A Tea Addict's Journal

Shenyang

June 24, 2007 · 2 Comments

Sorry for not posting updates the past day and half. I’ve been out touring the city, but also because the internet here is really spotty — up and down whenever it feels like. I’ve never had a stable enough connection to do much of anything — even my emails are only getting checked slowly.

Mind you, there isn’t a whole lot to report on the whole tea drinking thing here in Shenyang. One big reason is because they don’t seem to drink much of it here. Unlike most of the places in China that I’ve visited, which are either big cities or in tea producing regions, Shenyang is not a big city (I guess it’s better called a second or maybe third tiered city in China) nor in a tea producing region. It seems like people here aren’t really into tea drinking. There are very few stores that are dedicated to tea, even in the touristy areas, and the few that do have your very generic selection of regular offerings — jasmine, greens, a few tieguanyins, some oolongs, and maybe a puerh or two. I’ve encountered two puerh only shops, but the prices are not exactly low, and the selection lacklustre. All in all, a boring place for tea.

The “tea” we had today for lunch was a good example of people’s attitude here towards the drink. This is what was in the 500ml metal pot

See those black specks? Those are the only leaves in the pot. I should add that they were reused from the previous sitting — i.e. they brew out the same leaves, from what I can tell anyway, for the whole day. Yeah. In fact, I haven’t had a single cup of tea here that isn’t ultra bland, except what I had this morning

Which is from…..

Shoot me now.

So as you can probably imagine, I haven’t been spending much time with tea, and drinking the Assam and the Lapsang Souchong I’ve brought along as my supply of decent tea.

I have, however, been doing some touring of this rather pleasant city (apart from the lack of tea). As I’ve stated before, this was the capital of the Manchus before they conquered China, and so there are some historical sites here. Yesterday, we went to the Zhaoling, or the Luminous Mausoleum, for the second Manchu emperor Hong Taiji. The place is big…

If you look very carefully… you might be able to see a hint of the yellow roof of the main building in the distance. Or not. It’s big. The best part of the park was our ride around the park on a rented tandem bike (all 3 of us). Otherwise… it’s a lot of walking to get to places.

The actual mausoleum complex is not that impressive… but it’s the most elaborate this side of the Great Wall.

See that mound in the back? That’s where the ashes went.

The park has a conspicuous absence of any sight of a tea room — nowhere to drink tea. This further cemented my impression of the place as having not much tea.

We went to the Liaoning provincial museum today, which is a must-go. I was very very pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the museum itself, which was brand new despite the slightly ugly architecture

But they had a lot of Qing imperial collections, along with artifacts from earlier periods. Among which is one of my favourite calligraphers, Song Huizong, who is also the author of “Daguan Chalun” or the Treatise on Tea in the Daguan reign”. I took one picture of one of the stuff they had on display.

Among other collections, there was a nice jade gaiwan… note the more rounded lid (as opposed to the modern gaiwan with usually flatter lids). Gaiwans back then were used more for sipping tea out of (with leaves in there, I think) than just for brewing…. which I think might be part of the reason why.

We then went to the imperial palace, and the mansion of the last warlord who lived here, but that’s far too many pictures and probably not terribly interesting. Maybe another day, if it seems interesting enough. But if you ever come to Shenyang (4 hours train ride from Beijing, for those of you who might go to the Olympics or after) just remember to 1) bring your own tea and 2) go to the provincial museum!

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Traveling in China

June 21, 2007 · 10 Comments

These days, wherever you go in China, as long as the hotel is semi-decent it is bound to come with a water boiler, of the cheap plastic kind. This one I’m staying at is no exception. Except, the hotel is fairly new and the water boiler still smells a bit like plastic. Also, they don’t have real glasses here. Instead, I get this:

The white cup is detachable from the base — in fact, it’s just a regular plastic cup slipped into a handle of some sort. It’s not very elegant, nor ideal for tea sipping, but since I wanted to travel light and not carry around a big load of teaware, this will have to do. The stains are from the previous tea that’s still in the cup.

I only took two teas with me on this trip – the Assam that Mr. Lochan gave me, and a Lapsang Souchong. I tried both in the plastic cup by now, and I must say I like the Lapsang Souchong better. It’s got a nice sweet aftertaste and mellows out evenly as infusions go on, whereas drinking the Assam, I really feel the lack of milk was making the tea less enjoyable than it could be. The tea is more bitter, and doesn’t quite turn sweet in later infusions the way the LS does. I think this has much to do with the intended market for such teas, and the preferences of the target audience. A tea like LS will not sell well in China if it doesn’t turn sweet, whereas the way this LS is is probably a touch too light to go with milk.

I think this might also account for the way the Indian Oolongs behave. They brew a bright, strong introduction, but then fades fairly quickly as infusions go on. I think they’re probably just not meant to be drunk that way at all, and drinking it Chinese style is probably not “getting” the tea. Perhaps if stuck in a big porcelain teapot, with some scones on the side, they will beat any Chinese oolong brewed the same way.

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Beijing

June 20, 2007 · 3 Comments

One of the questions I get asked most often is — what do you actually do in Beijing besides drinking tea? What I do is really quite boring (historical research on some obscure topic that nobody cares about), but where I do it is perhaps slightly more interesting.

Since my work involves a lot of flipping through dirty, dusty, poorly catalogued and a few hundred years old documents, guarded by staff that are only rarely friendly, the work is not always pleasant. The trip to the archives, however, can be somewhat pleasant, if the weather’s nice.

I get off the subway at Tiananmen West, which is, as the name implies, on the West side of the Tiananmen Square. On the one side, it’s the Tiananmen.

But in the opposite corner, there’s the very out of place Eggshell

Which is going to be the new National Opera House.

It might be an interesting caveat here to say that the Tiananmen is NOT the entrance to the Forbidden Palace… to get in, you have to walk through the Duanmen (seen from Tiananmen)

And then you’ll see the entrance — the Wumen (Meridian Gate), as viewed from the Duanmen.

It all looks rather small, but if you look here, you can see the buliding actually cuts an imposing figure.

But I don’t get to walk through these places to go in to the archives. Instead, I go through the side — walking down a rather pleasant street

After a few minutes, I get to see the gate that I do get to walk through, the Xihuamen

Which is across the moat for the Forbidden City — it’s not that obvious when you go through the front

In the first picture — those tall buildings right behind the wall are the archives, where I go look at my dusty documents.

Inside… you can still see the old buildings, but parts that one doesn’t get to see when you pay the entrance fee.

The building on the left is the archives, and the wall on the right circles some of the quarters that are for palace workers…. not even people who are related to the Emperor in any way. To give you an idea of the scale of the thing… the grey part of the wall is about 2 meters high. The distance is, of course, quite far.

They are doing some serious renovations for the palace these days, partly to get ready for the flood of inevitable visitors during the 2008 Olympics. There are lots of building materials stacked up, and in the back — the draped over roof of the Hall of Great Harmony, which is the biggest building in the complex.

So that’s what I do everyday, until recently anyway. Now I’m sitting in a hotel room in Shenyang, the old Manchu capital, with very unreliable internet, having just dealt with even less friendly archivists here. Oh well.

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A bad day for tea

June 18, 2007 · 4 Comments

Weather was horrible today. Or more specifically, the air was horrible today. I walked outside this morning, and what greeted me was a nasty industrial smell. The air was yellow. It smelled like sulphur or something. Pollution at its worst. My eyes could feel the sting of the bad air. It’s that bad.

So I basically holed myself up at home. I should’ve gone for something safe, something nice, to cheer myself up despite the bad air. Instead, I went for adventure…

Going through the samples again, I found a bag that was given to me many moons ago by YP, a very experienced tea friend from Hong Kong. She gave me a corner of a cake she thought was interesting and worth experimenting with. It was a silver needle cake. I’ve now come to the conclusion that silver needles generally don’t age so well, but maybe YP has a better eye for these things than I do (I’m sure she does, actually). She said she bought it because she didn’t know what to make of it, so it was an experiment. Now it’s at least two years old. Let’s see how it went.

As you can see, it’s a big piece. In case you have any doubt about the fact that this is a silver needle cake

It’s 100% pure. The tea has a reddish tint now. If it’s a little redder, it could pass as a Yunnan Gold pressed into cake.

The first infusion was great. Light, sweet, fragrant, with a slightly odd but somewhat familiar smell/taste. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it. It was interesting. The second infusion was similar, but a little roughness crept in at the end. The third:

Was a little more rough…. a little more bitter. The fourth was worse… I think I can see where this is headed now, and I stopped before the tea turned nasty on me. Four infusions in, and the first was the best.

The wet leaves really make me wonder what I was drinking. Is this puerh? I’m not sure it is. Is this green tea? Maybe… stale green tea? I don’t know. What do you think? I know YP got it at a pretty cheap price. Good thing too. I don’t think it will compare to her Traditional Character Zhongcha in 25 years.

Dissatisfied by the rather lacklustre drinking session, I opted to drink another tea. I picked up the samples from iwii. The last two had some plastic bag smell in them, so I let them air on a dish. I sniffed… seems ok. So I picked up what he labeled as sample A, and which, he told me, is a Wisteria House (of Taipei) Yiwu via M3T in Paris, sent back to me in Beijing….

I forgot to take a picture of the dry leaves, but they are not really remarkable in any way — broken loose pu, a bit black/dark, and not too distinguishable from any other puerh that’s a few years old.

I brewed it up… and realized that even though the smell of the plastic bag was gone from the dry leaves…. the tea is already deeply infused with the plastic bag smell. Uh oh. I am drinking floral tea, except that this is not jasmine.

The tea brews a deep colour

Iwii said it’s 2003. It looks a bit dark for 2003, but it was probably stored in Taiwan.

Unfortunately, because of the plastic bag smell/taste, it made it rather difficult to pass any sort of real judgement on the tea. All I can say is that the tea is a little rough for my taste, after about 3 infusions, it started getting astringent. There’s some qi, and definitely something that resembles huigan (hidden in the sea of plastic). There’s also some throatiness, or is that my throat acting up because of some chemical component doing something to me? I’m probably making it up here, but whatever it is… I don’t know what to say about it. I feel this is sort of an ok tea, but not a great tea, but I really shouldn’t say that because I’m shrouded in a sea of plastic bag smell…. I’m sorry Iwii, I should’ve waited. In fact, I should let the rest of the samples sit around for much longer than just a few weeks before trying them ever again.

I was still dissatisfied, but my body has had enough caffeine. Oh well.

The wet leaves of the sample doesn’t look all that impressive.

Some of the leaves are more yellow-leaf like, or seem a little stiff. I wonder why.

Now I’ll wake up in a few hours to catch an early morning train to Shenyang, in Liaoning province in the northeast in China, for about a week. Among other things, Shenyang was the capital for the Manchus before they conquered China (it was retained as a nominal capital after they moved to Beijing). I wonder if I can find cheap puerh there like Hobbes did recently. Somehow I don’t think that’s likely.

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Market fragmentation

June 17, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went to Maliandao today, and saw my friend L who came up from Shanghai. I think he had some business to deal with.

He did bring something good, supposedly, anyway. It’s a sample of a Yellow Label from, ostensibly, the 70s. We tried it… nice, but in almost the exact same way that my loose GYG pieces are nice. They taste virtually identical. I’m sure the person who got the Yellow Label cake paid many multiples of what I paid for my pieces. It was a happy thing to know.

I also tried a number of other things, both at L’s store and elsewhere. They include an 03 Yiwu that’s been in Yiwu storage, which is reputably pretty wet and which shows when I tried the tea — there’s a sort of mustiness to it. I also had an 07 “rainfall” (aka summer) Yiwu maocha. Very bland, relatively speaking. Pleasant enough to drink, but not good enough for anything else. There’s a reason summer teas are used for cooked puerh. In fact, I think it’s a waste to bother to pick them – the taste is boring and flat, despite long infusions and generous amounts of leaves. It was definitely interesting to try though. I also had a mass production cake from Zhongcha this year. Smells nice, decent aromas, but a little too aromatic and too little bitterness for me to feel like I’m drinking young puerh.

Then I went on to the store that sells Douji puerh. I tried two things there. One was their 06 Fall “Yu Pin”, which literally means “jade product”, but is from the fringes of the Bulang area. Another cake is a self-produced cake by the owner of the store, who went to Yunnan this spring to press the tea himself (500 cakes of it) and who doesn’t really sell it except as gift packs. The cake is a Guafeng Zhai spring first flush. He pairs it with a real Lao Banzhang, and the set sells for a staggering $330 USD. Not cheap by any stretch of imagination, but then, he had high costs as well as real financial backing (I think tea is entirely a side business for him — he runs some other company). The teas were collected at above-market rates, and he only used first flush tea. The Guafeng Zhai tea is nice, but somehow, I don’t think it’s spectacularly nice to demand such high sums. I mean, it’s got good qi, but only so so huigan and not a lot of throatiness. I’ve read that sometimes for puerh it is better not to use first flush, which is sometimes too tender. Perhaps that explains the relatively subdued nature of the tea. The qi lasted a good bit, and the tea made my stomach hurt, but really… a lot of teas can do that for far less money. He also used an extremely generous amount of tea, which makes me think it has something to do with the strength involved.

One interesting tidbit the owner of this store told me today though is that he’s tried a number of 07 teas so far, and he thinks they are all weaker compared to the 06 version. There’s been talk that because of low rainfall, the tea this spring should be better, but he thinks that when rainfall gets too low… the tea suffers in quality. He might have a point. I haven’t really seen an 07 cake thus far that has made me feel like it’s worth buying. Prices for cakes this year are also much higher than those of years past, simply because the raw materials have gotten so much more expensive. When a lot of 03-05 cakes can be had for less money, why buy 07? It makes almost no sense to do so.

He also told me that many factories are pulling in tea leaves from other provinces to cut cost as well as to keep production going. After all, the total capacity for producing puerh in Yunnan right now has far outstripped the supply of raw maocha in Yunnan, especially given the low production yields this spring (one reason why maocha prices are up, supposedly, and also why a lot of factories haven’t produced much 07 teas yet). Like the story I posted about a week ago of Li Jing, who started a factory but has received few orders, most factories need to make tea to stay alive. Overcapacity, however, is a real problem, and I think many such small factories will be heading for a fall. What that might mean for the owners of such factories… who knows.

Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. If you’re a bull, you will cite the fact that puerh is still 1) very cheap, relatively speaking. 2) It’s only popular in the coastal cities. 3) Brands are still forming. 4) The tea’s inherent advantages, like rebrewability, ageability, etc. If you’re a bear, then you’ll cite 1) overproduction/capacity. 2) High, bubble like prices. 3) Unpalability when young. 4) Extremely volatile market.

How it goes only time will tell, but I think we’re seeing now a healthy segmentation/fragmentation of the market going on, with real consequences for us regular buyers. On the one hand, you have the big factories producing regular stuff that are, more or less, known items. Menghai and the like are prime examples of that. On the other hand, you have these small, boutique shops that make high priced teas catering to the wealthy and (perhaps) knowledgable. These are the ones with very well defined terroir, limited quantities, and high prices to go with it. These are also shops that can’t possibly do this on a grand scale for simple reason of economy and supply.

One huge problem though is that nobody, as far as I know, has good access to a steady source of such tea production areas. Everybody who is in the business rely very much on contacts in Yunnan, trying to score good maocha from the farmers. The way land ownership and production works in such areas is that nobody can buy out a whole mountain — the most I’ve heard of is somebody securing the promise of local farmers to only sell to him. Even that is difficult to enforce/police, and creates problems for a sustained level of quality, especially in a difficult to manage agricultural product like puerh tea.

Another factor that is complicating the issue is the appearance of drink-me-now puerhs. The oolong-ized or the green-tea-ized puerhs taste great now, but nobody really knows how well they age in the long run, and very few (myself included) can really tell them apart with good certainty. Whether such teas are worth the money depends on your tastes — do you want to buy it for aging, or buy it for drink it now?

I know I buy puerh hoping they’ll age into something great for the future. I’m more of a fan of aged teas than young teas, even though my current drinking habits would seem to indicate that I like them young. Rather, I’ve been trying them as much as I can while I have good access to it, and I expect myself going back to more oolongs in the near future when I won’t see as much young puerh. It creates a lot more work for me, and I noticed I’ve gravitated to small production, higher priced, but more individualistic puerh. Soon, however, I’m afraid I’ll be priced out of that market, if current conditions continue, and I think I will, because, as I’ve said before, I think old tree teas, the real ones anyway, won’t drop significantly in prices. Can’t say the same for the mass produced stuff.

Maybe I need to nurse my collection and hope they will all age to greatness, because I might not be affording some of them anymore a few years down the line. Let’s hope I’m wrong on this one!

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Revisiting a Yiwu maocha

June 16, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I thought about this tea after drinking the Yiwu Zhengpin a few days ago. As I noticed an obvious change in the Yiwu Zhengpin, I wondered if this tea I’m drinking today has changed as well since I last had it, probably sometime in December in Hong Kong with Tiffany. I got this from the Yiwu girl when I was dealing with her, trying to get the tong of tea from her that I wanted. The tong is now with me, and I still have some of this maocha left. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough for a few more sittings.

I duly measured 7g of tea.

Last time I drank it and actually posted a full set of notes, I thought it was nice, very nice, in fact. Of course, back then my experience with young teas was considerably less than what I know now, purely because I’ve had so many more teas in the past year 8 months (wow, it’s been that long). I think this tea is memorable for the fact that it was the first time when I felt all those things that people talk about but I have only seen glimpses of — the throatiness, the huigan, the qi, all mixed into one. I’ve since had other teas that are like that, but this one was the one that first allowed me to taste what I now seek in young puerhs.

I’ve really liked the results of me taking pictures of the liquor of the tea in my little clothes-drying area — the lighting in the afternoon works well to give it a consistency that I needed, and looks more natural than artificial light. Too bad I’ll be leaving Beijing soon and have to find some other way to replicate this.

The colour of the liquor, I think, is comparable to the last time I tried it. Although the dry leaves do look a touch redder than the last time, the tea doesn’t taste that way. It’s slightly bitter, sweet, an obvious Yiwu taste, and good huigan as well as qi. The tea is medium bodied. There’s some throatiness as well, more, I’m sure, if I brew it for a little longer, as I employed fairly short (5s or under) infusions until about the 7th.

The tea is smoother than last time, I think, and only displayed some minor roughness when hitting the 5th or 6th infusion, but it died soon after as the tea turned to a sweeter taste. Bitterness is more obvious if I employ longer infusions, but I’ve tried avoiding that.

A very interesting thing is the way the different teawares smell after each infusion. After I pour the tea out from the gaiwan into the fairness cup, I smell the bottom of the lid, which smells like that slightly sour, slightly off smell of young puerhs — some have called it “stinky green” in Chinese parlance. It’s not an aromatic smell. Rather, it’s more like an odor. Some have said this is the sun smell. I’m not sure, but I have taken it to be a typical young puerh smell. The leaves themselves don’t display much of a smell at all.

Then, pouring the tea from the fairness cup into my drinking cup, I smell the fairness cup, which, in this case, smells quite floral. It’s that Yiwu smell. After drinking, I smell the drinking cup, which is sweeter than the fairness cup.

It’s quite fun smelling all the different things. I think a wenxiangbei will only give you one kind of smell. I am personally not a fan of those things, as must be obvious, and it seems my preference against it is shared in some circles, more in mainland and Hong Kong. In Taiwan they seem to employ it more often.

After quite a number of infusions, I poured our the leaves

Since it’s maocha, it’s pretty.

I should note, at this point, that I no longer think thick center veins have anything to do with the age of a tea. I’ve seen plantation teas with very thick center veins. I do, however, think that if the secondary veins are obviously popping, that could be an indicator of the fact that the tea is from older trees. Don’t ask me why, and I don’t know if biologically this makes any sense, but among the teas I’ve seen, obviously popping secondary veins are pretty rare, and seem to happen most often with old tree teas. This picture might make my point clearer

In the pictures for the 6 mountain maocha series that I drank (link to the left), you can also see this in action. Although, I don’t think that is universally true and certainly shouldn’t be used as a reliable indicator. Rather, it’s more like an observation….

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Red Thunder

June 15, 2007 · 4 Comments

Rummaging through the samples I have today, looking for something to kill, I found a blue box with a label on it saying “Gopalhara Tea Estate — Red Thunder oolong”. Hmmm, I’ve neglected to taste this tea! It was kindly given to me by DH, a Boston area tea friend. He got it from somebody in New York, who apparently buys these small lots of premium Indians teas and resells them. There was a few grams in the tin left, perfect for a session with my small gaiwan.

The leaves look a little like oriental beauty, with the mixture of colour and type of leaves.

The tea brews a deep orange, with clear and somewhat thick liquor. The taste… is intensely floral. The first two infusions, as I’ve noticed with these Indian oolongs, coat your mouth with whatever taste the tea has. I was expecting this thing to drop off after a few infusions, as some other Indian oolongs I’ve had tend to do, but this one stayed strong — I brewed probably 10 infusions, and it still had decent taste. I’m impressed.

The floral quality of the tea reminds me of a dancong, actually, or at least the non fruity dancong. The affinity to dancong is most obvious around infusions 2-3. Later on, it came back to a taste that is mostly like a first flush darjeeling. In fact, I wouldn’t know this one’s supposed to be an oolong were it not for the floral qualities in the early infusions. It’s got less of the astringency that one gets from regular darjeelings, and but in some ways, I prefer those more. I think there’s something weird to me when I drink one of these teas — perhaps it’s the fact that the floral/fruity qualities are so concentrated in the first two infusions but then fade away. When I drink teas like this, I always wonder if they’re coated with a layer of artificial flavour. I’m sure they’re not, but it just seems that way sometimes.

This is easily the best Indian oolong I’ve had though. Depending on the price, I could get some of this. If it costs more than what I have to pay for reasonable dancong though, I’d pick up the dancong instead. The novelty value isn’t enough to keep me that interested over time.

You can see the wet leaves also look somewhat like an oriental beauty… I wonder how they did the fermentation, kill-green, and rolling/drying.

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Yiwu Zhengpin revisited

June 14, 2007 · 6 Comments

I actually finished a sample today — the sample of Yiwu Zhengpin that Phyll gave me back in October, when Bearsbearsbears brought it over. I had it twice, and then just let it rot in its little bag while I moved onto other things. It’s time to finish this one up.

As you can see… this is even more chopped liver than yesterday’s. Among the small compressed pieces… I also noticed that there were some very fined chopped leaves pressed into the cake, perhaps leaves that were crushed when pressing.

Since it’s so broken, I tried my infusions very very short… any shorter, and I’d have to pour the water directly into my cup.

The resulting tea though, came out pretty dark

Much, much darker than I remember them. Last time I tried it on its own I said it’s a little odd. I think I will maintain that stance, although the oddness is a little clearer this time, no doubt partly due to me having had a lot more young puerh in the past 8 months. The tea, like I said last time, came out a little rough, and drying. There’s a definite note of sourness that wouldn’t go away no matter how many infusions I brewed — up until pretty much the end. The tea was astringent, but it had decent aromas and also gave a sweet taste. It’s just that the sweet taste was accompanied by some not-so-sweet taste. It’s bitter to a point, although the bitterness fades a bit, but also never entirely going away. There’s a sharpness to the tea that is a little unpleasant. I’m sure the heroic amount of leaves for the gaiwan has something to do with it, but the fact that a lot of it got washed out in the first few infusions in the form of really tiny bits, as well as the fact that most of that flavour should’ve been brewed out in a few infusions, mean that the remaining sharpness must be from the tea itself and not from the amount of tea.

Why is the tea darker now than what I remember last time? I don’t know. Perhaps age has something to do with it. After all, it’s been sitting around for 8 months without anybody touching it. But is it enough to give it such a big change? I’m really unsure.

Phyll suggested, at one point, that I should try it out, but somehow I couldn’t find a 2004 version of this cake, having only seen mostly the 2005 ones. Perhaps it’s the 2005 one that had the big production run, whereas the 2004 was more limited. Who knows?

It was fun to drink this tea again after having tried so many other things. I guess this is one thing we can all look forwrad to — trying teas again after a long break from them, seeing what has happened to them. I noticed that I didn’t say much of anything about the sourness in the tea, but this time it came out much more pronounced… I wonder if it’s a function of me not having noticed, or it not being there…

The wet leaves were very chopped, but I did find a few that were a little more complete

Thanks again Phyll for the sample 🙂

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Bangwei Fall 2006

June 13, 2007 · 3 Comments

I think I probably have a month or more worth of samples to drink, so eradicating them is really not entirely possible. Right now I’m just trying to pare them down, and to drink up the little bits or broken leaves that are in each bag. At least this way the shipping that I have to do soon can be done a little easier with less mess.

Before I go on about today’s tea, I should mention this: If anybody has experience shipping a fair amount of tea, or has any ideas about how to pack said tea for medium term storage (a month or two) please let me know. Right now I am thinking of sticking the tea in a cardboard box and ship it over to Hong Kong. The tea will be divided into tongs, and be wrapped in plastic bag (perhaps double plastic bag) that are odorless and tightly knotted so that they are more air tight. This way I hope to keep the tea from absorbing any excessive moisture or funny smells. If anybody can see a big problem with this arrangement… let me know that too.

Digression aside, today I took out one of the older bags of samples I got last fall. This is from a guy who makes tea in Kunming. He goes up to the mountains, collect maocha for old tree teas, and then presses and sells them. He seems to sell a lot through Sanzui, although he probably has other channels to do so, as well as having a store in Kunming. The teas he makes are consistently of decent quality, but the prices are not low. In some ways, this is definitely one way for a tea merchant who can’t compete on cost to do well — the boutique teashop that makes great tea. It’s nice to know, at the very least, that when you buy from this guy the tea won’t have funny problems like green-tea or deliberate pre-fermentation or anything like that.

So the sample I tried was the Bangwei mountain 2006 fall tea.

As you can see…. it’s really the shavings, broken bits, and loose leaves of the piece he sent me. There’s still probably 20g of the piece intact, but since the shavings is about 6g, I brewed that.

I only drank this tea once or twice, and my memory of it is faint. I think both times it was drunk in a long tasting session with other people, so there was never an individual, clear impression of the tea. This is my chance, I suppose.

The tea brews up slightly dark.

The first infusion…. was strong. The second stronger. The tea reminds me of the days when I first started drinking young puerh without knowing much about them… there’s that strong, bitter, taste with that slight hint of sourness to it, hitting you head on and reminding you that this tea really shouldn’t be drunk right now. I think the fact that the leaves were so chopped up has something to do with the harshness of the tea. The bitter does turn to sweet, and rather quickly too, but the first second or two was powerful. I did feel a bit of throatiness, but the strength of the tea was most obvious when I got up with my cup to take a picture of the liquor with natural light at the third infusion. My heart was pumping — this was more caffeine than qi, but either way, it was making its presence known.

The tea didn’t last that many infusions, having endured about 10 before just becoming sweet water, although the tea taste remained and I brewed a further few infusions after dinner to clear my mouth of MSG. I tried finding leaves in the chopped liver, and eventually found a few more complete pieces…

I got two cakes of the spring 2006 after trying this sample. I still haven’t opened the spring cakes to drink yet, and probably shouldn’t for a while yet. I think this will make pretty interesting tea in a few years.

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An old favourite

June 12, 2007 · 5 Comments

When I was trying to think up what to drink, I saw my little pot for nongxiang tieguanyin. It’s been underused this year… so, why not, I still have some of that tea.

I brewed it simply, filling the pot about a quarter full, and then just going through the motions. About 6 or 7 infusions later, the tea was done. It’s a tiny pot, so each cup takes only a little time to drink. I can be done with it in half an hour.

The tea was fine, not great, as it is pretty low grade stuff. It’s also been aged just a little. There is also a slight note of sourness, although managed properly it won’t show up at all. When I was done with the tea though, I felt dissatisfied… I think the infusion after infusion of puerh is, in some ways, quite nice, and an oolong, especially a tieguanyin or the like, just don’t cut it.

Looking at the wet leaves, I have my suspicion that this is a pretty thoroughly mixed tea, with some benshan involved, if not mostly benshan. I am terrible at telling apart the various varietals that are used in these mixtures, and it is not a surprise that almost nobody will label their tea benshan, or maoxie, or something other than tieguanyin. I really ought to go to a reputable store and learn. Yet… it’s a difficult question to ask. “Do you have benshan?” Sometimes I think even the vendors don’t know what they’re selling.

I did conduct an experiment today — I brewed the tea again, using fresh leaves in a gaiwan, and then pouring it into a fairness cup. Half went into my drinking cup, while the other half went into the now empty pot. I wanted to see if I could tell any difference between the two. I must say that it seems the tea that went through the pot comes out a little softer, and a little of the edge seemed to have been taken off. Yet, I wonder if it’s placebo. I really ought to do a blind test.

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