A Tea Addict's Journal

Wuyi shuixian

August 18, 2007 · 2 Comments

I had some Wuyi shuixian today that I got from Beijing. This is from a guy who claims to have opened the first civilian (as opposed to state-owned) tea factory in Wuyi mountains. He recently opened a store in Beijing, and I got this from him since…. well, since I walked by his store when he was standing out front, and I already knew him and pretty much were obligated to go in and drink something.

Shuixians are good for two things. The first is that it’s quite easy to handle – as long as it’s a properly made and stored shuixian, it can hardly go wrong. You can overbrew it and still get something quite decent out of it. The same is true for most Wuyi teas that are of the roasted variety — really light Wuyi can be quite nasty if overbrewed, at least in my experience anyway. The second good thing about shuixians is that it’s usually really cheap.

The price differential comes from somewhere, obviously. Oftentimes the qi of shuixian is lacking, and the robustness and depth of flavour also don’t necessarily compare with a top notch dahongpao or some such, but as an everyday drink, it beats almost anything. I’ll be happy to drink shuixian till the day I die without too much complaining…

The tea today is somewhat aged. Precisely how long, I don’t know, and I don’t know if the guy who sold it to me knows. I think he muttered something around 10 years. I’m not sure if it’s that old, but it’s probably been a few years. Wuyi teas in general develop a rather distinctive taste after a few years of aging — a taste that I don’t really know how to describe, but is unmistakable once you’ve tried it. This tea actually isn’t too heavily fired

But there’s still a bit of a charcoal roasted taste to it. It is generally sweet, mellow, quite warm, and quite relaxing. This is why I say it’s a good everyday tea – it’s unoffensive and very pleasant. Can’t say the same of things like younger puerhs, light Taiwan oolongs, or greens…

The leaves didn’t really unfurl despite repeated and long brewings.

Somebody told me at one point that leaves that don’t unfurl were rolled by hand, while machine rolled teas tend to unfurl easily. I would think that repeated roastings might also have done something to it. I’m not sure, actually, if any of these are true. Even when I tried to pry the leaves open though

You can see the wrinkles.

I’m wondering why I didn’t buy more of this. Then again, I remembered why as the third typhoon in two weeks raged outside — these things don’t behave when it’s moist outside. They can get sour, and I don’t like sour tea.

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“Impressions”

August 17, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Today I went out for tea with Y, who’s my friend L’s business partner. Y’s from Taiwan, so he has some friends here. I went to where one such friend opens a (non-tea related) store and had some tea with them.

We didn’t stay for long, as the threat of the third typhoon since I arrived kept our session short. We only had two teas. The first was rather interesting — it was a new cake made by Zhongcha, for which L/Y is a primary distributor. The cake is called “Yiwu Impressions”. Now…. it’s a fancy name, but really, what it means is that it is sort of Yiwu-ish, but with no claims by the maker to be selling a tea that is old tree or anything like that. The overwhelming impression I got was mediocrity — the tea is thin, bland, and not very interesting. It’s unoffensive, but also unpromising as something for aging. Is it Yiwu-ish? I suppose, but only barely. It also turns rough on you rather quickly.

The tea used is supposedly just plantation tea, yet a cake at wholesale prices is around 100 RMB, and more if you buy retail. Prices are ridiculously high, and quality is just not there. I don’t think I’ll ever pay that much for this tea.

Y did give me a free cake though. I can’t complain about that. It’ll be interesting to compare notes a few years down the line to see how this tea aged relative to others.

Sorry for the inconsistent colours and the poor quality of the photos — I’m still trying things out with the lighting here, and it’s proving more difficult than I thought.

We only got a few cups of a second tea before we split. It was a yinhao tuo, cooked, and somewhat aged. Quite nice and mellow, and very enjoyable. The provenance of this tuo is a little suspect, but whatever it is… it’s fine as a drink. As something that’s worth a lot of money? That, I’m not so sure.

I have a feeling tomorrow I won’t be going anywhere while this typhoon hits. It’s supposed to be quite strong and I’m already hearing the wind howling outside my window.

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Storage

August 16, 2007 · 8 Comments

Puerh storage has generally been classified as dry and wet. Of course, dry and wet are absolutes, and nothing in reality really operates like that. It’s more like a sliding scale of wetness — from bone dry (say, sticking it in the desert) to extreme wetness (say, immersed in water). It’s obvious that neither of those are desirable, but how much wetness is good?

I’ve been thinking about this problem recently because I’m been fretting over how to store my tea in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a reputation for being humid. It is also the place where all these fabled wet stored teas are from. I myself have drank many such teas. They’re fine. They can be quite tasty. They’re, by some accounts, how puerh should taste. I’ve met quite a few extremely experienced tea drinkers in Hong Kong who hold this view.

Then you have the dry storage proponents, who say that wet storage fundamentally changes the tea in a negative way. You can’t get rid of the “storage” smell. The tea is less “lively”. You trade in the “liveliness” and the “freshness” for sweetness and smoothness. Many people who sell new cakes are people who will talk about this as if it’s the gospel. That, also, has a large following and many believe this to be the best way to proceed.

As with most things that have to do with taste, however, there’s probably no one real truth behind this. What I think there are though are misconceptions.

What happens to the cake I think is two fold. Since we know that mould grows on the tea when in wet storage, it’s obvious that those are part of the process of turning a tea into a sweet, mellow brew. There’s also, of course, oxidation that must be going on all the time. Pure oxidation, however, probably doesn’t work so well, since teas stored in very dry areas tend to perform poorly. I’ve had some that were truly hideous. So, the trick must be to get enough moisture to get the little mould spores going, but not too much so that it overwhelmes the tea…

What a lot of people in China, especially in the north, believe is that any sort of wetness is bad, and that the tea must be really dry. This is why I’ve tried the really dry teas — people who literally rented storage spaces in places with desert like conditions. The teas suck in those cases. Truly wet teas end up being a little boring and a little flat, and sometimes can taste too much of the storage and lose its charm. “Dry storage” as proposed then must really mean “wet, but only a bit”. After all, places like Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite wet to begin with. You don’t get a really dry environment unless you do serious climate control, and as far as I know, most of the dry storage facilities for tea merchants in these places are not climated controlled, only mediated by things like closed windows and sealed entrances.

What are the conditions that would produce the optimal amount of bioactivity, without overwhelming the tea and at the same time without it being too slow so as to make the whole exercise pointless? Somebody really ought to do experiments to figure this out. How about fluctuations in the humidity? I would think that fluctuations allow the tea to go in and out of the bio-enhanced aging phase. So sometimes it’s just oxidation, and sometimes it’s both. That, I suppose, must change the way it ages compared to a constant humidity environment. What, again, does it actually do? I’d imagine it can’t be that difficult to figure out.

Meanwhile… I am just praying disaster won’t befall my stash of tea.

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Shipping tea

August 15, 2007 · 1 Comment

I was really worried when I sent my tea out from Beijing. I haven’t shipped tea before, not in a large quantity like this anyway, and I think I learned a few things

1) Do use lots, and lots, and lots of bubble wrap. I didn’t use enough and some cakes took a bit of a beating.

2) China Post has really bad boxes. They look fine, but they get battered very fast. Which means more hazards for the tea itself.

3) Seemingly strong metal cans can be crushed easily by tea cakes in the same box.

4) Teaware actually do ok if wrapped enough, but some, like the delicate, thinner cups, aren’t meant to survive.

5) Some cakes survive better than others, interestingly enough. Having a tong wrapper REALLY helps and there was virtually no damage to any of the cakes wrapped in those things. You couldn’t even tell they went through the mail.

6) I don’t think I’ll do it again if I can help it.

I ended up following Hster’s advice — I thought given what I had it was the most sensible thing, to put some tea in the cupboard — about a tong of cheap cakes. The tea smell quickly overwhelmed the wood smell, so I think I am probably going to be ok with multiple tongs of tea in there. I also used the spilled tieguanyin from the crushed can to help soak up some smell. They’re still in the cupboard, along with all my puerh. Hopefully, when I come back in a few months… they’ll all be good and happy, mould free, and tastes a little better than when I left — which is tomorrow.

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Storing tea…

August 14, 2007 · 14 Comments

I’m trying to find a permanent home for my teas here.

One problem — the only suitable cupboard in the entire house smells.. like wood. Whatever wood it’s made of…. it’s got this smell that doesn’t seem to go away and reappears when I close the door. It’s the best place because it’s quite closed, is away from a window, and is the perfect size.

I don’t really like the idea of having my teas soak up the smell of the wood. In fact, in this case a cheap MDF board cupboard might be preferable, since those are usually pretty quick to dissipate their smell after a little while. The fact that it uses real wood is making it more problematic…

Any ideas on how to handle the smell problem? I fear this might not go away permanently 🙁

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Old teapots

August 13, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today I had a lesson in older teapots. I went to the Best Tea House today, as my usual haunt in Hong Kong after doing some errands. Tiffany was there, along with some other tea drinkers who frequent there and whom I’ve met before.

What’s different today is that somebody brought with him two teapots he recently acquired, both with claims to old age. He brought it for another tea drinker to evaluate, since he’s known as an experienced collector of particularly zhuni pots. It was really an eye opener for me, as there were things that I didn’t previously know that he told me about how to check for older teapots. For example, he thinks (from all the pots he’s seen) that the clay and the way the clay behaves under fire is really important. It’s interesting that he brought with him a 30x magnifying glass — the kind jewellers use to evaluate precious stones. He uses it to examine the surface of the pot and to see how, semi-microscopically, how the teapot reacted to the heat. By looking at that, he thinks that both pots are of an older age — one being a late Qing pot, while the other one being an early Republican period one. It’s difficult to explain everything he said without having a real life example, but it goes to show that much of it has to do with simple experience and having seen a large number of such things.

The other thing interesting is that we talked about the art of making tea — or the lack of an art of making tea. After all, what we’re doing is to make the best out of every tea we’re presented with. So, for example, with inferior quality tea, you want to use lower temperatures with longer steeping time, because if you use high temps with short infusion time, the tea won’t behave well — it will become bitter, astringent, rough, etc. Whereas with a good tea, you want to maximize the good qualities by pushing it as hard as possible. Using lower temperatures and longer steeping times is simply wasting the leaves — you’re not getting the most out of them.

So to illustrate, one of the tea drinkers talked about how one time he tried a tea made with a 12 minute infusion in a small yixing pot. 12 minutes… is a long time. It was, as he said, a brew of a really low grade tieguanyin, but that doesn’t matter, because the resulting cup was excellent. The long time, the relatively low temperature, and the expert manipulation by the brewer made sure it was a good cup.

That’s something we can all aspire to — again, it’s all about experience and knowing what to do with what you’ve got in your hands.

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Flying

August 12, 2007 · 2 Comments

Flying is such a chore.  Flying is also where you’re guaranteed bad tea, most likely.  Whereas these days branded coffee is making its way into the planes, and at major airports it seems like getting a good cup of java is never a real problem, finding good tea in an airport or a plane is considerably harder.

United, for example, offers Chinese restaurant tea as their “Chinese tea” on their service to Greater China.  What that means is that it’s tea powder…. with that strange taste one only finds in those kind of tea.  I honestly have no idea what type of tea is used to make that powder stuff… and how to explain those bubbles that never pop.  Anybody who’s been to a Chinese restaurant in the US will know what I’m talking about.  If you don’t…. good, because it’s nasty.

I’ve generally resorted to making tea on my own on the plane.  Using their sub-boiling water though, one shouldn’t use a leaf that requires too much heat or too much finness.  I find that young puerh, especially of the maocha variety, works particularly well on a plane.  A few leaves, and you’ve got yourself a cup of very pleasant, sweet, and gentle tea.  Since the water is not really hot enough, it’s almost impossible to overbrew the tea and so it will never really get bitter.  Indian teas also work, for obvious reasons.  I’ve tried brewing tieguanyin on a plane, with not-so-good results.  The leaves didn’t really unfurl, and throughout the cup tasted weak and watery.  Not a good idea.  I haven’t tried brewing Wuyi using plane water yet.  I should probably experiment.

Today I flew Cathay Pacific back to Hong Kong, where I’ll be for a few days to pick up my stuff and to settle my tea from Beijing into a more permanent home.  On the plane they served up a slightly weak, but still pretty reasonable (all things considered) cup of slightly roasted Southern Fujian oolong or something like that.  It’s a little too weak to tell for sure what it is, but it’s pleasant enough.  Flying into Hong Kong is, of course, quite nice.  Aside from being home, it’s also the most efficient airport I’ve been to.  Gate-to-door time was one hour and five minutes, including immigration control, baggage claim, custom, ground transportation … there’s no place like home 🙂

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Chunshui Tang

August 11, 2007 · Leave a Comment

This

is what I had for tea today.

No, it’s not some amber ale. It’s an iced tea from Chunshui Tang, where I went with an old friend for an afternoon drink. Chunshui Tang is most famous for being the original bubble tea place — that sugary sweet drink that is quite popular. I find it rather too sweet for my taste, so I opted for a “charcoal roasted oolong” with no sugar or ice. I wanted to see what they use as tea before adding anything to it.

Hardly any charcoal roasted flavour, and worst of all, a bit on the sour side. Who am I kidding? This stuff is meant for adding stuff with, not drinking on its own.

It’s also incredibly large (I should’ve ordered a small). I drank about half and the caffeine really hit… no more, my body says.

It was nice though, and the head — it stayed throughout the whole session without budging. I’m not sure exactly how they do it. I think they shake the tea vigorously to get the foam, but I don’t know how it stays on there — it’s sort of like the head of a stout, which doesn’t really go away no matter what you do. It’s an odd thing, really.

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Loose puerh

August 10, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Since I don’t really have my full complement of teaware and I don’t really have much tea here, consumption is going to be simple and limited until I get home to Hong Kong and ship the stuff over. One of the few things I do have with me is one of those bags of loose puerh I’ve purchased in Hong Kong. I got this bag, I think, a year ago. It’s been traveling with me to various places, since it’s a pretty good tea to just throw in a cup and make. Over the year though, it’s taken on a softer, rounder taste — a little more like cooked stuff, actually. I think it’s lost that slightly rough edge from the wet storage, and has acquired a little more aged feel to it while actually enhancing the mouthfeel. I got a few different grades, and it’s obvious that they differ in taste when I tried them side by side. The cheapest one was a little sour. This one doesn’t have a sourness, but is thinner than the most expensive version. The liquor of the teas, interestingly enough, reflect that in how dark the tea is. With that comparison (I meant to post it, but I think it got derailed with the earthquake around December that knocked the internet out), you can really tell the differences between different blends and how the feel and taste different in the mouth.

This is all stuff that one can call “cooked”, and the different grades are almost denoting different cookedness. The cooking was not done by the fermentation piles on the floor, but rather in bags in wet storage facilities in Hong Kong. Some would even say that only stuff like this is real puerh — dry stored tea is not technically right if the humidity never got high enough for it to acquire that distinctive puerh taste. Indeed, drinking a 5 year old, real dry stored tea that was in Beijing all 5 years can be a pretty unsatisfactory experience. I wonder though, has anybody actually figured out exactly what kind of microbe is the one that is responsible for the creation of our drink? Somebody should figure it out.

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Taiwan miscellany

August 9, 2007 · 7 Comments

I’m quite jet-lagged, so I’ll keep this one simple.

In the 48 hours since I got here, Taiwan has had two typhoons pass through it. This morning when I was brewing the Meghma oolong again after reading Mary R’s notes on it, using lower temperature, I felt the earth shake a little. No, it wasn’t the tea. It’s a reminder for somebody like me, whose last experience with tectonic plates moving was more than a decade ago, that I live in an area where this sort of thing happens.

Unfortunately, lowering the temperature of the water did not significantly change the tea. It did lower the bitterness, but I still feel it’s mostly Yunnan gold like taste to me. Maybe it wasn’t low enough? But I already left the water out for a good bit and the cup certainly wasn’t blisteringly hot.

I have a feeling that until I get my teaware back from Hong Kong, I’ll be stuck with drinking random things in a cup for the next few days…

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