A Tea Addict's Journal

Pot warming

January 10, 2008 · 4 Comments

I was in Peet’s today, waiting for a guy to make me a pot of (too much leaves) keemun.  When he was preparing the pot, I noticed something — he actually warmed the pot.

That was a surprise for me.  I didn’t expect to see it.  Perhaps Peet’s is more meticulous, or perhaps because this guy drinks tea, or perhaps because this is Portland?  Pot warming, methinks, does help you up the temperature of the water you use to eventually brew the tea significantly, especially if the pot is initially quite cold, as it could prone to be in colder climates.  I don’t know how much heat it will require to heat up a ceramic pot of that sort of thickness to close to the temperature of boiling water, but I’d imagine it’s enough to drop the temperature of the water by a few degrees if the pot started out cold.

I’m purely guessing here, but I’d think that it will matter the most for English style brewing, because there, you only get one, maybe two shots at making the tea, and a lower temperature will change the way the tea comes out.  For a short, multiple infusions brewing style, a lower temperatured first infusion might not be horrific (although I sometimes wonder if too low a temperature in the initial rinse will mess up the tea for the session — as I sometimes feel is the case).  I couldn’t even get more than one cup today, as there was simply too much leaves in the pot and I couldn’t drink another without feeling queasy from the caffeine because I already had an earlier session with my survival kit and aged oolong.  Mainly I was just impressed that the staff at Peet’s bothered to heat the pot at all.  I wonder how long it will take them to start rinsing the leaves….

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Travel day

January 9, 2008 · 2 Comments

Another travel day today, this time to what Davelcorp has aptly termed “Rainland”.  It’s cold, nasty, and rainy — just like how Pacific Northwest is supposed to be in the winter.

Rainland (i.e. Portland OR) has decent tap water.  This is, I think, largely true of this region, where they get plenty of rainfall plus a good dose of glacial water coming down stream.  I remember living in Vancouver BC where the water was always crisp and clean, even in the relative heat of summer.  The only problem, it seems, is that tap water will always have a bit of chlorine in it, no matter what you do, because they need to process the water to make it potable.  Even after they run it through the plant which usually tries to dissipate the chlorine taste, there’s still a bit of it left by the time it reaches your faucet.  If nothing else, a water filter will get rid of the chlorine taste.  Boiling it seems to take care of most of it, but sometimes if the water hasn’t reached full boil the chlorine taste doesn’t quite go away.

Meanwhile…. I have to survive a few more days on my survival kit with random aged oolongs.  I can’t complain too much, I suppose.

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Ebay misadventures

January 7, 2008 · 10 Comments

I think almost anybody who’s tried buying stuff from Ebay or other auction sites have had bad experiences with inaccurate descriptions, false advertising, etc. I am just reminded how sometimes things don’t work out on these things.

I bought a tetsubin through Ebay from a Japanese vendor. It looks nice, the price’s reasonable, and I have been wanting to get my hands on one to play with. So far, so good. It arrived…. and it looks good. Except one thing — there’s a small hole in the bottom of the tetsubin that the seller didn’t mention. Since there was no shot of the bottom of the pot, it was not possible for me to look at it either. So… I got a pot that will leak water right through the center. Since my name’s not Moses, I can’t part the water in the middle to keep it from dropping through the hole.

So now I’m dealing with the seller through paypal. Has anybody tried using the conflict resolution thing? How did it go?

Oddly enough, I felt somewhat uneasy when I purchased the first one, and I stumbled upon a second one, obviously inferior, but still a tetsubin… and very cheap (cheaper than one of those small enamel-lined tetsubin teapots you normally see). So, I ended up buying that one too, and that has arrived at the same time. It works — although I don’t know what the previous owner has used it for, because water that’s been through it smells like chamomile, and the outer surface of the pot was covered in some sort of grime. Now I’m trying to boil out the nasty sweetish chamomile smell from it… hopefully it’ll be usable after some treatment.

But tomorrow, I’m back on the road…. this time to Portland OR. Fun.

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Survival kit

January 6, 2008 · Leave a Comment

This is what I’m surviving on while away from home

It does the job. They have a fancy Cuisinart coffee machine with Lavazza coffee, but the only tea the hotel can muster up is some Celestial Seasoning Chamomile. Hasn’t anybody told them that chamomile isn’t even really tea?

Good thing I decided to bring my pot, and my electric kettle, because otherwise, I won’t have anything to drink tea with. Now, some hot water, a mug, and some aged baozhongs, and we’re in business.

Incidentally, because I’m relying on bottled water (boiled tap water in DC tastes awful — I tried) I got to test out two different waters for this baozhong. There’s Fiji, which worked really, really well. There’s also Poland Springs, which is so obviously inferior I wonder why anybody should pay money for it. It’s actually similar to the conclusion I reached almost two years ago in the early days of my blog — Fiji is a pretty good tea water, in that case a qingxiang tieguanyin. The aged baozhong is much heavier, but it also benefits from the Fiji water. It’s definitely better than my usual mix of filtered tap water plus some mineral water. It worked really well, actually.

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Teaism

January 4, 2008 · 2 Comments

There are a few places in Washington DC where one can have tea. I don’t have that much time to check them all out, but since one of them — a place called Teaism — is nearby, I figured it won’t hurt.

The store I went to is near Dupont Circle, and it’s located next to the local branch of the Evil Caffeine Empire

What my fiance remembered of the place and its current incarnation are actually a little different. Supposedly, they used to be more tea focused, but this time, when we went, it seems to be more of a lunch place that sells some tea on the side. The tea menu is quite undistinguished, and consist mostly of regular stuff you can find in any self-respecting tea store. My guess is that they discovered selling tea alone does not pay rent, as I suspect is the case in the USA for independent stores.

We did get some lunch though

A bento with (cold) salmon, and ochazuke — basically leftover rice with bad sencha. In this case, the sencha wasn’t so bad (I tried a little of it independently) — it was sweet and not grassy. The other pot of tea was something we ordered – a “Golden Monkey”, which is actually quite disappointing, considering they serve a pot of tea without actually giving you any leaves. The tea is underbrewed, and rather boring, and not having the leaves, I couldn’t even tell if they brewed it from teabags. For $3.75 a pot, I expected a little more.

There’s a store called Ching Ching Cha which seems a little more interesting, but it’s a little farther out, and I have a feeling I won’t have time to go… oh well

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Heavy teas, light teas, and the water they drink

January 3, 2008 · 5 Comments

Food for thought while driving 6 hours to go to Washington DC for a conference and sipping bad teabag teas — there are, I think, two types of teas out there, heavy and light. Heavy teas are things like cooked or aged puerh, roasted oolongs (and some aged oolongs), black tea, and that sort of thing. Light teas are green, white, light fermentation oolongs, etc.

That’s probably pretty obvious. I think though that generally speaking, in terms of tea preparation, there are one set of requirements that will work for heavy teas, and one set that will work for light teas. This is of course not accurate, because they each vary individually and each batch of tea will perform differently. However, I think that over time, I’ve noticed things are different waters and different teas that seem to play out consistently roughly within the heavy/light classification. So, for example, a water heavy in mineral content does not work very well with the light teas — the water is often too strong in taste or texture and destroys the beauty in the light teas. A really light water with a heavy tea, on the other hand, can make an otherwise thick and luscious tea seem thin, even though the tea will gain a bit of crispness and perhaps freshness not common in those types. This is not a science, and it is certainly not precise, but it is a beginning of a thought.

Has anybody else noticed this, or is this just induced by drinking Nestle “100% real leaf tea” teabags?

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Tea gallery aged tieguanyin

January 3, 2008 · 1 Comment

As I think I’ve stated before — the first law of a tea blogger is that the rate at which samples are sent to the blogger is always going to be higher than the rate at which the samples are consumed.

It gets harder when you get gift tea along with it, as I did recently from Toki.

These are two packs of 1991 tieguanyin from, I think, the Tea Gallery in New York.

The leaves are highly rolled, and smells a little roasted. The smell is more obvious when it hits the warmed teapot. The tea brews a rich brown liquor

It’s obviously thick. The tea is surprisingly still a bit bitter, and the roasty taste is quite present. Tastes a bit like a Best Tea House tieguanyin…. the tea is rounder and smoother than a new tieguanyin, but I think this was probably stored in more air-tight conditions (I know the Best Tea House usually stores theirs in extremely well sealed containers). The character that develops under this sort of condition is not the same as those that I found in Taiwan when they were more exposed to the elements. It’s obvious that this was a good tea when it was first made — all the right characteristics are there. My fiance had a lot of fun drinking this tea while eating chocolates. She said it went really well together, perhaps because of the strong roasty flavour plus the heavy body combining to bring out the best in the chocolates. I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t try.

There’s something funny about the wet leaves though — notice the difference in tones in the leaves? While most of them are dark brown/green, a few are a very light yellowish brown. How come?

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Twin flowers

January 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Yesterday was New Year’s, so I figured it’s an excuse to drink something nice.

So I pulled out this little container with about 2-3g of tea in it. It’s from my last visit to Wisteria with Aaron Fisher, when we met with a documentary producer. There, you have to order tea based on the amount of people you have in your party, so for the four of us, we have to order a medium sized pot of stuff. However, we used one of Zhou Yu’s antique pots — the one that Aaron said is the best for puerh. It was too small though, so we didn’t use all of the tea, and this is the leftover — and they let me take it home.

So what is this? This is what is called Shuang Hua, or Twin Flowers, supposedly a Yiwu from the 1930s. This isn’t nearly as famous as Tongqing, Tongxing, or some of the other antique teas, but still, it’s old. One advantage of it being not as famous is that it’s cheaper, but still by no means an afforadable everyday tea, unless your budget is huge.

I put it in my much inferior puerh pot and made tea

Older puerhs tend not to have a long lasting intense colour. This seems to be true from Red Label onwards — the colour fades very quickly, although flavour stays even when a cup of tea looks very weak. This tea is extremely mellow, with a soft aged puerh taste, turning into a mushroomy brew that is reminicent of water you use to soak mushrooms before you cook them. The qi is obviously there, but it’s very subdued and isn’t overpowering. I think drinking this you can see how it is an inferior tea compared with some of the more famous brands from that era.

The wet leaves are quite broken, and pretty unremarkable. I know if I bring something like this to, say, Beijing, they’ll think this is cooked puerh. Oh, the joy.

Here’s to a great year, in tea and everything else

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Happy New Year!

December 31, 2007 · Leave a Comment

May every one of you have lots of great tea this coming year!

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An oldish oolong

December 30, 2007 · Leave a Comment

One of the joys of drinking these older oolongs that I’ve been drinking is the freedom from any sort of label, hype, or influence from others, really. When a tea that I buy has no label at all, or at best a suggestive “this is an old baozhong” to go by, I can drink and appreciate the tea on its own merit, rather than thinking about what reputation it stands up to, whether it’s really worth the exorbitant price, etc, that are often thought processes that go through one’s mind when drinking an older puerh. For me, at least, it reminds me of the simple pleasures of simply enjoying a cup of tea and not worry about the things that really don’t have a lot to do with the tea itself.

The easy going prices of most of these teas also allow me to experiment and sample in a way that isn’t possible with older puerhs. Today I drank a tea that I picked up on the way to the candy store one weekend. It’s an oldish baozhong that looks a little odd

It might not be obvious in this photo, but the leaves are an orangy-green colour, and the stems are exceedingly long and obvious. I didn’t get to try it when I bought it, and so I only got a small amount. I was guessing it’s about maybe 10-15 years old or so, unroasted since it was first processed, and therefore quite rare in that sense. I figured a little of this, if it turns out to be a decent tea, will help me get a fuller picture of what an old, not so old, and youngish baozhong taste like in their various stages of aging.

When I opened the bag today I smelled a whiff of sourness, which worried me. I remember smelling it at the store too, which was one reason why I didn’t buy too much of it — I didn’t know how the sourness would manifest itself in the cup. Then things got hectic and I didn’t even get a chance to try this tea out before I left Taiwan. Now’s my chance to redeem myself.

The colour of the tea is a pleasant orange, just like the leaves. I didn’t use much leaves since I worried about sourness, but it turned out to be not a problem at all – there was not even a hint of sourness in the tea itself, which I found strange, given the smell. Mind you, maybe my black pot helped, I don’t know. Since I probably will use the black pot from now on to brew this tea, it probably doesn’t matter…

It is an interesting tea, tasting more honey like than anything else, and has a hint of that aged taste that I am now quite familiar with in older baozhongs. It hasn’t quite turned fruity yet though, and retains a bit of that young baozhong aroma. What is interesting about this tea is that it is very minty down the throat — I could feel it going down, as if I had just swallowed a mint. It was really obvious for two cups before that effect died down. Interesting.

There was also no hint of bitterness to be detected, no matter how hard I tried to overbrew the tea. I think next time, I ought to use a little more leaves, but at the moment, I’m wondering why I didn’t pick up more of this tea.

The wet leaves are also an interesting bunch — note the size of the leaves. They are certainly above average in size, with the stems being a prominent feature. Haven’t really had a baozhong that looked like this. Then again, provenance doesn’t really matter as long as the tea stands up, and this one certainly does.

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