A Tea Addict's Journal

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Passing the year

February 18, 2007 · 1 Comment

Not much of an interesting tea day, as I drank, interestingly enough, teabag teas. Well, not exactly. I had a so-so Darjeeling with my breakfast this morning, and then had a Tazo teabag in the afternoon. Neither were exactly nice, and I just didn’t have a chance today to brew my own teas. I was hoping to make something nice.

Chinese New Year is a pretty festive affair. Families get together to eat and chat and just gather for the sake of gathering together. At one point about 12 people were crammed into my grandfather’s room, all chatting about family stuff. It was quite nice, and something I certainly haven’t done for quite a while.

However, Chinese New Year isn’t quite so benign in its mythical origins. The Chinese term of going through the new year’s is “Guonian” 過年, which actually literally means “Passing the Nian”. Nian is year, but Nian also refers to an ancient mythical beast that comes once a year. It will come up from the deep seas, where it resided, and eat and rampage its way through the lands. People were scared of it and left home every year on the 30th to avoid the beast. One year, an old man showed up and asked the villagers to let him stay there — if they would, he could make sure the Nian won’t harm them. The villagers obviously thought he was crazy, and left anyway. He stayed behind.

When the Nian came, everybody except the old man had left already. Suddenly, however, there was a loud burst of sound with a lot of red confetti flying around — a red firecracker went off. Nian was badly scared. Turns out that Nian is afraid of loud noises and the red colour. The old man appeared, wearing red, and Nian ran away.

So, the legend goes, the tradition of decorating the houses in red with parallel banners and lighting red firecrackers became the custom each year to scare the Nian away. This, of course, is just a legend that justifies a lot of people’s festivities during this time of the year, but I’m sure at one point people perhaps really believed in such things. Either way, it’s a time when everybody is supposed to have a good time. Kids get their red bags stuffed with money. Adults exchange gifts when they go visit each other, and everybody is encouraged to eat lots of special food and wear red. It’s a good time.

Among the things I got was, surprisingly, a cake of puerh, from my uncle who got this thing from a friend of his in Kunming. I don’t think this is the best of teas, but it’s a nice gift and comes in a really nice packaging.

The tea itself is cooked, and supposedly 6 years old now if you read the little booklet carefully. It looks…. like a cooked cake, and cooked cakes….. are impossible to distinguish in terms of age. It smells strong. I don’t know how it tastes.

Festivities continue tomorrow, with fireworks at night!

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Young puerh prices (2)

February 16, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to Bonham street today and looked at, among other things, a bunch of loose puerh. That, I think, is also an important thing related to prices. Loose puerh in general do not come with packaging, at least not in the “this is vintage xxx from xxx factory” way that cakes/bricks/tuos do. So when you pay for it — you’re paying for the quality of the tea, with no reference to who made it, etc.

Unfortunately, the lack of information I talked about earlier makes it so that there is a serious hunger for any sort of information. I remember recently reading an article in the Economist, I think, that says studies show that human behaviour is easily affected by those surrounding them. A music store online that shows how often a song has been downloaded will see sales gravitate towards the few “winners”, whereas stores that don’t show such information will have a more even spread of sales. The herd instinct is alive and well.

The same is true for puerh, especially in a marketplace as crazy as puerh market is right now. Any sort of hype surrounding any sort of product will often create a buzz among puerh collectors. An article in a magazine, a good review from an “expert”, or even just a well documented thread on a place like Sanzui can create a buzz for a particular product that will drive the price up. I’ve fallen into the same trick. When BBB and I bought the Mengku stuff partly because I heard about it from online sources, etc, which in turn came from an article in a magazine. Prices for said tea shot up over the past few months, as far as I can tell, and somebody’s profitting from it.

Is that tea necessarily that good though? When we tried it, the Yuanyexiang was not that much better than the 2002 cake we also tried, but the price was much higher. The price differential is even larger now. Why did these people buy it though? Is it really because the tea is that superior? Or is it just because somebody talked about it, written a good review, and …?? I’m not so sure anymore. These products that are featured are also often used as a “guiding” product, and the prices of EVERYTHING produced by said factories will tend to go up after an episode of such a price rise. It’s unfortunate, but in an arena with such a lack of information…. price changes in one thing is often the only piece of info that is seen by the general consumer, and will affect a lot of other things and pull prices up all over.

So the loose tea offers a good lesson. Buy the tea based on how the tea is, not on what other people have to say about it. It’s extremely difficult to do that, however. Doing blind tests help. Doing head-to-head tastings help. It’s not easy to be objective when you know that one of the teas you’re brewing is going to cost you $90 and the other is $10.

The other thing is that it entirely depends on what you want to do with the tea. Are you buying it for drinking now? Drinking later? Trading for something else later? Selling? Investment? Those all affect the purchasing decision. If one were to buy something for investment, for example, you would want to buy a tea with a brand name, a pedigree. Those command a premium right now, but those will also have a more reliable future price. On the other hand, if one were to buy teas for one’s own consumption in the future, then it might be best to buy cheaper teas right now.

Are these “wild”, “old”, “arbour” teas really going to be 10x, 20x better than the plantation tea, 20 years down the road? Does anybody know? After all, most of the classic teas that are so highly valued today are plantation stuff. I personally don’t know the answer to this question, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. Those who claim they do generally have a heavy financial stake in the business, so I’m not even sure if any of those words can be trusted. The claim is that these old tea trees will yield a better product, will age with more qi, more depth, more complexity, etc. I’ve had some 10 years old “big tree” teas, and while they’re decent…. I’m not sure if the price differential now between old tree and plantation tea will really show in the future anymore.

Which is why these days I’ve been buying some cheaper stuff…. I think at this point, where I don’t know the answer to such questions, I am just going to have to apply the shotgun method and buy something of everything so that I will have something good to drink down the line, and also I will have learned something useful. It is also why I tend to buy teas that aren’t made by big factories, because they command a premium that I don’t think necessarily reflects the quality of the tea itself. Maybe 10 years from now, I will know better what will really age well, and what won’t. Right now, however, I am afraid I don’t have a good grip on such questions.

Unfortunately, nobody who knows something about this seems willing to talk about it. I have rarely, if ever, seen real recommendations on how to select tea without talking about specific products. Or, they are phrased in such vague terms that they are hardly useful. Perhaps at the end of the day, it takes experience to do such things…. I wish I could offer more, but at this point, I don’t want to mislead anybody 🙂

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Young puerh prices (1)

February 15, 2007 · 4 Comments

I went back to the Best Tea House today for my usual visit. I dropped off some of Rosa’s tea, although most of it is still with me. I also tried a bunch of teas, none of which I’ve had before. They got some new goods, and so I was eager to give them all a shot. Talking about them, however, would be boring. Instead, something else popped into my head today.

Prices at the Best Tea House, for young, raw puerh anyway, is all over the place. For example, I tried a very expensive new cake today from the Jingmai area that was entirely unremarkable and boring, not to mention weak and unappealing. Tiffany tried it once before, and thought she just didn’t brew it right because she was rushsed. After today’s tasting, however, she realized that it wasn’t so much that her brewing was bad, but that the tea was bad. The price, however, is mystifying. It’s much more expensive than some of the older stuff which are also better. No idea why, really…

Then you have some cakes that are really quite cheap (relatively speaking, anyway). The one I bought last time was one of them. Of course, then I discovered that I could get it off taobao for a slightly lower price, but given the hassle of using that service and the shipping cost, the price was basically the same… and this is from a store with a much higher overhead!

In some ways, this is sort of a microcosm of the young puerh market in general. Prices are all over the place for all sorts of reasons, most of which aren’t even logical. Much of this, I think, derives from a lack of information on all fronts. There is a lack of information on the side of the purchasers, of course. Services like taobao and access to markets like Maliandao (provided you’ve done a lot of walking on the street) will give the consumer a good idea of what might or might not be a fair price, but both activities take a substantial amount of time to do. Most consumers don’t have that kind of time. When you can only rely on your local teashops and when you only shop for tea once every, say, two weeks, it’s hard to know what’s a fair price for what kind of goods.

There is also a lack of information for the retailers as well. Many times the retailer is simply selling stuff that they got from whatever source they have, and mark it up the usual % and resell it. Quality is not always involved in the calculation of the prices. Much of this is also arbitrary and unpredictable, depending on many factors such as storage, fame of the cake, production numbers, etc, all of which affect the price of a particular tea. At the Best Tea House, for example, I have seen 15-20 years old cakes, wet stored, going for half the price of a 10 years old cake, dry stored. This is quite normal. I have also seen entirely new cakes be almost 10x different in prices, despite a similar quality. I cannot understand the pricing. I think how much the tea cost the retailer in the first place plays a heavy role.

On the other hand, there are the genuine attempts to deceive consumers. At a place like Best Tea House, you can be assured of a fair quote, no matter who you are. That is not true on the mainland, where everybody gets a different quote. For example, I have asked L to get quotes for me from the Haiwan Factory store for some of their cakes. He got them for me. I then went back with him a week later, asking the same question for the same prices. I think I got a different salesperson that day, and not surprisingly, the quote was different by about 15%. It was actually lower, but it could’ve been higher as well. We just laughed it off as a funny incident (especially since he’s actually a tea vendor, when I’m not), but without transparent prices, such things happen all the time. I’ve personally experienced them many times on Maliandao, and I’m definitely not alone.

While prices are lower at a place like Maliandao, getting the low prices involves substantial work and a reasonable amount of knowledge and experience in dealing with these people. I have seen a dramatic decrease in the prices I pay for puerh in Beijing over the coures of the year. Although you might think it is nice to get the low prices, in some ways, those buying tea from the US or Europe or elsewhere, especially those purchasing tea over the internet, have a much better and easier time. Even though prices are obviously higher through ebay vendors than what I could get at Maliandao, prices are also transparent and more importantly, stable. While prices do rise, they do so in a slow and predictable fashion. Whereas Dayi tea in China over 2006 has seen times when it was literally “one day, one price”, internet prices through ebay were the same for the same 7542, 601 batch. That itself is a bit of a blessing. In fact, some of the ebay items are selling at basically no premium over what the current market prices for the same tea in China. Since ebay consumers probably won’t tolerate a 40% price hike in the course of a few months, the prices can only stay the same, or more or less the same.

Raw material prices for old, big arbour trees in Yunnan have been shooting up by something like 50% a year. This year, from what I have heard second hand anyway, raw leaves prices are the highest in Lao Banzhang, reaching 550-600RMB for one kg of maocha. Yiwu is second, clocking in around 280-300 or so. Jingmai is a bit lower, and then you have the rest. This is only what I have heard. Work in some attrition of maocha during production, add in sundry costs like pressing and transportation and overhead and stuff, and you can roughly work out how much a cake of these old wild arbour trees should cost to make and to be sold at a profit by the people who first made them.

How much they retail for, however, is an entirely different subject. As I have noted, pricing is all over the place, but I think it would be quite unreasonable to charge anything more than 300% of raw cost of the tea for retail, more if it’s being sold overseas (as it’s been through somebody else’s hands). The more hands its been through, the more it would cost. Other factors come in, such as the kind of market the store serves (i.e. stores that are located in CBDs with pretty salesgirls and fantastic decor will sell the same tea for more, obviously). Factory reputation come in (the Dayi premium, for example). The stories, unfortunately, also come in (this is tea made by so and so when he discovered a new field of tea trees in xxx area, unharvested for a long time!).

More on prices tomorrow. This is getting too long.

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Hong Kong is wet!

February 13, 2007 · 7 Comments

I got back, got off the plane, and the familiar scent of a slightly damp city graced my nose. Hong Kong is always wet, and it seems like the super wet weather of spring is hitting early this year.

This leaves me a bit uneasy with my tea stash here. In Beijing I never worry about moisture, because it’s always too dry there (I put two bowls of water in my tea cabinet, so to make sure that the water doesn’t run out before I return). Here, though, you can feel the wetness.

This is where the tea was stored

The place, as you can see, is not ideal. It’s next to the windows, so when the windows are open (as it was when I came back) there was a slight breeze. It brings a lot of moisture through the air. Although what’s stored there are just two tongs (the other loose cakes are in a paperbag on one of the bookshelves), I worry about it. I could sort of smell the tong wrapping. I opened one of the tongs up to check… the cake almost feels damp. It’s wet all right. Time to move them.

So I cleared out a little corner of one of the bookshelves and put my tongs there. Take a peek

I need to clear the area out a little better, but it will do. I am thinking of making one shelf tea related stuff, if my dad will let me. After all, I don’t have a room in this place and sleeps on the murphy bed in the study.

Other than my puerh stash, I also got a nice package in the mail:

These are tea samples from Mr. Lochan of Darjeeling. They’re actually all big bags… 100-200g each, I think. That’s a lot of tea to drink. I might give some to the Best Tea House folks to try.

Anyway, time to turn in. I think I am going to deliver Rosa’s tea tomorrow (which, incidentally… put my luggage over the weight limit…)

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A study in Zhengshan Xiaozhong (lapsang souchong)

February 10, 2007 · 4 Comments

I went to Maliandao today to buy some tea, and of course, during the course of the afternoon, I had a dizzying array of tea (when do I not when I’m there?). I won’t bore you with all the details of all the teas we had. Needless to say, it included a lot of puerhs… mostly Yiwu today.

But that’s not the interesting stuff.

I had a lesson in Zhengshan Xiaozhong (Lapsang Souchong) today. A valuable lesson that I will always remember. So, I figured this is a good thing to post about.

I will let the pictures speak for themselves

This is the fourth infusion of the teas above, but left and right are flipped around. So, the leaves on the right above brewed the tea on the left, and vice versa

This brewed the cup on the left

This brewed the cup on the right

I think it is not terribly obvious, but you can sort of see how in the brewed up… the right hand cup is slightly darker. The first two infusions were largely identical… it’s extremely difficult to figure out which one is better, even when drunk back to back and right by each other. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how they can be 40% different in price. The second infusion… you can sort of tell the one with smaller leaves (buds) is a little more complex… but it’s a very faint difference.

Then from the third infusion onward the difference became clearer… the flavour for the buds was sustained, whereas the one with the leaves started feeling a little watery. Then, as infusions went on, the longer lasting nature of the buds Zhengshan Xiaozhong became more and more apparent. The tea is nice, sweet, complex, mellow, easy to drink, and everything I really care for in a tea. I could drink this all day. The cheaper one is more watery, a little thinner, less complex, but still very good, at the end of the day.

I really think that every Lapsang lover need to try this stuff out. Of all the teas I’ve encountered in China this year so far, I have by far found the Lapsang to be probably the most palatable tea for Westerners who are used to drinking only teabags or black teas in general. The smoke is not overpowering, and is gone by the third infusion. Instead it is a very pleasant sweetness that coats your mouth. I really like this stuff.

Just for reference, Laohe (the owner of the store) called the best stuff “Special Grade” and the other “First Grade”. I also looked at the “Second Grade” stuff, which is basically broken leaves. He said it’s not worth trying after we’ve had these two, and I believe him.

Then for the rest of the afternoon I drank a whole bunch of young and not as young puerhs. The most interesting Yiwu of them all is one I also have a few cakes of, a 2005. I might’ve actually neglected to post pictures of it… I’ll do so another day 🙂

Meanwhile, I need to rest up, as I’m going back there tomorrow to grab some teaware. I need a set of tools in Hong Kong so I don’t have to bring stuff back and forth and risk breaking half of it everytime. I didn’t get to do teaware shopping today.

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A tale of two waters

February 1, 2007 · 7 Comments

I got an email early today from Toki, who’s been rather quiet lately (note: and as I just noticed right now on his blog, whose grandmother has just passed away…). He asked me if I have tried a water called 5100. I haven’t, so I prompted went out and got a bottle.

This is a pretty expensive water for Chinese standards, with this particular one costing about 1 USD for 750ml of Tibetan water. It’s piped from some spring at 5100m elevation, and supposedly glacial in origin. It boasts boatloads of minerals, among which are Lithium and Strontium, which I’m not sure is actually good for human consumption in large quantities. Anybody knows?

Since I’ve already said yesterday that I’m going to brew some Yunnan Red (aka Black) Tea, I did. This is a tea that my girlfriend brought me from New York, from a place that sells both tea and coffee. The tea is basically a typical Yunnan hongcha, nothing fancy, and not of the “Golden Yunnan” variety where all the leaves are golden buds. Instead, it’s mostly broken leaves with bits of golden buds mixed in.

I wanted to test the new water I got today, so I brewed this tea using the two small gaiwans I have, putting in a small amount of leaves in each, eyeballing them to about the same level (damn the broken scale). One is to be just the 5100 water, and the other is my regular supply — Nestle water from the Shanghai plant.

I didn’t bother washing the leaves. Since the amount of leaves I used was small, I brewed each infusion with about one minute steeping time each. Let me show you the first one

Hmmm….

That’s a big difference in colour, and trust me, even though I think I added slightly more leaves to the gaiwan on the left, it was by no means a huge difference.

As you have probably guessed, the left gaiwan used 5100 water, and the right used my Nestle water. They definitely LOOK different. I mean… it’s night and day.

Thinking it might have to do with the slightly different levels of leaves, I reversed the water for the two gaiwans for the second infusion

And got the reserve result. This is not an illusion.

So far I’ve only been talking about the look of the tea. How did it taste? Well, the tastes are definitely different, although the true test would be if I were able to taste them blindfolded, not knowing which one I were drinking. The tea brewed with 5100 water tastes a little heavier, whereas the one with Nestle water tastes crispy. I’m not sure what the best way to describe this is, but the 5100 water gives the tea a slightly more intense and deep flavour, as if it had condensed something from the leaves, while the Nestle water just skimmed the surface, but the aroma from the Nestle water was more apparent, “higher” in Chinese terms, and just lighter in general. There was a slight hint of sourness in the Nestle water sample on the second infusion that I didn’t detect in the 5100 sample. The mouthfeel of the 5100 samples were obvious a little softer as well, but not definitively so. Again, it would be more convincing if I couldn’t see which cup I was drinking from.

I switched the teas back to their original waters

And a final, long steep, with the left now being a mix of 5100 and Nestle water, and the right only of Nestle water

Meanwhile… I consumed some snacks, which I don’t mind doing when I’m drinking red (black) tea. In case you’ve never seen them… these are egg tarts, “Portugese style”, but really from Macau as far as I’m aware. The ones that look burnt have caramel added to the custard mix, whereas the ones that aren’t burnt do not have the custard and are therefore a little less sweet and a little less creamy.

One interesting thing about the 5100 water, which I’ve noticed with Evian as well, is that they leave sediments behind when boiled. Notice the white deposits….

It will be interesting to see how this water changes the way certain other teas taste, stuff I’m perhaps more familiar with. I’m wondering what to try next with this. Perhaps the Best Tea House “30 years” loose puerh will be a good candidate for the same treatment, or maybe some Wuyi tea. I don’t think I’ll want to use only 5100 for brewing, for a few reasons. Cleanup is definitely one, since I think the amount of deposits in the kettle is quite high, and although I know I would be gulping down all of this if I were to drink the unboiled version of this water, it’s still a bit… jarring. Also, it’s not cheap…. and I don’t think the way it changes the tea is entirely positive. That is, I don’t think one can say with no reservations that this water makes today’s dianhong better in every way. It was different, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t say I liked it more, necessarily. I think it was interesting to see the difference though.

What’s a day’s drinking without a shot of the wet leaves?

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Difficult question

January 22, 2007 · 6 Comments

Inevitably, when your friends know you as the “tea guy”, they start asking you that very difficult question — “what should I get?  What’s good?  What should I buy as a souvenir for xxx?”

A friend’s friend who is visiting Shanghai asked me that today, and I really was at a loss for an answer.  I thought about longjing, but really, longjing is not very well appreciated, necessarily, by the people who don’t particularly like tea (in this case, the object of the gift-giving are some Americans).  Longjing is also expensive.  The girl then said “would chrysanthemum be good?”, and I thought that might be a good gift — not expensive, tastes reasonable, etc, but then, I am loathe to suggest an herbal tea…

It’s always made more difficult when I ask “so what kind of taste do you like?” the answer will be “I’m not sure — anything good will do”.  Ugh.

So…. if someone asks you this question, especially when buying stuff for someone who knows little to nothing about tea, and if you have an unlimited supply of tea at your disposal, what would you usually suggest?

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How do you make puerh?

January 4, 2007 · 2 Comments

How DO you make puerh?

Conflicting versions abound. From my understanding, puerh making is very simnple — picking of the leaves, kill green, some rolling, and sun-drying. There it is in its entirely, raw puerh maocha is done. Then you steam it (enough to soften the leaves) and press it. Then you have compressed maocha.

Puerh, properly speaking, isn’t quite finished until it’s gone through at least some fermentation. Raw maocha just compressed is more like green tea.

Technically, I think, maocha can be classified as green tea, because it goes through the essential processes that green tea goes through, but there’s a crucial difference in processing temperature, which allows something in puerh tea to retain its bioactivity and continues to ferment naturally (into something that tastes good) whereas green tea of our normal kind is processed at very high temperatures, and the tea gradually loses flavour over time and turns into something nasty.

However, some now process puerh with additional steps such as the withering of leaves and the intentional breaking of leaves (to encourage fermentation before kill-green). This, generally speaking, is what you do to tea that is destined for oolong. This process creates honey or fruity like aromas, along with lower bitterness and astringency (relative to raw puerh). It makes a nice tasting tea right away… which will mean the tea is easier to sell. It also means you have something more like oolong, and the aging prospects…. are suspect.

There are other raw puerh that are processed like green tea, and tastes like green tea (a la longjing type green tea). They might not age as well either. The jury’s still out on the long term prospects of these teas. Xiaguan mixes some of them into their tuocha, but it’s only a certain percent, not 100% of it. What happens to these things 20 years from now?

This is what we were debating in the Best Tea House today with Rosa and Tiffany. We don’t really know. Nobody seems to really know. So many developments are so recent that nobody really could figure out what’s a good way of making puerh, what will really age well, what won’t, etc. I’ve heard at least 10 different versions of what makes a tea a good tea for aging. The only common point so far is that it should be strong, somehow. If the tea is mild and weak right now, it won’t do well (Yiwu is weak in many respects, but not in chaqi and thickness of the tea). Is that the only indicator of a good raw puerh?

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Provenance

January 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

One of the things that distinguish a Hong Kong tea vendor from a mainland (at least Beijing) tea vendor is that Hong Kong tea vendors tend to be very imprecise about the provenance of their tea. Most vendors in Hong Kong cannot tell you if the tea you’re tasting right now is from 1989 or 1991. Most vendors also cannot tell you which mountain its from, or whether it’s a fall or spring tea, or what not. Some do, like Sunsing, but that’s rare. At the Best Tea House, for example, such information are usually qualified… i.e. “I think this is from xxx” or “we started selling it in 200x”. The Mengku Yuanyexiang, for example, is, I believe, a 2001 cake, but Tiffany always thought it’s from 2003, because they started selling it in 2003. They don’t always sell everything right away, and that is fairly standard practice. Usually they are not in a hurry to sell… and why should they, with prices going up so fast?

This is in stark contrast to Beijing tea sellers, who will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the cake in question, from the production date, raw material origins, storage location, etc, down to every last detail. Sometimes it’s probably true, but more often than not, I think it’s probably at least sometimes fabricated. I’ve heard so many times from people in Beijing that their tea has always been dry stored since production in, say, 2001, etc etc, except that I find them sometimes to be slightly wet stored, damp, etc. They will always tell a story, but the story is not always true.

The other thing is… how many people can tell the difference of a tea when it’s ten years old? As far as I am aware, nobody knows what a 10 year old Banzhang tastes like. Pure Banzhang (substitute any mountian here) cakes didn’t appear until about 10 years ago. Before that, all we’ve got are recipe cakes, or cakes with leaves of unknown or only somewhat known origins. Who can say for sure where the leaves for the original 8582 was from? The season it was picked? Anything? Yet, we’re drinking them up like there’s no tomorrow (with prices to match). I recently heard someone tell me that this 1997 brick was made with Banzhang area materials. Huh? How do you know that? It’s not written anywhere. By taste? How many people can taste that much of a difference among these locations?

Yet, it is on this sort of information that prices are driven up. XXX cake is expensive because it’s a pure Yiwu from, say, 2001, and the 2002 and 2003 have correspondingly lower prices. If the materials (and the quality) are about the same… why buy the 2001 when its price is, say, 100% more? Your money won’t make 100% return in two years unless you’re a very good investor, so wouldn’t it be better to pay the 100% lower price to get the tea that is 2 years younger? There’s an opportunity cost involved. I guess if I were 65, I might pay the higher price to get the further aging, but otherwise… I’m willing to wait. This is mainly why I only buy cheap or loose aged puerh for current consumption, and buy mostly 5 years or younger compressed teas… because they are correspondingly much cheaper. At the end of the day, 15 years from now when I am drinking some of my current purchases (when they’re finally ready for consumption), I probably can’t tell the difference between the stuff I bought in 2006 or 2007.

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Different locales, different tastes

December 22, 2006 · 5 Comments

One of the things that became really apparent on my trip back here this time is how differently people taste teas here. Let’s start with the brewing.

In Beijing the brewing is usually done with relatively little effort and concentration. In the gaiwan the leaves go. In pours the water. Out comes the tea. There’s some variation in how the tea is done at each store. Some storekeepers will do flash infusions with no regard to how much tea is in the gaiwan or the temperature of the water. Others will let the water sit a bit. However, usually the first method is dominant. This has to do with local tastes, where they prefer lighter, cleaner tasting teas. Anything too heavy is deemed to be either too bitter or no good. Ditto for anything remotely wet stored. Some will go as far as to say that anything that has been stored in Fujian or Guangdong is bad.

Then, in Hong Kong, the tea brewing is very different. This is most apparent with Tiffany at the Best Tea House, who takes a lot of care in both the temperature of the water, the amount of tea, and the way the water is poured. She lowers temperature for brewing after 3-4 infusions for almost all teas, but especially the older ones. However, the same can be said of some of the other places I’ve been to (though not all). Jabbok brews teas also in a fairly careful manner. Sunsing a little less so. The people at the Yue Wah National Products store are more like mainland brewing…. a little less attention than I like.

The tasting requirements are also different. Everybody talk about mouthfeel, but what exactly do you want from the mouthfeel is not quite the same. In Beijing, it’s about how thick the tea is, huigan, where the bitterness is, etc. Flavour is also important, to a certain extent. In Hong Kong, the overwhelming first factor that people seem to talk about is whether or not a tea is smooth. Smoothness, it seems, matters a lot to them. Some teas will be considered smooth by most people, but some of the tea drinkers at the Best Tea House still go “oh, this is quite rough”. Requirement in that side is high. The other thing they look for is “throat feel”, also something that is rarely discussed in Beijing (I seem to be one of the only person who talks about it, no doubt a HK influence). Where bitterness is, etc, is rarely mentioned. The thinness and thickness of teas is talked about in conjunction with these other factors, but not really the first thing they mention.

This leads to very different ideas about what makes a good tea. This is most evident in puerh, but also in other teas as well. I am still trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes a good puerh, and having conflicting concepts doesn’t really help. At the end of the day, it will take experimentation and careful observation. I’d tend to think that the Hong Kong way is right — because they’ve had more experience dealing with it. But then, maybe it just comes down to personal taste.

What do you look for?

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