a day has changed it a bit, or has it? I don’t know for sure. I do remember, however, thinking that the leaves look awfully dark sitting in the pot when I made it yesterday.

So, no conclusions. Just…. lots of questions.

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Trying out a new pot…

April 30, 2008 · 1 Comment

I used my newly cleaned pot today to make Iwii’s sample 5. Originally, the thought was to see if this pot is any good for young puerh. However, I realized that I don’t know the tea well enough to really judge whether it is making it any better than usual or not, and since I used up the rest of the sample, I have no real way of comparing. One tasting does not a good impression form, I suppose, and so…. I decided that what I might be doing for the rest of the week (or even beyond..) is to use this pot to make a number of different kinds of tea, and see which one it goes the best with. I might actually brew the same tea two days in a row, except that one day it will be with the newer pot, one will be with my usual, and see if that makes any difference….

The new pot I got is really quite porous, so I am thinking it might be good for things like wet stored puerh…. but I guess we’ll find out soon enough, or at least, I’ll have fun trying.

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A new toy

April 29, 2008 · 6 Comments

Yes, many new toys these days, this one’s slightly different though

A chawan, a kuroraku hira chawan, specifically, but a chawan nonetheless.

I don’t drink much matcha, but I plan to play with it a bit in the coming days. This stuff isn’t so good for me in the winter, that’s for sure, but in hot summer days, a nice cool cup of matcha can actually be quite nice.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to decipher the artist’s seal

My first instinct is that this is a really stylized version of the word “raku” or “le” in Chinese. I tried thinking up what else it could be, but can’t. It’s a funny shaped raku, for sure…. or is it matsuraku (in which case this is upside down)? I can’t tell. Does anybody have any idea where one can go find better info on such things? Japanese books are fine…

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The power of bleach

April 28, 2008 · 8 Comments

Before:

A pretty dirty pot, if I may say so myself. I got this recently, and it hasn’t been cleaned. Time to clean it.

It took a dip in a diluted bleach bath for an hour or two. Then I dunked it in water to try to “de-bleach” the thing. I figured I’d first soak it with some water and see how it does, and then try to do some tea with it. It’s interesting to note that the water turns yellow after a while of soaking — I was using cold water at this point. There’s truth to the “old pots will brew tea on its own” theory.

The pot is now very clean

Now I’m going to let it soak some more, then probably sink it in some tea to wash away the bleach…. then it’s time to try making some tea in this thing.

Exciting, isn’t it? I should’ve taken more chemistry.

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Young aged oolong

April 27, 2008 · 1 Comment

This is some stuff I got from Taiwan early on, when I didn’t know much about things and was just getting a bunch of random teas to try out.

Now that I tried it again, it’s revealing more things to me. It tastes medium roasted. It hasn’t been reroasted much. It’s youngish — I’d say 5-7 years. It’s starting to develop that fruity taste, but that’s still in its infancy. The tea is still astringent when overbrewed, and not as sweet as can be. However, I can see how some of my teas were, once upon a time, something like this, and how this tea, if stored for another 10 or 15 years, will turn into one of the teas I like.

It’s always interesting to see what some expeirence will tell you. Teas that seem rather unremarkable suddenly reveal information that I did not previously detect. I guess that’s part of the fun.

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Thoughts on seasoning pots

April 26, 2008 · 7 Comments

My method of seasoning pots is really very simple — use it. I remember when I first started out, I’ve learned all these tricks and things you do when you get a new pot. These days, I find myself not caring so much about all that, since I now tend to think they’re mostly just myth. I do still boil my pots when I get them new, because there are gunk and things that you don’t really want that you may wish to clear out of the pot. The first time I brew a tea in it I won’t drink, because new pots can be nasty. Otherwise though…. I just use.

I do polish my pots sometimes, with a wet (very important — must be wet) towel. Dry towels can make your pot look really shiny but in a slightly undignified way. Rub the pot with the wet towel while the pot’s hot… it will give it a nice shine without that “dry rub” look.

It is important to keep the lids more or less even coloured with the body of the pot, so it is necessary to pay extra attention to the lid. It is also important to make sure that mineral deposits don’t form on the pot — those can be rather difficult to get rid of once they set in. If you have a habit of pouring water over the pot, for example, they can congregate in certain parts of the lid/pot and gradually build up mineral rings. I’ve had one pot that I had to then meticulously work out the ring by constantly rubbing/seasoning that part. Not fun. Use a brush to brush out the liquid so that it won’t happen.

Other than that….. there really isn’t much to do. I’ve found that just by repeated brewing, without even much polishing, the pots gradually will take on a bit of a shine. It’s nice when you can see it change like that — somehow there’s a sense of accomplishment. It’s part of the fun.

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The colours of tea

April 25, 2008 · 2 Comments

Well, I tried something today, but not too successfully. I wanted to take a series of picture of the changing colour of the tea I brewed, but, due to the fact that 1) I don’t have a tripod and thus the position of the camera changed, and 2) my light source was a little unsteady today, since I was relying on a sun that sometimes hid behind clouds, the pictures didn’t come out very well.

But nevertheless… this was the attempt. The tea was Iwii’s sample 1b. Hou De’s big character zhong…. rather sour in the first two or three infusions before turning a little better. This tea needs to wait.

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New thoughts on gaiwan vs yixing

April 24, 2008 · 9 Comments

As many of you have probably noticed, I almost never use gaiwans anymore. In fact, last time I touched any of them was when I sold one of them in my teaware firesale. Before that…. I don’t remember when the last time I used a gaiwan was.

I’ve found that there’s really no good reason to use gaiwan when one can use a yixing. I used to think that it is better, for the purpose of testing a tea, to use a yixing rather than a gaiwan, because, so the thinking goes, the yixing might change the way the tea taste in a way that a gaiwan would not. So, gaiwan is thus more accurate as a way to assess a tea.

I think that is still true if and when I am trying to test out a larger number of teas all in one go using the same parameters, as in a multiple sample tasting using, say, 5 minutes brewing. However, I almost never do that. Instead, I brew them normally and form my opinions based on that. If that’s the case, why should I use a gaiwan? After all, if, say, I were making a purchase decision, ultimately after I do buy the tea, I’ll be using my yixing to make it anyway. It would be foolish to use a gaiwan to test it and then never use the gaiwan again to brew it for drinking. As anybody who has used multiple pots for the same tea would probably know, teas behave differently in different pots. Shouldn’t I be testing the tea based on how I would normally drink it, rather than how I never drink it?

Of course, the other thing is that one realizes that there are so many other variables involved, one thing (i.e. vessel) doesn’t really make that much of a difference. Once I saw past that…. I’ve never used a gaiwan since, basically.

Besides, using more teas in pots season them faster. That’s always a plus.

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Having tea outside

April 23, 2008 · 7 Comments

It was nice having tea outside yesterday. The weather was perfect — not too cold, not too hot, not too sunny. Having a way of making water while outside frees you from electrical outlets and lets you make tea anywhere you want…. that’s always a plus.

The first tea we had was a tieguanyin I got from Beijing about three years ago.

You can tell it’s not that fresh anymore, and now that I’m tasting it, I don’t think it was very very good to begin with. Very average stuff, in fact, and probably not even tieguanyin — maybe this is benshan.

For the purpose though, it worked well enough. It was a tea that’s light and not too hard to make. Easy going enough.

The colours are pretty

We then had a beidou #1, also from Beijing. It’s interesting what two or three years of drinking does to you — stuff that you used to think is good no longer seems so good. The beidou is only ok — then again, it’s quite cheap. Compared to the rougui I had two days ago… it’s no match.

What was nice though was to drink outside at all — listen to birds, watching the deer walk by, etc. It’s just not the same.

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