A Tea Addict's Journal

Manzhuan maocha

May 3, 2007 · 8 Comments

I decided to make this a series and continue the maocha tasting.  I had the Yiwu yesterday, so today we’re moving north to Manzhuan.

Two shots of dry leaves

They are bigger than the Yiwu leaves yesterday.  The Yiwu looks more delicate.  This looks more robust.

Just brewing for myself today, so I took out the smaller table with the tea setup… unfortunately, the tea tray leaks a little :(.  This is why i should never buy these dirt cheap bamboo trays.  I’ve had two now that leak on arrival.

The tea brewed up a nice liquor… I had some trouble with the colour balance again, and this one is showing up slightly yellower than the real thing.  Another picture has it coming out a little blue.  I can’t quite get it right.

The tea, however… is incredible.  The sensation of having drunk something goes all the way down to the bottom of my throat, into my neck, and at one point during the second up, I felt as if it was hitting my stomach.  The coolness and huigan lingers forever.  The chaqi is obvious.  This is a great tea.

The taste is not quite like a Yiwu, yet there are some vague similarities.  If Yiwu is a honey-like sweetness when young, then this is a more spicy/fruity taste.  I’m not good with aromas, but I think you can tell it’s different.  This tea, though, I feel is better than the Yiwu sample.  There has been talk that Yiwu is simply overharvested, and I won’t be surprised.  Sometimes I wonder if a place like Manzhuan is better because the teas are less in demand.

The tea lasted something like 20 infusions before I gave up on it.  Yes… it could still go on if I wanted it to.  It could’ve lasted 30, I think.  I had enough tea though.

Halfway through a few birds started to sing a chorus.  It was rather nice:

And the obligatory shots of the wet leaves… you can see these are larger than the ones yesterday, yet it’s not devoid of small buds.  I think this is still very much a spring tea.

It was a memorable tea.

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An outdoor tea party

May 2, 2007 · 4 Comments

Today was a very nice day, and I invited two friends to come to have tea with me.  Since it was a warm but not too warm day, I thought it best to sit outside, next to the blooming roses…

We started off with one of the Douji Maocha samples that I got from the tea expo. To refresh your memory, it’s one of these:

Since I’m a fan of Yiwu… we drank the Yiwu.

The amount of maocha was just right for the gaiwan… not too little and not too much.  One of my friends is a tea novice, so I thought other mountains might be a little too bitter.

The Yiwu turned out to be quite fragrant, thick, smooth, and generally very pleasant to drink.  It lacked a bit of a “throat feel” that I hoped for, and huigan is mild, not as strong as can be.  The tea is obviously spring tea, although I’m not sure if it’s actually 07 spring tea.  I’d imagine it might be, but it could also be an 06.  It’s hard to tell and I personally am not sure.

The wet leaves are quite beautiful

I think I liked this tea quite a bit.  Now I wonder how the other mountains taste.

We then went on to a qingxiang tieguanyin given to me by Toki.  I brewed it using the pot I got yesterday

It worked pretty well.  It’s a little bigger than the amount of tea was good for, but at the same time, we were looking for something a little less strong.  It brought out the fragrance of the tea quite well, although I always find the newer qingxiang tieguanyin these days to be a bit grassy for my taste.  I haven’t had a qingxiang tieguanyin for so long!  Thanks Toki 🙂

This is what’s left of it at the end

We then drank the cheap Yunnan green, or rather, tested the cheap Yunnan green I bought.  I wanted to contrast it with the maocha just to see what’s in the tea…

I think it’s pretty safe to say that if this were pressed into a cake, nobody can tell for sure if it’s puerh or not without being able to smell it and try it.  It can look quite like the real deal.

The taste, however, is distinctively beany.  Many green teas have a “bean” taste, and this tea, I think, has a classic “bean” taste that can go into a tea textbook.  If I ever want anybody to know what a “bean” tasting green tea is like… this is it.  This is also something that a puerh shouldn’t taste like, lest it will not age well in a few years….

The wet leaves are rather green too.

By this time it was getting a little late, and we finished up with the Qimen Haoya B that I bought a few weeks ago here in Shanghai.

I didn’t use too much leaves as I didn’t want to overdose my guests.  It yielded a nice cup of tea, quite nice to drink to finish off this session.  I always like to drink something warming/mellow to finish a tea session to keep everybody on a happy note.  Something too high-strung can really make one feel jittery or uncomfortable after many teas.  The hongcha did the trick, I think, and we proceeded to dinner after the tea.  Not before I take a shot of the wet leaves though…

By this time the sky was turning dark.  The camera was doing funny things to compensate for the lack of light, so the gaiwan is showing up in interesting colours.  I played with the colour balance to try to approximate the colour of the wet leaves, but this is still a little off.  Oh well.

It was fun, and I think I should definitely do this again.  Drinking tea outside has its charms, and so long as it’s not the mosquito season… it’s a very pleasant thing to do.

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An offer of tea

May 1, 2007 · 10 Comments

On an entirely unrelated note….

I’ve been toying with the idea of distributing samples of a young raw puerh.  I think I can make 20 slots open by breaking up a cake.  A few are already locked up as I have been discussing this idea with a few people.  I won’t tell you what it is, as I don’t want you to have any presumption going into the tea.  I find it’s more fun that way (having been inspired by Davelcorp’s A&B).  I am thinking of sending around 12g per sample, which should be plenty.  If you think you need more, somehow, do let me know.

The only requirement would be for you to tell me what you think of the tea, and not necessarily in public.  I only want honest opinions, so if you think it tastes like dirt mixed in with bleach, I want to know that instead of “it has a perculiar aroma”.  Don’t worry, this is not a ploy to poison you all.  A few weeks from now I’ll probably post an entry here to collect all your opinions.  If you don’t want yours shared, you can just tell me in private.  No, no prize here, sorry.

I do ask that if you could…. I would appreciate a small ($1 or $2) donation to help defray the costs of sending mail.  I will figure out how much it costs to send letters from here to international destinations, but I can’t imagine it costing more than $2.  This is not essential at all to receive a sample.

Please reply to this entry if you want to join in, or you can email me at (MarshalN) at gmail.

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New teaware

May 1, 2007 · 3 Comments

I got some new teaware today…. since I have tea guests coming tomorrow, and I didn’t even have anything to serve them with!

I opted for the nicer looking stuff.  I could’ve bought dirt cheap cups, but they really do look nasty.  Now in contrast, my gaiwan looks awful… but oh well.  I’ll survive, for now anyway.

I also got a teapot from L

He kindly gave it to me as a gift.  He made a few dozen of them (special ordered) and gave me one for free.  I appreciate that 🙂

It’s even got his own chop on it

 

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Teaware dilemma

April 30, 2007 · 3 Comments

It’s been more than a week and half since I got to Shanghai, and yet I still haven’t properly brewed tea at home.  I have a tea tray, a water heating unit, and a gaiwan now, but I lack a cup and perhaps a fairness cup.

I finally opted for the cheapest gaiwans there are.  Most of the gaiwans available here are very nice Jingdezhen ones.  They are those hand painted ones (or allegedly hand-painted ones anyway) and they look quite nice.  For a while I was rather tempted to buy one here, but if I do, it would have to be brought back as I don’t want to leave it here.  With this 5 RMB gaiwan… I feel no qualms about just leaving it here so whenever I come, I’ll have a set to use.

The same problem is there for cups, and to an even greater extent, the fairness cup.  The issue is that with a cheap fairness cup (the cheapest I’ve seen is around 10 RMB)is that the pouring is poor.  The spout is shaped like a semi-circle, and those generally pour very poorly, with the thing dripping all over while you try to pour.  Ideally, the spout should be long and tapered.  The fairness cups that have that nice spout, however, are expensive and generally well decorated.  It seems rather stupid to buy an expensive fairness cup to go with the dirt cheap gaiwan (and the dirt cheap tea tray).  It just doesn’t match.

The same is true for teacups.  I can buy the cheapest thing, but they don’t look so nice.  Anything slightly nicer is expensive.  I also want one where all the contents of the gaiwan will fit in one cup, eliminating the fairness cup all together (unless I’m serving guests), so that limits my choices.  There just isn’t much middle ground here, as opposed to Beijing.  Mind you, even the expensive stuff clock in at under 100 RMB, but when a gaiwan can be had for 5…. it seems like a lot.

What to do, what to do??

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Yet another tea gathering

April 29, 2007 · 7 Comments

I went to L’s place today for tea again.  Quite a few people showed up throughout the afternoon, and we drank quite a few teas in the process.

They were already drinking when I got there.  But the first two teas we had after I arrived were the two samples sent to me by Davelcorp.  They were labeled sample A and B.  We started with sample A, as I assumed that was the order I was supposed to go in.  Sample A, when dry, smelled a little cooked for some reason.  It doesn’t smell quite like a regular puerh would after a few years of aging.  It’s a little dark, somewhat brown in colour.

The tea brewed up a reddish brown liquor.  After a few infusions, it looked like this

The tea tastes a little funny for some reason.  While the tea looks like a great puerh, and smells like an ok one, it has a funny taste… it’s got some slightly plumish taste, but not in the way that the 1997 Xizihao Yiwu taste.  It’s also got a little sourness to it on the side of the mouth, and has a strange finish.  I can’t quite pinpoint what’s wrong with it, but multiple people thought it a little odd without quite able to put their finger on it.  In fact, I think I’ve tasted this before in my Keyixing bricks… they are somewhat, but not entirely, similar in taste.  They are both a little thin in body.  I wonder if this is a tea that didn’t have enough “kill-green” and turned a bit into a red tea.

The second tea we had was Sample B.  Sample B smells a lot better than Sample A when dry.  It’s got a nice aroma, smelling like maybe a Yiwu would after a few years of aging.

The tea has a lighter colour liquor than Sample A, but the taste was obviously fuller, with a nice aftertaste that hits the back of the mouth and the top of the throat.  Everybody liked this tea.  I am quite certain this is a Yiwu, perhaps Davelcorp’s beloved Menghai Yiwu cake that has been a subject of discussion on the LJ community recently.  Whatever it is, it’s quite nice.

Here’s a comparative shot of A and B’s wet leaves

A on the left, B on the right.  The colour might be a little too light, but B is definitely greener than A.  B also has a more pungent “puerh-like” smell than A, which smells a bit vegetal.  A is really quite similar to my Keyixing bricks, down to the smell of the wet leaves.

We then drank the Bulang that I bought recently.  I like it, but L doesn’t, thinking it’s too bitter.  I find it to have good energy, but maybe I’m just deluded?

Compared to the Zhongcha Banzhang cake we drank next, the Bulang is stronger, oddly enough, but the Banzhang has an obviously different flavour profile.  I think for the cost differential, which is very substantial, the Bulang obviously wins.  Without factoring in the cost, it will have to come to individual preferences.

We then sat around for a bit, and in the meantime, L got a call from Beijing about the newest prices from Zhongcha (with whom he has a dealership relationship).  Prices have been reduced a little, which is definitely a good thing.  I think there’s now some downward pressure on new cakes’ prices, and also on new maocha prices, because the level reached a month ago was simply too high — many stores could find no buyers, especially retail buyers, for their tea.  At least L doesn’t gouge me, that I know.  Not that I have bought much of anything from him, mind you.  I think I’ve drank more tea from him than actual tea bought, which is a scary thought in and of itself.

Another guest arrived, and we switched to a dahongpao that Action Jackson got as a gift from Xiaomei, L’s business partner in Beijing (and which I hauled over).  It’s actually quite nice, aromatic, and a very, very welcomed change from all the youngish puerhs we were drinking.  We finished the day with a wet-stored cooked brick, which I didn’t find particularly interesting, but then, I rarely find any cooked stuff interesting, and certainly cannot justify high prices paid for such things.

One of the things that came up during discussion between me and Action Jackson today about younger puerhs is the matter of taste… and I realized that I no longer really drink any flavours of a youngish puerh, but rather the feeling of the tea.  She said she liked the taste of one of the teas we had today over another, and asked me about flavours.  It was then that I realized I was no longer looking at flavours… I didn’t even really pay much attention to it.  Of course, I noted whether or not something was like what I think is the taste of a certain region, but… that almost no longer enter into the equation when I make that decision of whether or not this is a good tea, and whether or not this is something I would want to buy.  It’s something worth thinking about… I should perhaps pay more attention to describing flavours, something which I’ve never been very good at.

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Where do the wrappers go?

April 28, 2007 · 4 Comments

A constant on CCTV these days during prime time are these programs that essentially try to educate the viewers on the virtue and the intricacies of copyright.  As everybody knows, copyright in China is almost an oxymoron.  However, there is some real attempt, at least through government controlled television, to educate people to the problems with piracy and the importance of respecting copyright.  All the participants in these programs seem well versed in such matters, and when they get it wrong, the program hosts will quickly correct them and everybody will nod and smile.

Contrast this with the following image:  a tea store that is packing teas for shipment to somewhere else, and they do it by stripping the neifei, neipiao, and wrapper of each cake and rewrapping it with something else, or nothing at all.  However, all those wrappers (all the ones I’ve seen are Zhongcha) are saved carefully and meticulously.  They unfold the wrappers, put them in neat stacks, and obviously stock them away somewhere.  I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere.  This is stuff that you would normally throw away, but not here.  Instead, they are probably going to somehow reuse it.

I’ve seen this done at least twice now at two different places.  I can’t help but wonder where these wrappers go.  I’m sure they go somewhere, and I’m sure that of the many many new or semi-new cakes out there wrapped in Zhongcha wrappers…. at least some of them are faked this way.  Some will be used to fake older teas.  What can you do about it?

Then you have the practice of repackaging a tea with some other wrapper and calling it by a different name.  Lots of people do that.  Lots of factories do that — essentially the same tea but using a different neifei/wrapper, and all of a sudden, you have a different tea!  While some people might be able to tell you the minor differences between one and the other, many regular drinkers probably cannot (if there is any difference to begin with).  Since puerh changes over time, even in the span of a few months, it is not too hard to think that they taste different if it’s an idea already lodged in your head.  That’s one way that some factories could use to bolster their own lineup and also encourage more buying by tapping into the “I must collect all” mentality.  I’ve tried some factories’ cakes that are really very similar… and makes me wonder if they are really basically the same thing with a different name.

A variation of this is where one company buys a bunch of cakes from somebody, and strips the packaging from that company and puts on their own or none at all, and sell it as something else.  I’ve had a teashop owner complaining to me about this practice as he has been a victim of it.  He and a few others made a lot of one cake.  His had his own neifei in them.  Somehow most of his were sold, through a third party, to somebody else (let’s call him Person A) in that group who had sold out his own version of the same cakes, and that somebody else stripped the neifei out of the cake to prevent people from knowing they have a different provenance.  The tea is now a known item in puerh circles, and the name that it is known for is the one that Person A uses, not the original tea store owner’s.  He still has some of it left, and I saw it with neifei and all — it does look the same as the cake with the more famous name. I wasn’t entirely sure of the story, and since he now charges the same price as person A’s store… why would you buy the no-name one (even though the no-name one is actually the original)?  His loss all around.

Last but not least, there are just the out and out fake stuff.  There are lots of them, with big factory teas being the most commonly faked.  Some are poorly faked.  Some are well faked.  Some, at least according to those who’ve tried, are even better than the real stuff.  I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s possible.

This is all really depressing.  At least it’s reassuring that they’re trying to do something about all this through education.

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Tea Expo Shanghai 2007

April 27, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went to the Tea Expo today.

First of all… the thing is a little surprising given the amount of puerh tea vendors in there.  Granted, puerh is all the rage these days and is the new darling of the tea industry in China, but I didn’t expect quite so many of them.  A fully 80% of the stalls, by my estimation, were puerh ones, and the best attended/decorated ones were definitely the puerh ones.

All the usual suspects were there… Menghai, Xiaguan, Mengku, etc etc.  Mind you, the Xiaguan stall was deserted (while the Menghai one was pretty well attended).  There were some green tea ones, and a few tieguanyin stalls, but not many.

The other thing odd about this thing is timing.  It’s obviously designed with green tea in mind, because this is a perfect time for manufacturers to showcase their newly picked green tea in late April.  However, for puerh it is too early.  Most factories present didn’t have their spring tea ready… many showed up with only the packaging of the teas, but not the teas themselves…. because they haven’t finished making them yet.  It’s a rather odd situation.  The “official puerh vendor” of the expo only had one spring cake ready — the rest were still in various stages of production.  It was a strange thing.

Here are a few sights from the place… it wasn’t too big, and we went through a backdoor (we don’t even know where the front door was) and just walked right in.  You don’t need to pay anyway to get in, so it doesn’t really matter.

The prices at the expo were actually fairly high by Maliandao standards.  One store quoted me something that was 4x what I could fetch at Maliandao… so why should I buy from the expo?  I don’t know.  Prices in general were quite high, and no bargains were to be had, as far as I am aware, especially considering this was the “trade” day.  Non-trade visitors were only supposed to visit tomorrow and Sunday.

Then again, as at all expos, there were freebies to be had.  Action Jackson, especially, got a free cake from some gentleman from a relatively unknown factory

Sometimes, it pays to be a foreigner in China.

I also had my first experience drinking tea from a huge teapot today

The tea inside is similar to what I had at the Xinjiang restaurant, except with a bit more spiciness in the tea.  Maybe it’s the same thing brewed a little stronger.  If it’s what I think it is… it’s Fu Bricks from Hunan.

Thanks to L’s connection, all of us got some freebies as well from the puerh sponsor.  He knows the manager of their factory in Yunnan, who was there today, and he gave us this:

Which, if opened, reveals the goodies:

This is maocha from all six of the Six Mountains.  In order from top to bottom they are Yiwu, Yibang, Wangzhi, Manzhuan, Youle, and Gedeng.  Yes, I’m going to try them all, and of course, you’ll all hear about them when I do.

After the tea expo, where we only spent about two hours and change, we went to Tianshan Tea City to buy some stuff.  We stopped at a Wuyi store, drank a few things, including a fairly interesting, but very high fired, Wuyi tea.  This stuff was black and tasted quite strong of charcoal taste.  I liked it, Action Jackson didn’t, and neither did L’s business partner from Hangzhou.  L himself wasn’t around, but I don’t think he would’ve liked it either.

We made it out of there with a bit of tea, then looked around for the cheapest gaiwan we could find.  I finally have a gaiwan for the house now for a whooping 5 RMB.  I don’t have a cup, but that is easily fixable.  I also saw some curious cakes on our way out, but I already had enough.

We drank even more tea as we went to L’s office, including a 2003 Purple Dayi and a cooked cake of some kind from Zhongcha.  All this while a few Menghai factory dealers were there drinking stuff and basically saying only Dayi teas are good.  It was too much for me… and my stomach complained when we didn’t get to eat dinner until after 8.  Sigh.

All in all, a long day for tea.  Gotta get some work done tomorrow to compensate, and at some point in the near future, I need to head back to Tianshan to try some tea I don’t get to try in Beijing.

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Mystery tea

April 26, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to a Xinjiang restaurant last night with some colleagues.  They already ordered when I arrived, but there was a brass teapot on the table, and in there was some tea.  There were no cups, so I poured it into a bowl to drink it.  While everybody else imbibed the Xinjiang beer they had there, I kept drinking the tea.

It was an interesting tea, if a bit of a mystery.  I didn’t know what it was.  I didn’t fish out the leaves, but the bits and pieces that made their way into my bowl indicates that they were rather dark.  The liquor, on the other hand, was a bit light.  It’s a greenish/orange/yellow colour.  The taste is bland, but slightly sweet.  No bitterness at all.  I think it’s tea, but I don’t know what kind.

I didn’t ask them what it was, and I couldn’t really figure it out.  It sort of tastes like a few years old dry stored puerh, actually, but of low quality… so there wasn’t a lot to the tea.  The sweetness seems right.  Maybe they get these teas from Xinjiang?  Maybe this is Xinjiang stored tea?  It wasn’t bad at all, the way they made it.  I should’ve really asked them what kind of tea it was.  Maybe I’ll go again and find out.

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Breaking news

April 25, 2007 · 8 Comments

It seems like the disorderly exit that I semi-predicted has begun.

L just called me.  He said that there have been news that he heard that the markets in Kunming and in Guangzhou have started the big decline… and nobody is asking for Dayi (Menghai) goods at this point.  Makes a lot of market sense, really, since as soon as the prices start dropping, everybody who wanted to buy will wait till the prices stabilize a bit before jumping into the fray again.  All the tea investors who’ve been buying will want to let go of their goods very quickly.  One of L’s customers in Tianshan Tea City told him that the biggest Dayi distributors in Shanghai has already called him a few times, asking him to help sell stuff for prices that you could only dream of a month or two ago.

This is welcomed news, really.  The prices for a lot of these younger cakes has reached astronomical levels, with new, fresh off the mountain cakes selling for things like 250 RMB each, and a lot of these are cheap plantation teas that aren’t really worth that much.  Many people I know who are the end customers for such things — tea drinkers like you and me, think that prices are simply far too high to buy any more new cakes.

I had thought that given the fact that much of the country still has to tap into the puerh craze, that there might be enough future customers to sustain the run for a little longer.  However, once a fall happens it is hard to stop if everybody wants to exit the market, or at least withdraw from active buying.  I think it started with Xiaguan teas — it briefly reached 220 RMB for a stick of 5 tuochas.  That price was about 7x what I could’ve bought the same tea when I first arrived in Beijing.  Somebody made a lot of money from investing in Xiaguan tea in the short term, but more people have now lost a lot of money.  Xiaguan prices already fell a bit when I left Beijing for Shanghai.  I wondered, at the time, whether it will cause a drop in Dayi teas too.  Seems like people have woken up to the fact that investing in puerh is a risky business, and are no longer willing to take that risk.

We’ll have to see what happens in the next few weeks, but I think it will be hard for prices to pick up anytime soon.  Hopefully this will usher in an era of more rational purchasing, as well as more sustainable development of products and farming techniques.

I am going to go to the Tea Expo in Shanghai this Friday.  If what I’m hearing is actually true — this will definitely make it a very, very interesting experience.

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