A Tea Addict's Journal

Sample H

February 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Sample H today

This tea was a little hard to identify. Looking at the dry leaves, I thought it could be some dancong, because of the long leaves and the relative greenness of it. Brewing it though

Revealed a yancha taste. So, yancha it is, but…. what kind? It might’ve been shuixian, one of the lighter roasted kinds. But then, shuixian is typically a little weaker than this — this tea was fairly strong, with a good amount of yanyun and a nice, full body, but a taste that I couldn’t quite identify. It was roasted right — not too little, and dare I say it, not too much. I am usually not a great fan of the lower roastings of Wuyi tea, because I tend to find them a little too green, but this one was enough so that the nasty greenness was gone and preserving a nice honey taste.

Talking to Will, I found out that this tea is actually called Changqingteng, literally evergreen cane. Never heard of it. Googling reveals nothing. My guess is this is a newfangled invention of the tea maker whom he got it from. Not a bad tea, I must say. Not something for everyday, but I think this tea can probably age well.

One interesting thing is that the leaves are extremely large — suggesting, perhaps, that it uses older leaves for the tea. I wonder if that’s what gives it the rather unique flavour.

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Sample F

February 22, 2008 · 1 Comment

Before I go on about today’s tea…. if you noticed that the links to your left have disappeared, that’s because my Xanga premium subscription ran out. Xanga, you see, is cheap that way — you can only put up links to outside sites if you pay them (as far as I know anyway). I don’t think it’s really worth the privilege, since I think the ability to link to other places should come for free. So… sorry for no more links.

Anyway, today was another sample from Will. Sample F this time.

The tea is rather reddish in colour when dry. Smells a little sour, but not bad. Not heavily rolled. Lots of stems. Looks old.

Colour came out all right

The tea is interesting. It is actually quite similar to a 15-20 years old competition tea I bought in Taipei just before I left. This tea is a little thinner than that one. The taste is also different somewhat — there’s an interesting (some might say odd) taste in this tea that isn’t in that one, which is mostly sweet and fruity. I don’t know how to describe the taste — it might be slightly medicinal. I am thinking that it might have something to do with the high amounts of stems in this tea versus mostly just leaves in that one of mine. Otherwise, flavour profile are quite similar from beginning to end. Mostly sweet, fruity taste. At the end the agedness came through with a slightly puerh-esque taste. Not a bad tea, so long as it doesn’t cost too much.

The leaves look standard — nothing too remarkable, but sometimes, nothing stands out is a good thing.

Two down… at least another half dozen to go!

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Benshan

February 21, 2008 · 2 Comments

As promised…

Benshan, otherwise known as fake tieguanyin, or at least, it’s often mixed into tieguanyin and sold as such. It’s very cheap — my 100g bag cost 10 RMB, which comes to around $1.20. And this is the good stuff — there’s stuff that’s about half the price.

I used my tieguanyin pot to make it

Yum

It’s really quite interesting. The tea isn’t terrible. It’s got a familiar taste — I KNOW I’ve had this tea before, or at least something quite similar. I recognize the aroma, and the aftertaste. It’s even got a nice aftertaste, although for all I know, it’s some chemical they sprayed onto the thing. I am quite confident that this can be sold easily as tieguanyin here for 30 cents a gram and nobody would notice. Mix in a little tieguanyin, and it’s probably even harder to notice.

That’s what they do in China, anyway, so a guy selling tieguanyin here might actually be selling you benshan, and he doesn’t even know it.

I really haven’t had tieguanyin often enough these days to discern all the minor differences between this tea and the real deal. All I can say is this was a little thin, the huigan and the yun a little slow in coming, and a little grassy at the end. All in all… acceptable, but since I don’t like drinking things like this anymore these days, it mattered little.

The wet leaves

Do they look familiar? I hope not. I was told that one way to tell Benshan is that the stem of the leaves tend to look a little like bamboo — with little indents on them. They also don’t tear apart cleanly — when you pull them apart, they don’t have a clean cut, whereas a tieguanyin would. Differences in stem structure, I suppose, although I have never tried verifying this for sure. Maybe somebody can do that test for me.

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Sample G

February 19, 2008 · 4 Comments

As the slow boat from Taiwan arrived, I finally got my stuff, among which are samples — samples from Will of LA Tea Drinkers, in this case. I picked out a bag at random, sample G, so sample G it is.

It smelled like a lot of “aged” oolongs I’ve had in Taiwan…. heavily roasted stuff, rolled, probably claiming to be 20 years old, but probably no more than maybe 5.

It looks like those tea brewed as well

I don’t know if it’s obvious here, but basically.. there’s a difference in hue of the tea. The stuff that is heavily roasted but without much age is generally brownish, whereas the stuff that have been aged, roasted or not, are usually more reddish. It’s a subtle difference that probably barely shows up on screen, but when you see it in person enough times, it shows. The tea is a bit thin, with not much beyond the roasty taste. A little sour. It’s not horrible… but probably not as old and as good as it claims to be.

The wet leaves

Also look true to form. Examining them though reveals that they might be benshan, a cheaper varietal of tea that is often used to make “tieguanyin”. Which reminded me — I have a bag of benshan from Beijing that I’ve been meaning to drink all along, if for nothing else than self education. Maybe that’ll be tomorrow’s tea.

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Revived from the dead

February 19, 2008 · 5 Comments

Over time, I’ve bought a bunch of stuff that I thought were duds for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s stuff that are, basically, no good at all. Other times, it’s tea that should’ve been good that had somehow gone bad. Or, perhaps, I made them bad (say, longjing I bought three years ago… anybody want some?). Today’s tea was supposed to be one of them.

I had a few boxes of stuff that recently arrived via the slow boat from Taiwan. Among them, of course, are a bunch of teas. Some are good, some are ok, some are things that I didn’t want to throw away, but not really good at all. This is a qizhong (literally unusual varietal) of Wuyi mountains, bought from the candy store. It was one of my first purchases there. Their tieguanyin became one of my staple teas in Taiwan. This one, however, wasn’t so good — too sour.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked this up today to try. I figured maybe, just maybe, it won’t be that bad.

It looks pretty good dry, which was why I bought it in the first place

Smells old, although, now that my nose is a bit more trained, it also smells a bit sour. But I wasn’t quite good at telling that apart from the “old” smell before.

Into my old oolong (1 person) pot it goes

The second cup

The …. 12th? cup

The residue

Since I lasted 10+ cups, you probably figured out that the tea wasn’t that bad. It was, in fact, far better than I expected. There was some sourness at first, but by the third cup it was gone. The Wuyi “rock” taste was very strong, with a potent minty sensation down the throat. Aged, of course, and I couldn’t detect any sort of immediate roasting flavour. Nicely aged and mellowed… a winner. Even better without the initial sourness, but I can’t ask that much.

What changed?

Well, everything, really. First, the water. It’s a different water (not my Taiwan apartment slightly problematic water). Boiled in a different vessel (my cheap tetsubin instead of the glass kettle). Brewed in a different thing (a supposed zhuni pot instead of a gaiwan). Drunk in a different cup (my newest purchase instead of another cup). And of course, just halfway across the planet.

Which one was the one responsible for making this tea better? I don’t know, but I suspect water, water prep, and tea brewing vessel all did their share. Or, maybe, after all this time brewing old oolongs, I myself am also a little different, and a little better at this. Can’t complain.

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Aesthetics and tea

February 18, 2008 · 5 Comments

I think the first thing one should make clear when talking about Chinese tea is that there is no real ceremony involved. I don’t think of gongfu drinking as a ceremony. It’s more like a particular way of preparing the tea, much like, say, drinking espresso is not a ceremony, it’s a kind of coffee. It bothers me to no end when people say yixing pots are part of the Chinese tea ceremony, because I don’t know what that is.

What about those tea brewing performances? Yes, well, those are, of course, some sort of “ceremony”, but I find those things generally very stale and boring, and entirely contrary to the whole purpose of Chinese tea making, which is very singularly focused on the extraction of the best drink possible out of the leaves. Of all the stuff that were written in the past (in Chinese) about tea, I have seen very, very little that has anything really to do with the form of tea making. Rather, it all has to do with the purpose and the result of tea making — how do you get a better cup out of the leaves you’ve got (and in many cases, how do you get better leaves in the first place).

This, I think, is in quite a sharp contrast with the Japanese Chado, which is quite concerned with the aesthetics as well as the actual tea itself. In some ways, I sometimes even feel like Chado has things backwards — sometimes the form and the aesthetics pleasures of performing/participating in the ceremony is much more important than the actual cup that you’re drinking. A lot of attention is paid to the space, the setting, the equipment… all sort of things.

Now, I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m just saying that’s different. I do think that if one is too concerned about form, the actual tea being made suffers a little. It’s most obvious when I see those tea “performers” making tea with that twist of the elbow or the little “presentation” they do with the pot…. all the while I’m just thinking “if I want to look, I’ll go to a chashitsu and get a lot more out of it”. I just can’t handle the overly stylized Chinese “ceremony”.

That’s not to say, of course, that we should ditch all sorts of aesthetic concerns either. There’s I think a fine balance between form and function, and in the case of Chinese tea, form should follow function (call me Modernist). I believe that one should make one’s tea making space as comfortable and beautiful as one would allow, but the beauty or decorations or whatever should not get in the way (not too much anyway) of the tea making.

I’m currently debating whether or not to ditch the tea tray I use to collect waste water, and switch instead to a wooden tray with a bowl to hold any runoff for the pot. The downside is, I need to have another place to dump the water, eventually — basically after every infusion, but it does also mean that there will be water sitting under the pot while I’m brewing, which might not be a bad thing. The upside, of course, is that it’ll be prettier, and I’ll also have more room to do things, instead of feeling constrained by the tray right now. Which leads me to an entirely opposite position — the environment we make our tea in greatly affects us, as the Japanese have obviously figured out. If the place is right, the tea will feel better, even if, objectively, it’s not. I still think form should follow function, but maybe if something is too function, it loses its magic.

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Seasoning pots

February 17, 2008 · 13 Comments

So yixing pots are supposed to be seasoned over time as you use it… but how exactly does that happen?

I’ve been more than puzzled by the exact process. Supposedly, the pots will slowly gain a shine as you use them. You’re supposed to use a wet cloth to sort of buff the pot, basically, after using them and while they’re still hot, ideally. But there are many, many theories out there about the way you raise a pot. Some say you should just leave leaves in them. Some say you should clean them out right away. Some say it’s good to polish them often. Some say it’s good to not do it very often. Some say it’s important to use only one tea in them. Some say it doesn’t really matter how many kinds of teas you use in your pot.

The information has been, on the whole, contradictory. I cannot help but feel though that much of it is magic, and not really true.

What I can say is this — that over time, at least for the pots that I have raised myself, they do slowly gain a shine. I usually pour the wash over the pot while I am brewing my first infusion. Otherwise, I just pour hot water over them. I rarely rub them with a towel — maybe once a month, if even. I don’t usually leave leaves in them over night. I clean them out after using them. The most obvious change happened to my young puerh pot, which was fresh from the kiln when I got it. Now it’s actually got quite a sheen to it after about a year’s use.

There is also the matter of the clay’s quality. I am currently running an experiment on a cheap pot that broke on its way from Taiwan to here. Basically, I’m soaking it in my spent tea leaves every night before I go to bed. I have noticed that it started doing what they call “spitting black”, basically, black spots that show up on the pot. They don’t go away. Supposedly, from what I’ve read online, they are the result of under-firing of the pot. The pores are too big, and the iron ions of the tea (supposedly one of the things in it) will infiltrate these pores and somehow a reaction happen and it turns black. All pots eventually do this, but really underfired ones are more likely to do this, and at a faster rate.

This is only what I’ve read. I don’t know if it’s true. It’ll be pretty interesting if it were true. The black spots, I should add, are quite numerous. Maybe I’ll show you all a picture when I get better lighting. The thing though is that before I used it, the pot doesn’t look that different from many other ones. I could sort of tell it was slightly on the low density side of things, but it was not obviously so.

Anybody got pot-raising stories to share?

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Cups

February 16, 2008 · 3 Comments

I bought a new set of cups recently — a set of 4. Here’s one

Hand painted, methinks, since they are all substantially different (but same patterns). I think it’s actually quite old, at least a few decades. Stamped “Made in Hong Kong” of all places.

They’re actually big — almost 3 inches in diameter. I like bigger cups personally. I find not having to use a fairness cup much more convenient and just over all being a nicer thing to do. The presence of those fairness cups, now that I think about it, really detract from my enjoyment, for some odd reason. I must say I don’t find much of a difference between different kinds of cups, but once in a while, I do think different cups make a difference. Very small cups and larger ones do make a difference in how you perceive the tea — I think mostly it has to do with the nose and whether you’re smelling it while sipping, or not.

But I’m enjoying these cups today, drinking my aged dongding. One infusion, one cup… just the way I like it.

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Mystery Wuyi

February 15, 2008 · 1 Comment

My tea closet is full of little bags, not so little bags, and big bags. Many of them, especially the little ones, are unlabeled. That’s because they are samples from one place or another, and they always come in faster than I can drink them. More often than not, they’re from tea shops, or from people I meet, or whatever, and they just shove you a sample and you take it home. You throw it in the box where all the other samples are smouldering…. and there it lies, waiting for you like a little puppy at an animal rescue center, until you pick it up and give it a new name….

Today’s lucky tea:

I have no idea what it is. There are no indications of any kind as to where this came from. I know this is a Wuyi tea by its looks and smell, but that’s about it. Probably not a shuixian — maybe a dahongpao? But I don’t remember getting a dahongpao sample. Maybe one from my friend L in Shanghai? I have no clue.

There wasn’t much, so I threw it into my Wuyi pot and brewed.

Sour in the first infusion, but the sourness went away after the second cup. Good. Solid rosated Wuyi taste, probably something inferior, not quite good dahongpao quality. Maybe a low grade one, or one of the other varietals. I don’t know… but it is aged, somewhat. It’s not new, as it has that aged taste coming on in the later infusions. Not very old, because it’s not very prominent, but it’s there. Lasts many, many infusions, as a Wuyi should.

Broken leaves, but that’s partly the product of it having traveled around the world with me. Maybe I’ll call this tea Max.

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Aged maocha

February 13, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I was thinking of drinking my biyuzhu today while rummaging through my tea closet, and I thought I found what I wanted. Out came the bag…. and lo and behold, it’s the wrong tea (in a similar looking bag). Ooops, but it will do. I got the aged maocha I bought from Taiwan instead.

It was expensive, too expensive for what it is, but I think it’s a good example of regularly (but not bone dry) stored maocha. No wet storage. It’s allegedly around 12 years old. I can believe that.

The tea is, I think, currently in transition into the kind of flavour that you will think of more as aged puerh. Drier stored teas though will exhibit signs of youth after a few infusions. So you will first get a more aged taste, but it sort of reverts back to a greener profile. Overall, the stuff tends to be perfumy, just like a dry stored aged oolong – somehow the fragrance gets accentuated through age. I wonder why?

The leaves are sort of brown — but in a good way, and there are still some greener ones among them.

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