A Tea Addict's Journal

Trying to get the old price back

June 11, 2007 · 5 Comments

It seems like everybody who deals with puerh is trying to get the old price back, although which old price depends on your vantage point.

I went to Maliandao today. I was there to buy some gifts for somebody, as well as buying some tea for myself. I had planned to buy some of the Bulang cakes (aka sample 1), which I only have one of right now. So I went to the store — the only store on Maliandao that has it — and hoped to get some more.

It was on the shelf, just like last time, although the girl who sold the two to me wasn’t there, which isn’t a good thing, as I had hoped for a smooth and quick transaction. I asked the girl working there how much the tea is, hoping for an easy quote…. but I got a quote of more than four times what I paid last time.

Lovely.

Incensed, I started telling her in a rather angry tone how I bought two cakes last time at my previous price, and I didn’t even bargain about it because I was only buying two cakes (I didn’t tell her that also because I thought it was really good value). No no no, she said, it couldn’t be. There’s no way they sold that tea to me for so low. It must’ve been another one. It’s below their cost, etc etc….

I will spare you the whole details of our discussion and arguments, but about two hours later, I got her to agree to sell it to me at the price I paid last time. I was hoping for a better price than last time before I went, partly because I was buying more this time than last, but at this point, I really didn’t have it in me to continue any further, and I really have no reason to believe she will budge any further.

Then… apparently, she couldn’t find it in the store. We looked, and looked, and looked… and indeed, no tongs of this tea was to be found. They might have it in their warehouse, but trying to find a tong or two of a tea in a warehouse is a pretty meaningless exercise, at least on such short notice. I ended up leaving just with the four bings that were in the store… less than what I had hoped for, but alas, this is what I had to live with. At least I got my old price back.

While there, I did try a cake that she purports to be a Shuilanyin from the 80s, which sounds fishy. The tea couldn’t be more than 10 years, and most likely is less than 10 years. Smells of storage, but not wet storage. Not great at all, and asking for far too much.

I then went to Xiaomei’s store to ask for information on something. While there, two people came in whom I’ve met before. Turns out after some discussion that one of them actually owns a lot of tea — something I wasn’t aware of previously from our prior conversations. The guy has jians of, among other things, Menghai’s Classic 66, Gongting Qingbing, Yiwu, “Big Bokchoy” (a nickname for a Banzhang tea that sells for something like 1000 RMB a cake)… etc etc. From the sounds of it, this guy has at least a million RMB worth of tea sitting in storage. I think he’s at Xiaomei’s store to try to push some teas on her to sell for him — he brought along samples. Xiaomei, from what I understand anyway, thinks Menghai tea is too risky now to enter the market. The only time she does anything with them is if she has secured a buyer already, and then connects the buyer and seller and essentially takes a small commission. Holding any Menghai tea is very risky.

Anyway, this million RMB Menghai owner was saying to me how this current dip in the market, with Menghai prices being about half of what it was early this year, is just an opportunity. New spring teas are, once again, starting to arrive from the factory. Guangzhou already received new teas — first time in two months, and the 702 batch of 7542 is all sold out already. There’s rumblings that prices will rise again, and this is a great time to buy some more Menghai tea again and catch this wave.

Somehow, I could almost feel this guy was trying to get me to buy some tea. Perhaps he thinks I actually have that kind of money to spend on tea, and perhaps he’s just getting desperate. Very early on in the conversation I already said Menghai is too pricey for my tastes, but he kept going on and on about how great their teas are. I could feel a sales pitch.

I escaped with a phone call, but it’s clear that some other people — those with great stocks but nowhere to sell them to — are hoping for the old price. It’s just that in their case, they want the higher one. I can imagine many, many, many people being in the same boat, having bought a boatload of tea a while ago and now wondering how they can turn it into cash, unless they want to start cooking with the tea leaves for food. This makes me think that whatever rise in price we might see in the next few months might be quickly quashed by some people who will be eager to use the slightly higher price to get rid of stock on their hands. I also can’t imagine the same fervour in buying that has gripped the market in late 2006. People are now very, very aware of the risks of this investment (as evidenced, among other things, by yesterday’s article), and are, in my opinion, unlikely to jump in with the same enthusiaism.

I ended my trip today with a stop at a Wuyi tea shop, since this was the stop for the gift buying. I went in, told them how much of their 200 RMB/jin shuixian I wanted, in what kind of packaging, paid, and left… no fuss, and all done in minutes. I sat down just to chat with the owner a bit and try one of their new teas while the packing was being done. No bargaining either — prices, at least at this store, are more or less fixed. I didn’t even try the shuixian I bought, since I’ve bought a bunch before and know it’s quality. I must say it was a welcomed relief compared to the endless testing, bargaining, doubting, and regretting in the world of young puerh.

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Buyers don’t buy, sellers don’t sell

June 10, 2007 · 5 Comments

The following is an article that I saw on Sanzui (unfortunately, you need to register to see the original text), which was in turn reposted from sina.net, a Chinese web portal. I’m trying to stick as close to the original text as possible, so some places might read a little awkward. Also, note that 1 USD = 7.7 RMB at current exchange rates. I should also note that coincidentally, I’ve actually met Li Jing at the Shanghai tea expo.

Buyers don’t buy, sellers don’t sell: Today’s puerh in a frozen state

From Jinghong, the capital of Xishuangbanna, to the tea country of Menghai, one must pass through Nannuo Mountain.

On the west side of the highway is the wooden house of Qiuhe. The people live on the second floor, and on the ground floor there’s a huge bag of tea, totaling some 250kg. This is freshly produced spring maocha. Right now it’s May 9th, and the price for old tree Nannuo maocha is about 280 RMB/kg. At this price, just this bag of spring tea is worth 70,000 RMB. Adding in the summer and fall teas, making 100,000 RMB this year is no problem for Qiuhe.

Yet he hasn’t sold one single kilogram of tea. He said he’ll wait — he’s hoping for 300 RMB/kg.

Qiuhe has a reason to wait. This Hani ethnicity family has been living in Nannuo Mountain for generations, and have always relied on tea as a living. From what Qiuhe remembers, in the 80s the price for all teas, plantation or old tree, were the same, around 0.4 or 0.5 RMB/kg. It wasn’t until 1999 when the price rose to 3 RMB/kg. Then after 2004 came around, the price went far beyond what he imagined possible. Two years ago, it hit 40 RMB/kg, and last year at the beginning of the year it was already at 55 RMB/kg. This year it zipped past 200 RMB/kg in no time.

Yet, just across the road, the general manager of the Menghai Shagui Boma Tea Factory, Li Jing, said as soon as I met her, “this year’s no good. Renminbi (RMB) shrinks as soon as it sees tea leaves. What do you think this is?” Her factory didn’t receive an order until very recently for two or three tonnes of tea. “You see that factory down the road? They haven’t even lit their furnace (for making tea)”

Li said that the prices this spring for various famous mountains rose about seven to eight times for plantation teas, and more than 10 times for old tree teas. Take Banzhang village of Bulang mountain for example, last year it was around 100-200 RMB/kg for old tree tea. This year, before May 1st, the price shot past 1250. Hu Wang, who came from Beijing to buy maocha, said he’s even bought some for 1600 RMB/kg.

Banzhang village is almost like a fairy tale this year. When Li came here in April to buy tea, she agreed on a price of 1100 RMB/kg on the first day she arrived. The next day, it went up to 1150. She decided to wait a little, but when she got up the next morning, it was 1200. She decided not to wait any longer, and bought 60kg. The tea cost more than the car that carried it home.

Away from Qiuhe’s home, on the other side of Nannuo mountain in the hamlet of Shuihelao, Xiao Zhixin, a graduate student in anthropology from Beijing University is also seeing the effects that the puerh tea craze has had on the people here. “A few years ago the people here just grew their own rice and corn to eat, some families didn’t even make enough food to feed themselves. Even last year, when the tea prices just started rising, there were only two motorcycles in this hamlet of 240 people. Now most have at least one, if not two motorcycles. There are even some new karaoke bars, and some girls from out of town who just loiter in front of them.”.

Pazheng village, to which Shuihelao belongs, produces mostly plantation teas. They neither have the old trees of Nannuo Mountain, nor the miracle of Bulang mountain’s Banzhang village.

Li Jing said other than families that only have old people and kids, almost every family has a car these days, mostly pickups of some sort. As long as you have an identification card for Nannuo or Banzhang, put down the ID card and sign a contract, you can take home a motorcycle or even a car right away. According to a tea merchant from Beijing, a farmer in Banzhang could make a few hundred thousand RMB easily, and during the harvest season, just one day’s picking would be a few thousand RMB.

But, as one can see from Qiuhe’s old wooden house, the wealth that has suddenly arrived is only affecting one corner of Yunnan. According to Yang Shanxi, the director of Yunnan’s Tea Bureau, on the whole Yunnan fresh (unprocessed) tea leaves prices rose about 2-3 times this year, from last year’s 3-4 RMB/kg to this year’s 10-12 RMB/kg. Even then, it is still far from Zhejiang province’s prices, as maocha for Yunnan is around 62 RMB whereas Zhejiang has reached 182. Zhang Jun of the Tea Institute of Yunnan’s Agricultural Academy thinks that as long as the market develops normally, there’s still ample room for growth in puerh tea prices.

Statistics also show that even though Yunnan farmers have had a substantial increase in their income in recent years, they are still ranked in the bottom when compared with the rest of the country. But the stories of Lao Banzhang has attracted the attention not only of people from Menghai or just the puerh production areas, but the whole country as well.

When asked about her thoughts when she joined the puerh tea industry as a kindergarten teacher in 2005, Li Jing said “when I saw other people making money, I wanted to make some money too”. She has natural advantages, having lived in Nannuo for almost 50 generations. Her father teaches in Lao Banzhang. “I was naive back then. There are lots of relatives, so it was easy to buy maocha. When we got maocha we just made it into finished products and sell. It was easy to make money”.

The same thought went through everybody’s mind. Li said that this year, in the local bank in Menghai, there were four lines of people who were lining up to take out cash. The local branch didn’t have enough money to pay all of them, and had to get cash transferred from Dali to meet the needs. Everybody talks about puerh when they meet. A parent of one of her former students, who used to be a garbage collector, asked when seeing her “Teacher Li, you want puerh? I have all sorts of teas.”

“Prices for rice went up. Prices for vegetables went up. People who used to grow vegetables went to collect tea. People who used to work in restaurants are now working in tea factories. Even nannies are impossible to find” Li said, noting things that outsiders don’t see. “Many tea factories can’t begin production because they can’t find workers. Last year we paid 30 RMB per day for wages. This year people won’t even work for 50”

Li’s problems are not limited to these. She planned to make a tea factory in 2005. In 2006 they made about twenty to thirty tonnes of tea in the spring. With the money she and her partner made, as well as the money loaned to her from her distributors, she expanded the factory’s capacity to 500 tonnes a year, and owed a million RMB in debt in the process. The factory was finished early this year, but prices of maocha is already so high that nobody wants to risk putting down a big order. “If our customers don’t send us money first, we don’t do the order. What if the market crashes? We’ll be dead.”

Factories like Li’s are very common. She said that last year there were only about 50 factories in the area. This year, there are 170. In fact, in the whole of Yunnan, according to Yang Shanxi, puerh processing capability is already approaching 200,000 tonnes a year. Last year’s production of all teas was 138,000 tonnes, with puerh accounting for about 80,000 tonnes of it. This means that there’s already a large distance between capacity and demand, which caused the prices of tea to rise quickly this year. The
other main reason is that rain came late this year, lowering overall production of tea leaves in the spring.

Late night on May 11th, in the lobby of a hotel in Jinghong sat a group of tea merchants from various placing, drinking together. Some of them have already been in Xishuangbanna for two or three months, but they still haven’t placed a big order. After May 1st, the price of Lao Banzhang has already dropped back to 800 RMB/kg, but still, nobody was buying and nobody was selling.

“Right now the situation is quite funny — buyers don’t buy, and sellers don’t sell”, Hu Wang said. He said that on the one hand, tea farmers want a better price. On the other, merchants are worried about risk, so they have been delaying their purchase, which then freezes the market.

A Hebei tea merchant bellowed out “do you bet high or do you bet low?”

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Zhongcha Bulang Fall 2006

June 9, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Rummaging through my samples, I found a small bag with a little piece of paper, written by me, saying “Zhongcha Bulang Fall 2006”. Why not, I thought to myself. So, I took out the pieces and measured 7.3g

I’ve been using the amount of tea I use these days to give myself a more uniform way to taste the teas, as well as giving the readers an idea of what I do with them, generally speaking. I realized, after the notes for the samples I sent out, that brewing parameters vary greatly, and it is more meaningful if I provide some sort of parameter when I talk about my tea tastings. Otherwise, they’re less useful.

For this tea, infusions were kept short (5s or so) until about the 7th or 8th infusion, after which it lengthened. The tea went through some pretty interesting progression. It started in the first two infusions in a very mild manner, sweet, fragrant, but with a decent “hit” in the back of the throat. Very promising. Then it sort of went through a transition period in the next few infusions, when the tea gradually got a little more astringent and also a little more bitter. Then, it hit the final stage, when if I brew with a short time, the tea comes out tasting sweet and nice, like a good young puerh should, or unpleasant and bitter, like a fake green-tea puerh would.

I should perhaps explain again what I mean when I say green-tea puerh. Somebody asked me today what I meant. I think what I mean is what Chinese would call “hongqing”, or baked green. This is different from “shaiqing” or sun-dried green. Hongqing basically means tea that was processed/dried at a high temperature, while shaiqing is that of a low temperature processed tea. The difference between the two is that hongqing brings out aromatics that shaiqing won’t, but at the expense of ageability. Think of a typical longjing — the first infusions (or the first minute of infusion) would bring you a highly aromatic, sweet, and nice cup of tea, but oversteeped green would taste astringent, rough, and bitter. A proper young puerh, on the other hand, has the reverse order — bitter first, but turns into sweet water later on. This is probably not the only way to tell, nor is it the surefire way to tell the two apart, but I think it is one way, and I feel that having tasted a whole bunch of younger stuff… this has generally held. I have especially noticed among the 2007 cakes I’ve tried that the proportion of green-tea puerh has been pretty high this year. This is also the concensus in online forums like Sanzui — that this year’s puerh production has been uncharacteristically green for some reason. Don’t know why — some speculate that the farmers all got richer and bought drying machines instead of just leaving it to the whims of the weather.

I should now caveat this all by saying that much of this has been knowledge that I have gleaned from various sources, online and offline. I have, however, tasted a few hongqing samples of a few years old that… are bitter and nasty (think stale old green tea). So, given that to be the case, what I say here should be taken with a grain of salt.

That said, I don’t feel confident enough with the tea I drank today to ever buy it. It’s probably a mix of the two, and the mix of hongqing tea is probably less than the “Banzhang Zhengshan” I drank about a week ago. Yet, it’s still enough to deter me from thinking of buying this tea.

The wet leaves

As Lew has pointed out in a recent comment on the day when I mixed the Yiwu with the Banzhang — trying to pick out which of these leaves have been improperly processed is going to be a mightily difficult job. In fact, I doubt it’s at all possible. Buyer beware, I suppose.

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Mixing teas again

June 9, 2007 · 4 Comments

Continuing my sample eradication, yesterday I drank the remaining piece of Zhongcha traditional character bing given to me by my friend YP in Hong Kong.

A really clean, but unremarkable, piece of tea. It’s about 5g, not really enough for my pot. So I decided to add a few small pieces of the Guangyungong broken bits that I bought in Hong Kong and see what happens.

The tea first brewed very lightly

But it then deepened into a nice red colour

Notice, though, that you can still see the sediments. The liquor, though dark, is very very clear. The picture doesn’t really do a good job of showing that.

The taste of the tea is a mix of the two. There’s the more fragrant plummy taste of the Zhongcha cake, and then the blander sweetness mixed in with the bamboo wrapping taste of the GYG. My girlfriend thought it was an unsuccessful mix, as they lost their individual characters and turned into a mix of taste. I must admit it probably could’ve been mixed better, but I thought in some ways the tea wasn’t bad at all.

The pieces were too broken for good pictures of the wet leaves, although it is obvious that the Zhongcha tea was better stored with more flexible/nicer looking leaves, while the cheap GYG pieces had darker and stiffer ones. I also think it could be partly a function of the different varietals used, with the GYG using Guangdong tea leaves that age differently compared with the Yunnan ones.

Now I’m wondering what to drink for today….

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101 Plantation 2004

June 7, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Continuing the campaign of samples eradication, I drank part of the 101 Plantation Jingmai 2004 cakes that Lew Perin gave me when I visited New York. I never got around to them until now, sorry.

I have heard that 101 plantation has closed out Jingmai mountain for themselves, but I think that’s obviously not true, unless all the Jingmai teas out there are all fake, which I don’t think is the case. Jingmai teas tend to be rather aromatic when young, and turns a deeper tone once aged a few years. I’ve had a few cakes that are a few years old from He Shihua, among others, that have a deeper tone and quite different from the light and fragrant young Jingmai. It’s actually slightly similar to some Mengku cakes in the progression from a very light and fragrant tea that turns deep very quickly.

I again had the option of using the broken bits or the big piece. I opted for the broken bits, which came to around 8.5g of tea. A rather heroic amount for my small gaiwan (since my big one broke), but what can we do.

The two years of aging has done some work to the tea

It’s thick, fairly bitter, very slightly sour, and smooth. My girlfriend identified the aroma as dried apricots, which actually lasted through all the infusions with very little obvious change. The bitterness dissipated after about 5-6 infusions. There wasn’t a lot of huigan, nor was there much in the way of throatiness, but the tea remained mostly smooth throughout, no doubt thanks to the buddy leaves. In those respects it’s actually rather similar to the tea I had yesterday, except that the tea yesterday was sweeter and lighter, and today’s was heavier. Drinking a young Jingmai though, one would not really expect the taste to turn so much in so little time.

Since I used broken bits… the wet leaves are obviously quite chopped

The few complete leaves I could find were all very tiny — early picked teas, for sure.

I personally am not a great fan of Jingmai. While the young young teas are nice, I think I prefer other areas. It’s also gotten very expensive, being one of the priciest mountains in Yunnan these days. Nevertheless, it was nice and smooth drinking, and thanks Lew for the sample 🙂

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Mystery sample alpha

June 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I’m trying to clear out my samples, if you haven’t noticed. Samples are a bit of a pain to carry around, and since I’m going to be leaving Beijing in about a month, having too many samples will make shipping more of an annoyance than it already is. So… today I picked up the sample labeled alpha from iwii and drank that. There was a piece of solid tea, and then the loose stuff. The loose stuff end up being around 7g, so it made sense to drink the loose stuff first.

The tea brewed a somewhat dark liquor

That deepened in colour by infusion 3

The taste is a bit odd, and not immediately pinpointable. I know this must have been aged a few years, maybe 3-5 years. The taste is mellow, if a little subdued. The first infusion or two were a little bland, but there is some aftertaste, though no feeling down the throat. The tea is soft and reasonably thick, and smooth. The subsequent infusions, around 3-4, developed a slight sourness that had me worried. That, thankfully, went away by around infusion 5-6. There was a bit of bitterness that showed up in infusion 3-5, but overall the tea is not bitter at all. Aftertaste is a bit stronger here as well, but still no real cooling effect. There’s a slight feeling of astringency, but the tea is overall pretty smooth. No doubt the few years has done some good, and probably softened out the edges, but I have a feeling the tea, to start off with, was never very bitter nor rough.

This makes me think that it could be a Yiwu, and the late infusions (9+) tasted sweet and more Yiwu like. The earlier infusions had hints of what I thought was a Yiwu taste, but dissimilar enough so that the thought didn’t occur to me until the tea turned a corner in the later infusions.

I asked iwii with this in mind, whether if this was a Yiwu or not. Turns out it’s Stephane Erler’s 2003 Yiwu. Iwii also reminded me that Stephane himself said this cake is more precisely from Jiangcheng. This might explain the unfamiliar flavours I had in the beginning.

I must say this time it tasted quite a bit better, and very different, than last time when I tried it in Shanghai with Bearsbearsbears, when I thought it tasted odd and uninspiring. I think there might be a few things at work here. One is that it was traveling in his backpack for a few weeks before getting to Shanghai, the other being differences in water used. I must say that while there are still things that worry me a bit, such as the sourness and the general lack of a physical effect, it’s not nearly as problematic as I remembered from January when I had it in Shanghai.

Since I used the shavings, one wouldn’t expect to see many whole leaves in the sample

I did manage to find a few after some sifting

It’ll be interesting to try the big piece next time, probably in yet another place since I don’t think I’ll get to it before I leave Beijing. It is also a good reason why tea samples sent for honest opinions shouldn’t be labeled 🙂

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Tea jamming

June 5, 2007 · 2 Comments

When you have a lot of samples, you have a lot of leftovers. Sometimes I have the presence of mind to use up all the samples, but sometimes I don’t. So, I have a few of these “odds and ends” samples that really isn’t enough for a session on their own, but just enough to throw away. This is what Chinese call “chicken ribs” — “tasteless for eating, but lamentable to throw away”. (There’s a long story for this, from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.)

So today I decided to dispose of two of these samples by mixing them together and drinking it. One is a leftover Yiwu from a long time ago. The other is the supposedly Lao Banzhang. I had a bit more of the Lao Banzhang than the Yiwu, but they add up to about 6g of tea. You can see how different they look

I think the Yiwu is 2005, and the Banzhang is new — this spring’s pick.

So I mixed them up… and stuffed them into the gaiwan

And out came the tea

The taste is a little interesting. There’s the up front bitterness and strength of the Banzhang, and then the sweetness of the Yiwu appears. Except something’s not quite right. A few infusions later…. yup…. the Banzhang is, as I had suspected, a green tea. Last time I wasn’t sure partly because it was so fresh off the mountain. I thought perhaps it is a product of its extreme young age. Now, almost two months later, it’s still tasting like that… in fact a little worse… and I start getting suspicious. The bitterness is the kind that doesn’t go away. It’s quite an uncomfortable feeling, drinking the tea. You can see the mixture of the leaves in this

The body of the tea is good, but I think the greeness of the Banzhang killed it. Would’ve been more interesting if it were a properly processed tea… which it isn’t.

I eventually picked out all the Banzhang leaves (it’s not very hard to do). I then brewed the Yiwu more or less just on its own, with maybe a few of the Banzhang leaves in there. Much better, with a solid sweetness that one would expect from the Yiwu.

This made me realize two things

1) If mixing two teas together, the sweeter/lighter one should probably account for more of the blend in order to show its flavour. Otherwise, the more up front/obvious tea will overpower it.

2) In small enough quantities, oven-dried green tea is not noticeable as long as you have enough real puerh to cover it up.

1 is not a bad thing to know, 2 is a little unsettling, unfortunately.

Here are the two piles of leaves, wet. You can see how they look very different… and how the Banzhang looks just a little too green. Smelling the wet leaves, it has that classic Yunnan green tea smell. No good. My friend got gibbed buying this in Yunnan (this is a tea they didn’t pick themselves).

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Jabbok loose tea redux

June 4, 2007 · 1 Comment

My girlfriend arrived today, so I pulled out something a little different from the parade of young teas to drink. It’s a loose puerh from Jabbok Tea House in Hong Kong, which I last blogged about here.

The dry leaves look normal, if a bit broken (bottom of the pile stuff)

I said it tasted bitter. I have to say that it is still quite bitter, but at some point, the tea sort of turns a corner and turns sweeter. The aroma is still quite alluring. My girlfriend described it as “sweet potato”, which I suppose is not a bad smell to have in a tea. There’s also a bit of talcum in it. I definitely still don’t think it’s 30 years. It’s at most… 10-15? It’s dry stored though, for sure, given the colour of the tea and the leaves, as well as the flexibility of the leaves and the aroma given out. There’s no “storage” smell to it, which is not a bad thing. Somehow, I can’t recapture the nice aroma I got the first time I drank it.

One little thing I noticed is that because this little bag has been stored next to the Mengku cakes… it has taken on a little bit of the Mengku taste/smell in the early infusions. Interesting how that happens.

The colour of the liquor is a nice orangy/brown colour.

And the wet leaves look good

Compare this to the somewhat mouldy, supposedly 1998 tea from a few days ago

You can see the differences easily. The Jabbok teas open up a lot more, and look more lively. The stems also look softer (and are indeed softer).

The cups I used are actually what the owner of Jabbok recommends for older puerh — flat cups with a big surface.

I’m not exactly sure why he thinks they’re good for older puerh. Other than allowing you to gulp them in big gulps… I can’t think of a good reason. One test I can do at some point, I suppose, is to try the same tea from the same infusion in two different cups and see. Somehow, my suspicion is that I won’t see much of a difference…

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Lazy day

June 3, 2007 · 1 Comment

A few things happened today

1) There was a Richter scale 6.4 earthquake in Yunnan, in the heart of the puerh tea producing areas. Jinghong and Lincang, among other places, felt the shaking as well, and the epicenter was around Ning’er County in the newly renamed Pu’er City (used to be Simao). So far, casualty is 3 deaths and 290 injuries, and I’m sure that’s going to climb. My thoughts go out to the people in the area…

2) It rained today. It’s the first time it really rained in any meaningful way in Beijing since … last October? It’s so very dry here, and very depressing sometimes. It was nice seeing the rain.

3) I wanted to drink something simple today, something that doesn’t take as much concentration as a young puerh. I took out Teacuppa’s sample of laocong shuixian (old bush shuixian) and drank that. The first infusion was a little sour, not enough to be offputting but enough to alarm me. It turned a corner though, and the sourness went away by the third infusion. It’s obviously aged, with a roundness and a fullness that you can’t find in a young shuixian. The tea is actually quite nice, and lasted many infusions. It could keep going when I was done with it, after at least 10. It was slightly on the bland side of things in the middle, but I probably should’ve brewed it for longer in retrospect. as the last few infusions, using 3 minutes or so brew time, were very full. Good tea, and easily the best of the samples I got from Teacuppa.

4) While I was drinking the shuixan, I opened their sample D to give it a try. I was never too convinced of the way the leaves look, with its very obvious mix of different colours and slightly odd appearance. The brewing confirmed my suspicion… they don’t seem to be quite puerh like. There’s an odd spicy/floral flavour to the tea, and bitterness crept in around infusion 3. An examination of the wet leaves gives me the impression this is some sort of low grade Fujian oolong made into cakes, or something like that. They felt and looked more like a cheap imitation tieguanyin than a young puerh. Sorry.

I’m sure you can guess which is which.

I still have sample E to drink, which I intend to compare to my own Jiangcheng cake (I’m sure E is Jiangcheng). That will be interesting, but right now, I really don’t feel like much young puerh, yet.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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My weekly pilgrimage

June 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

It’s Saturday, which means I go to Maliandao.

These days I don’t have as much adventure spirit as when I first started going there. I think I’ve come to realize that most stores sell similar things. Once in a while, I’ll see something interesting and sit down and try, like the Bulang that became sample 1. Most of the time, however, I don’t really feel like it anymore, as most of the cakes look rather…. mediocre.

So my frequent destination is L’s store in Beijing, co-owned by the very friendly Xiaomei. She said she wanted to try some Guafeng Zhai tea from Yiwu area, so I brought along the Chen Guang He Tang Yiwu Chawang, which is supposedly Guafeng Zhai, for her to try.

The tea actually turned out better than the last two times I’ve had it. It’s smoother today, for some reason. Perhaps we used a little less leaves. It’s a little weak in the aftertaste, although she thought the huigan is nice. I’m glad she liked the tea, although she didn’t like the price so much. Understandable, as that’s a price that automatically builds a lot of shipping charges into it, on top of the tea itself. Hard to be impressed when shipping costs almost nothing in China.

Then some folks came along, and she opened up a Jingmai cake, took out a very beautiful teapot, and brewed it. She got this teapot from L’s financial backer in Shanghai, who deals in the ceramics/pottery business. I have to say I would buy this pot in a heartbeat.

Sorry about the slightly blurry picture in the last one. I especially like the contrast of yellow and blue, and also the little ring around the handle on the lid is a nice touch. The ugly lighter is there for scale. I apologize for the ugliness.

The Jingmai is very nice, although I felt it was a little weak, but the amount of tea used probably had something to do with it. Regardless, it was a nice sight seeing the pot in action.

There are some beautiful leaves in the Jingmai as well.

I had originally planned to go find some Keemun red tea shop to do some studying, so I went around the tea market that Xiaomei’s store is in to find one. No such thing. As it was getting late and all the other tea markets closed, I went to Chayuan. Again…. not a single Keemun store in sight. I think I have to go to the more retail oriented ones to find a good Keemun store for me to do my studying. Oh well, next time.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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