A Tea Addict's Journal

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On romanization

August 20, 2012 · 25 Comments

Vendors, read this.

Languages in East Asia are tough, at least for foreigners. They are some of the most difficult languages to learn in the world, and for tea drinkers who don’t speak or read such languages, they can be a bit of a pain to navigate. Since names for teas are already such issues, with vendors naming their own teas and also the confusion and lack of oversight of tea nomenclature. It doesn’t help, however, when romanization is itself an issue. This is more of an issue for Chinese and less so for Japanese, since there the romanization is pretty standard. Korean romanization can be a little weird too, with different competing systems (Jeolla in Revised Romanization vs Cholla in McCune–Reischauer, for example), but since Korean teas are, let’s face it, a relatively small universe with better sourcing information generally, I’ll ignore its issues for now.

For those of you who know Chinese, you probably know that there are two main romanization systems, Wade-Giles and Pinyin. Up until the early 90s, pretty much everyone used Wade-Giles except those in Mainland China, who used Pinyin. Then things flipped, and everyone started using Pinyin, and Wade-Giles is increasingly dropped with the exception of Taiwan, which finally adopted Pinyin two years ago. These are partly for political reasons, and partly because, well, a billion people can’t be wrong, I suppose. I personally reserve a special hatred of simplified characters, because in the simplification process much of the meaning of the proper characters are lost, but I realize that many people now simply cannot read proper characters, unfortunately.

Anyway, with two romanization system and the relatively recent date of conversion, you can imagine there are issues with their usage. The problem is further complicated by two things: 1) conventions from the past, and 2) the fact that many Chinese people, especially those from Taiwan and Hong Kong, never actually learned any romanization system at all. Chinese, as you probably know, consists of characters that do not have phonetic indicators – meaning that by looking at the characters, you can’t tell how to pronounce them. It’s awful for people trying to learn the language, but it’s great for the purpose of keeping lots of people who don’t use the same dialect sharing the same written language. For all these romanizations that we’re talking about, we’re only concerning ourselves with the use of standard Mandarin.

So we’ve got two main romanization systems, but a fair number of people who don’t really know either, and a lot of vendors who probably don’t know much or any Chinese, as well as the use of older customary romanizations that persist. One of the most obvious and common old conventional spelling that still exists today, as related to tea, is the use of puerh instead of the Wade-Giles p’u-erh and Pinyin pu’er. I use puerh, instead of the Wade-Giles or the Pinyin version. Another common one is tikwanyin, which in Wade-Giles should be t’ieh-kuan-yin and in Pinyin tieguanyin. One reason people have dropped Wade-Giles in favour of Pinyin is because Wade-Giles has finicky rules regarding the use of apostrophes, which are essential for accuracy, and also hyphens. Without those, or getting those wrong, renders Wade-Giles rather useless. Pinyin only has issues with apostrophes, which is easier to deal with and errors are often not fatal (although still frequently wrong).

Pinyin also includes strict rules with regards to how to separate words. Since Chinese is character-based, it is very tempting to put everything into separate characters and just be done with it. Using the cake from the last post as an example:

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The two big words are “yesheng” or “wild”. Then, above the 2005 is “xianliangban” or “limited edition”. After the 2005 are “Menghai laoshu yesheng tedingcha” or “Menghai (region) old wild tree special ordered tea”. At the bottom is “Chenguanghe tang chaye yanjiu zhongxin rongyu dingzhi” or “Proudly ordered by the Chenguanghe Tang Tea Research Centre”. Note, of course, the nonsensical “Chen kang ho tang Pu-erh Tea”.

Now, imagine if the bottom row is all separated (and capitalized, as is often done for reasons unknown) “Chen Guang He Tang Cha Ye Yan Jiu Zhong Xin Rong Yu Ding Zhi”. What’s going on is that by separating everything, it becomes very difficult to tell where one word ends and the next begins. When romanizing, one of the things the person doing the romanization is splicing the words into sensible units, following the rules I linked to above. If I see a row of romanized characters all separated into individual syllable, I often need to see the Chinese original to know what I’m looking at. Properly romanized, however, it is usually quite easy to figure out what we’re dealing with.

One of the worst offenders of romanization confusion is Hou De. For example, the puerh brand Xizihao is routinely romanized as Xi-zhi Hao (finally fixed in some 2011 new listings, but persist for the older ones). There are no hyphens in Pinyin, and no X in Wade-Giles, so this is really neither. Hou De routinely does this sort of mixing, but Guang’s certainly not the only one. In his defense, he probably never learned Pinyin, having grown up instead on zhuyin fuhao. Other vendors mix in capital letters when there should be none, separate words randomly, mix in Wade-Giles from time to time, or simply spell things wrong. Babelcarp has a truckload of such misspellings, helpfully linked to the most widely used one.

Another issue is more simple – some vendors choose to give you the name of the tea in translation, while others give you the name in transliteration. Biluochun and green snail spring are the same thing, but you wouldn’t know it unless you’ve learned that somehow. Likewise, you can see Keemun, the old conventional name for Qimen, often on websites and teas and what not. Qihong is Keemun black, but again, you wouldn’t know it unless you somehow already knew.

While most people can figure out that puerh and pu’er are the same thing, it’s harder when the difference is between tikwanyin and tieguanyin, or even oolong vs wulong. Ideally, we’ll all use the same thing, so there are no problems, but I choose, for example, to use oolong instead of the proper wulong romanization because of accessibility – the same reason why puerh is used instead of pu’er on this blog. Very often people will find oolong being the word on vendor pages, not wulong, and might wonder what wulong is when in fact it’s the same thing they’ve always had. I also thought about switching wholesale to use Pinyin exclusively, but the thought of somehow having to go back and fix past listings stops me. I suppose the only way for a consumer to wade through all this is to arm him/herself with some knowledge of Chinese, so that one’s not too reliant on vendors’ proclivities. Vendors can also help by using more Chinese in the websites – it never hurts, and in this day and age, easy to do. Unless, of course, if they decide to rename their low grade Yunnan black tea Golden Peanuts, or something.

Addendum: Sometimes I forget the original impetus for writing these things. Jakub, helpfully, reminded me with his comment. For things like proper names, one should string them together. So, Yunnan province is Yunnan Sheng. Menghai county should be Menghai Xian. Yiwu mountain should be Yiwu Shan, not Yi Wu shan or Yi Wu Shan. Gaoshan Zhai, or Guafeng Zhai, or any other village, are a little more ambiguous. Zhai, in this case, is really “village”, “hamlet”, or literally, “stockade”. So it should be treated the same way as sheng (province) and shan (mountain) and separated from the name.

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Unintentional scams

June 1, 2012 · 19 Comments

One of the scams I’ve come across, as related to me by another tea seller, goes as follows.

You walk into a store with tins lining the wall. The tins are not labeled, and the store specializes in yancha. You go in, wanting to buy, say, shuixian. You ask for some. They ask you what price level of shuixian you want – since they have lots. You throw out a number, say 300 RMB/jin. They take one of the tins off the shelf, take out some tea, show it to you, and brew it for you. You sort of like it, but it’s not too great, so you ask them for something better. So they take the next tin out, and say “this is 400 RMB/jin”. You try it – it’s different from the last one, seems a bit better, but you’re not sure yet. So you try another one, this time from yet the next tin over. The tea is 500 RMB/jin now. It’s a bit similar to the first one, but not quite the same. Yancha, after all, share a lot of similar notes and are hard to differentiate just on visuals or taste alone. You end up settling for the 500 RMB/jin one (or any one of them) because it seems like it’s a good fit.

The trick, of course, is that there are only two kinds of teas in the store. They are stored in alternate tins in an ABABAB pattern. The 300/500 RMB ones were, say, tea A, while the 400/600 ones would be B. So when you try two that are just one level apart, they are indeed different. When you try ones that are two levels apart, well, by that time you’re on your third tea, and it’s been an hour since you tried the first one. You don’t remember it all that well anymore, and by manipulating some of the brewing parameters, the vendor can easily make it so that you think you’re drinking a similar, but different tea. Besides, we all know that more expensive wines taste better, so the same should apply for tea.

That’s not why I wrote about this scam, of course, although in and of itself it’s a cautionary tale of buying tea. One of the things in hster’s post that I linked to two days ago is that one should avoid Western reseller. There’s a good reason for that – because you can be an unwitting victim of the above-mentioned scam.

There are generally three ways a Western hemisphere based vendor can get their tea for sale. One is to go directly and source it – either from wholesale markets or resellers based in Asia, which is probably the most common way, or buy from farmers in the area, which probably also happens but less often than you think. The vendors can also buy from consolidators/wholesalers based in the West as well, with SpecialTeas (now Teavana…) and that type of thing. In that case, you’re basically buying teas for a markup for no good reason. The last is that they have some special connections for some reason, such as Guang of Hou De, who, from what I understand, has family members who are tea farmers. There aren’t too many of those around. This above list excludes those who are based in Asia but primarily sell to a Western audience, although for the most part, they are also just falling into the first category – someone like Jing tea shop in Guangzhou is basically buying teas from the Guangzhou market and then selling it to you at a markup.

What’s going on though, is that for those who are selling in the West, unless they take frequent trips to Asia or have some special connections, are generally just buying from some wholesaler and reselling said tea to you. The markup can be slight, or it can be very heavy. The problem with tea, and it’s the problem that enables the scam that I talked about earlier, is that tea is not labeled and is remarkably difficult to judge if you’re not in the right frame of mind. Let’s say you buy two tieguanyin. One’s marked at $15/100g, and has an interesting description. The other is marked at $25/100g, and has a breathless description. The pictures, of course, don’t tell you all that much, as they’re all about the same – some rolled, green leaves. You try them…. and then, unless you happen to compare them side by side, would you really know the difference? Is it going to be that obvious? What is the $15/100g’s seller’s markup is 100%, while the $25/100g’s is 400%, both of whom sourced from the same dealer? In other words – the more “expensive” tea is actually cheaper originally, because the person you bought it from is selling it for more?

There are endless possibilities for things such as this when you buy from Western based vendors. This is not to say that it is always a better deal to buy from Asian based ones, but at least there you’re more likely to run into unique things that other sellers aren’t selling – each local market is indeed a little different, and will offer you things that others can’t find. I even wonder if one might have better luck buying oolongs off Taobao – I haven’t experimented widely there, but even that could be a better deal than buying a “monkey picked” tieguanyin from online store X.

I’m not trying to say that every single Western based vendor is going to be terrible. By all means, if you find a tea you like from a certain vendor, then it’s perfectly fine to frequent that shop, but knowing full well that there’s always the possibility of a cheaper, better alternative out there. That’s why I have always advocated not getting sucked into buying from one vendor exclusively, regardless of what they have done for you in the past, and also to experiment widely in both providers and also the range of possible teas out there. This is true not just for us consumers, but also even for the tea vendors, who sometimes seem to form exclusive relationships with their Asian providers. That is also a dangerous path – one which can lead one’s customers to drink lots of overpriced, bad teas. Life’s too short for that.

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Sage advice for newcomers

May 29, 2012 · 1 Comment

A fellow drinker way back in 2005/6 was hster, whom some of you may remember from the LJ Puerh Tasteoff that BBB organized back in the day. Seems like hster has restarted a blog after a long absence from the online tea scene, and has posted, among other things, some sage advice for those just starting out. It’s worth taking a look here.

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A Quintessential Invention

May 11, 2012 · 29 Comments

MadameN and I have co-written a paper and presented it at a local conference on the recent history of tea and tea practices in East Asia, using mostly the Taiwanese/Chinese re-invention of chayi/chadao as an example to illustrate a case where one regional, localized tradition was adopted and re-invented as a national tradition. The full paper, a pretty short affair, is available here, in the tea issue of this quarter’s China Heritage Quarterly. Other things in there might be worth a look too, so please go ahead and take a read.

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The value of old tea

April 13, 2012 · 3 Comments

I had an opportunity to drink some old tea the other day with the King of pots and some others. It was an interesting experience, going through the decades and trying something that’s your grandfather’s age. During the conversation, one of the things that inevitably comes up is the price of tea – how much such a tea might be worth on the market now, for example, and how much standard bearers like the Red Label is going for these days. A well stored, well aged Red Label might cost something like $200k HKD (prices vary wildly depending on who you talk to, condition of the tea, etc), which is about $25000 USD. Per gram, we’re talking about $70/gram, so a pot of Red Label using 10g of tea is probably going to set you back about $700 these days. Antique teas that are older than 1950 are going to cost you three or four times more. So, at what point is a pot of tea worth $700, or even $2500?

Nicolas’ notes on the Blue Label captures this really well – he thinks the tea he had is probably 10 times better than a 2010 tea, but the cost is 200 times more. Is it worth it then? By that measure, probably not, although by that measure, the only tea anyone should ever drink is probably a nice, dependable Yunnan black tea that costs $5 a pound. So clearly something else is going on here.

I think one of the things that we love as tea drinkers is the variety that teas offer, and there is a premium that we pay for access to that variety. It can come in the form of different types of tea, different terroir, different season, different processing, and different ages. Of these, however, the price differential is quite wide, and age is, by far, the most expensive type of “variety” that anyone pays for. Is it then worth it to buy very old teas?

The answer to that clearly depends on whether or not you have money sitting around. As Nicolas mentioned, if you have lots of money, then buying a tea like the Blue Label is no problem. If you only earn $30000 a year, then buying a tea like that is pretty stupid. Given a choice between a family vacation and the tea, the person who has to choose may very well choose the vacation. For the person who can have both, however, that is no longer a problem.

I think as tea lovers it is very easy to fall into the trap of wanting a particular tea badly because others have told you it’s great, or it’s special, or some such. While many of the much older teas are out of reach of the ordinary drinkers, the impulse is to go for everything that is available and priced reasonably. The problem, at least for my readership here, is this: the supply of good, reliable, well stored old tea to the English speaking population is really very limited, much of it more or less discards from the Asian market, or at least the second tier stuff. The reason is quite simple – because the market that can bear such prices remains primarily in Asia, and I think many people would balk at paying, say, $1000 for a cake of 90s tea. Yet for the more famous makes, that’s what the market rate is. Even for early 2000s teas that are well known, prices are also astronomical. As I mentioned recently, a big market for expensive teas is the gift market here. For them, cost is not really a problem, and may in fact be a good thing. For the tea lover who actually wants to drink the tea (as opposed to hoard it for profit) this is very much a problem indeed.

One solution is to try to find the odd bargain that can be had here and there, through channels such as Yunnan Sourcing or Taobao – teas that are essentially still cheap because they’re not famous and yet still retains a good quality. To be able to do that and to discern quality in not-famous teas, however, is no easy task. This is further compounded by the lack of good, aged teas for comparison purposes. If you don’t even really know for sure what a well aged puerh that’s 20 years old tastes like, how can you pick out a good 5 years old tea?

While I can probably afford at least something from an earlier period, increasingly I find myself not wanting to spend such sums, preferring instead to use it for other things. There are simply too many substitution goods out there for me to find it worthwhile to chase down earlier teas that are great in some way or another. For $2000 I can buy a good cake of say early 90s tea, or I can use it for a variety of things such as kilos of good aged oolongs, and a decent teapot, and a gift for MadameN, and a trip to Taiwan, all together. Do I really want that early 90s cake that badly? I personally don’t, even if I have the money to spare. I can’t even say I’ll enjoy the puerh more than I do the aged oolong, so why should I spend that much money on such things? I also derive great pleasure in the act of hunting down teas and finding things that are out of the way. If I really want that cake, I can march down to the shop tomorrow and buy it, but I’d rather find obscure teas that are good. Maybe that’s what distinguishes those of us who treat this as a hobby and those who take it more as an investment or a business. We do it for love, not treasure.

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Priced for gifting

March 31, 2012 · 15 Comments

Lew Perin, maintainer of Babelcarp and, I think, longtime reader of this blog, asked me a few weeks ago about a curious cake he saw on Taobao. His question was basically “does anyone actually buy these things? And are they that stupid?”. The cake in question, in case you’re wondering, is currently priced at 3888 RMB (although at the time I think it was 9999, if member serves). The tea is supposedly Youle mountain tea, produced in 2005, so maybe 7 years old or so. If we believe all of that, and if it’s truly old tree tea, the value of this cake maybe 1000 or so, but who knows. There are, after all, no pictures on the wrapper.

There are catches though, of course. The first is that this cake has slight religious meaning – it’s “made by Longchang Hao, produced by the Shaolin temple”. Yes, that Shaolin temple (which also explains the yellowness). What’s better, I found a cake that is similar, only with the signature of the abbot of the Shaolin temple, and this one was selling for 99999 RMB.

Back to Lew’s original question – why do these things exist, and who’s buying them?

I think the simple answer is – gift, gift, and gift. Basically, these things exist as gifts for the high and mighty of the Chinese bureaucracy and business world. Now, this cake is a little “special” because of its religious meaning, perhaps, but one doesn’t need to look very far or hard on Taobao to find similarly priced cakes that aren’t made by the Shaolin temple. Basically, these things are used as gifts to grease the wheels of business. The way it used to work, of course, was through gifts of cash. That ship, however, has sailed. Nowadays, gifts of cash are often refused, because it’s too obvious and hard to hide. Conspicuous gifts of luxury are often not that impressive for the official who already has all the latest watches and bags. So, enter tea and other rare things.

A friend in Dongguan recently described it to me like this – these days, those looking for gifts don’t just want anything expensive. After all, they can buy it themselves. These days, they want something unique, something that other people don’t have. Roughly following Bourdieu’s ideas of taste and cultural capital, in a society where an increasing number of people can afford Louis Vuitton bags and BMWs, it is important for those in the upper crust to find something that keeps them apart from the rest of the pack – something to distinguish themselves. Gifts of a rare, hard to find, and impossible to procure nature will easily do that.

So, in terms of tea, what we’re seeing these days is exactly a reproduction of this type of dynamic, driven by the demand of a market that is increasingly segmented into different layers. These days, even older teas such as Red Label are not that hard to find, if you have the money. Buying things like this is only a matter of wealth, maybe coupled with a few connections that help you find the “real” ones instead of the fakes. But if you have the ability to splash out 100k RMB, you can find something of that calibre without too much difficulty.

However, it is difficult to find certain kinds of things, such as, say, true current year first flush Lao Banzhang from old trees. Such teas, given the limited amount that is produced, tend to be secured long in advance by the powerful, and sent up as gifts to those even higher up. You can easily imagine, for example, of how a local administrator in Xishuangbanna looking for a promotion might use his pull to make sure the village head of Lao Banzhang saves him 10kg of these teas. He keeps maybe a little bit for himself, and then sends the rest up to people in the provincial party hierarchy, or maybe even in the national bureaucracy. The best tea, in other words, never see the market at all. The ones that see the market end up commanding high prices. Even if they’re not really worth all that much, their supposed rarity help the perceived value of these teas. In fact, they become Veblen goods and the gift-giver only needs to point out that “this tea costs 10000 RMB on the open market” and all of a sudden, everyone understands that this was a substantial gift. This explains why jinjunmei, an otherwise decent but utterly unremarkable black tea, was selling for something like 20k RMB per 500g.

Shops like the ones I visited in Dongguan are also, I think, largely driven by the gift market and the connoisseur market. They are related, but not identical. The shop owner was, according to the shop keeper anyway, a factory owner who was relatively successful. Having cashed out of his business, he turned to tea, but I think his business acumen still remains. He knows, for example, that in a city like Dongguan where there are many businesses vying for contracts as well as needing to make things run smoothly, there is an acute demand for gifts that help things moving. It was no surprise that in the area near where my hotel was, there were lots and lots of tea and alcohol shops selling high end tea as well as high end French cognac. These things are prized by the middle managers and that type of thing, so again, creates a market for this type of good.

My friend L in Beijing told me that his shop once received an order for 100 cakes of cooked puerh, each worth maybe 50 RMB. He was told to get the nicest looking packaging possible for the tea, and then deliver the goods to the client. The client then resold the teas in his upscale store for 10x the amount, no doubt ending up in people’s homes as gifts and told that these are nice aged puerh. My parents sometimes get things like that from friends visiting, and they are almost always very mediocre (or worse) cakes that I wouldn’t even want to try.

So if you visit major Chinese cities and pass by teashops near your hotel and are floored by the crazy pricetags you see, it’s not because the Chinese love their tea so much that prices are insane, but because they need to show the gift-receiver that they paid good money for such things. Skip those stores and head to the wholesale market instead.

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Don’t be hasty

March 13, 2012 · 3 Comments

There’s been quite a few responses on my last post, some focusing on the problem of “too dry storage” and how to fix it. I think it is important to keep in mind that although I said you can’t quite make “traditional storage” at home, you can easily grow mold at home, if you have the right conditions and aren’t paying attention. For example, look at this experiment that went horribly wrong.

There are lots of variable that go into aging and proper levels of moisture, etc, that makes it difficult to pinpoint what is a good condition and what is not. In that post, Tuochatea mentioned that the Jingyehao teas were not molded. That’s interesting, but may also be explained by the fact that the cakes were more compressed than the other ones. He also put some Xizihao in there, which tend to be loosely compressed, hairy teas, which are much more likely to attract and retain moisture than your run of the mill cakes. Put some Xiaguan iron cakes in there, and it’s quite likely that the mold damage would have been very light, or none at all.

If you go about changing your storage condition, especially if you try to accelerate aging by adding moisture artificially, or putting the tea in a place with naturally high moisture, it is quite important to be able to check on the tea every so often to make sure it’s going ok. If it’s an environment where human beings normally move about comfortably, then there probably won’t be much of a problem. On the other hand, if it’s in a shed or some such, or, as I’ve read once on a Chinese blog somewhere, moved outdoors onto someone’s balcony, then you’re playing with fire and can very easily ruin a whole bunch of tea in very little time, especially if you don’t catch the mold growing on a few leaves. Also, the natural rhythm of the seasons is said to be beneficial for tea aging – that the tea will “breath” moisture in and out as the climate changes. A constantly high humidity environment doesn’t allow the tea to do that.

So just because I told you to learn to stop worrying and love the moisture, I am most definitely not telling anyone to just buy two humidifiers and start pumping water into your room 24 hours a day. If you do that in, say, Phoenix Arizona, that’s probably fine, since it’s so dry there. If you try that in coastal Maine, it might not be such a bright idea and may very well end in tears.

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Ideas of proper puerh storage

March 9, 2012 · 39 Comments

A few people recently pointed me to a blog post on McIntosh Tea serving as a “how-to” guide to storage for puerh. I think it is always good to have more discussion on this topic, and very often people have little idea of what to do for teas in general, and puerh in particular. However, I also believe it is very essential to have good, accurate information, and when things pop up online or elsewhere that seem to be misinformed, it can easily mislead people in the wrong direction. Alas, I think there are a number of problems in this post that need to be questioned.

The premise of the post is that Mr. McIntosh is trying to build a tea storage for his budding business as well as personal collection, which is a great reason to figure out a good way to store your tea. However, after talking to “tea wholesalers, retailers, collectors and experts in the field”, the solution he came up with is more or less the same as a lot of what others have built that are affectionately called “pumidors”. Basically – a closet, or an enclosed space, with a water source that provides some additional humidity in the environment. So far, so logical.

This is where the problems start. There are logistical issues, such as having a wet towel constantly on a plaster wall being VERY likely to induce mildew in that particular area of the wall (and thus more likely to infect the tea stored in the same space). The entire post is built on a foundation that is really rather shaky, namely that of focusing overly much on relative humidity and not enough on anything else.

The most important of these factors is temperature. Relative humidity of 70% in a 25C environment is very different from the same relative humidity in a 15C environment. The former is conducive to tea aging, the latter is not, because it’s too cold. Aging tea requires humidity and temperature, neither of which can be too low. Ignoring temperature from the equation is basically like telling people to store wine correctly on a rack in a damp environment, while forgetting to mention it needs to be kept cool. You can end up with vinegar that way.

Also, the relative humidity number used in the post is itself rather problematic. How did he come up with 50-65% as the optimal range for such storage? I can’t quite figure it out, and would appreciate if he would elaborate. After all, Kunming, which is well known as a place with relatively dry storage condition for puerh, has humidity that fluctuates between 60-80% throughout the year. 50-65% is considerably lower, and if you believe anything Cloud says, he would think that’s too low for the right conditions for aging good puerh tea, and 20-30C being a good range of temperature.

This choice of super-low relative humidity is probably explained by McIntosh’s self-professed dislike of “wet-stored tea”, but as I have made clear many times before, “traditional storage” is not the same thing as “wet storage”. You cannot replicate traditional storage at home, even if you try and pump up humidity and temperature. What you’ll get instead is some nasty tasting, mold covered tea, but the richness and the flavours that at least some find alluring in traditionally stored teas will be missing. For that, you need large volume, expert control, and the proper environment for it. You won’t get that at home, even if you try, unless your home also happens to have a more or less air-tight basement with literally tonnes of tea and 30C+ temperature.

What you can achieve with McIntosh’s setup, however, is storage that is far too dry. They can seriously damage the tea, and yield horrible results. Quite a few Kunming stored tea that I have tried that have been there since the early 2000s have similar problems, but the desert treatment that I’ve tasted takes the cake in terms of dryness damage. Not all Kunming teas are terribly stored, but many are. The worst is when they’re exposed to high levels of ventilation and dry air – it sucks the moisture out of the tea and will never change into anything decent.

What people forget, I think, is that when the term “dry storage” first appeared, it referred to teas such as the 88 Qing, which was stored naturally (i.e. without traditional ground storage treatment) in Hong Kong in an industrial building. There’s no dehumidifiers, no air conditioning, and only minimal air circulation. Mr. Chan only opened the windows on drier days, but given that in Hong Kong, most of the year the relative humidity is over 80%, when you say “drier days” it’s still quite wet by the standards of many places, and way wetter than the 65% upper limit that McIntosh has proposed, not to mention quite a bit warmer as well. And even then, the 88 Qing was, until maybe about ten years ago, still very young tasting and not particularly nice. It’s only in the past ten years when it really turned into something more fragrant and drinkable. That’s storage under Hong Kong, natural conditions. Under low temperature, low humidity conditions, it would’ve taken considerably longer.

Paragraphs like the following are particularly misleading:

“There are times when I have received a new shipment and have wanted to jump-start the microfloral growth after its been sitting on a boat for a few months covered in bubble-wrap, so I will bring the humidity up to 70% for a short period to speed up the fermentation process. I only will do this for abut a week, since if left longer there is a chance that mildew could form. Personally, I do not enjoy wet-stored tea, so I avoid high-humidity storage.”

Pumping up humidity for a week to 70% for a tea will do absolutely nothing in terms of long term aging, especially if the temperature stays at something like 20C, which is typical of a heated home in the US. I have a cake that I’ve been leaving out in the open for about three months now because it was stuck in some plastic wrap for a long period of time. Relative humidity has been around 95%-98% for the past two weeks with temperature fluctuating between 18-25C, and the cake has exhibited no evidence of any mold or any other abnormal growth. The fact of the matter is, unless you put your tea right next to an open window for weeks when it’s raining nonstop and temperature is hitting 25C or higher, the ability of your tea to grow mold is not exactly high. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but relative humidity of 70 or even 80% is pretty safe unless it’s getting quite hot outside. Overdoing it on the low end, on the other hand, can basically stall any and all aging and will result in teas that change very little over time.

I think what needs to be rectified is the confusion of different terms, and substituting “traditional” for “wet” and “natural” for “dry is a good place to start. There also needs to be a recognition that many of the old teas that we consider great by the tea community at large are, for the most part anyway, stored under conditions that might be considered “wet” in some circles but which are actually what should be just called “natural”. To “Keep your investment safe”, as McIntosh puts it at the very beginning of his post, there needs to be growth in the value of the investment itself, and not just preservation of the status quo or even a decrease in its value. Aging doesn’t happen without temperature and humidity, and so trying to keep humidity down in a temperate environment is almost counterproductive in terms of trying to get good, aged tea ten years down the road. What you might end up with is a lot of wasted time and teas that aren’t particularly good or aged. Regretting the lost ten years will cost considerably more than regretting the money you spent on the tea.

I should hasten to say that I have had and liked many teas that have been naturally stored – I am, by no means, a traditional-only type of tea drinker. In fact, most of the cakes I have are natural storage only since I purchased them, or even since when they were produced. I do, however, find much fault with the idea that’s sometimes propagated on the internet that natural = dryness. Even my friends in Beijing, who a few years ago were very wary of traditionally stored teas, are now trying very hard to find ways to add humidity to their storage precisely because they now recognize that the natural environment in Beijing tends to produce poorly stored teas (dryness + coldness). To speed things up, they’d add water in bags in closed plastic boxes in order to produce something better. Even that doesn’t produce mold. The worry, therefore, is really about dryness, not wetness. It’s easy to spot tea that is starting to grow mold and even easier to rectify such a problem – just reduce humidity and temperature, and you’re good. The cake I found growing mold in Taiwan has had no problem since – it’s aging just fine, even though it had a little bit of growth for a short period. Spotting teas that are stored too-dry and hasn’t been changing much is considerably harder, and the only thing that can fix that is time and effort. If you are drinking your tea regularly, chances are you’ll spot the mold long before it festers into anything serious. That’s how I learned to stop worrying and love the moisture.

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Thoughts on tea blogging, 2012 edition

March 1, 2012 · 22 Comments

The last time I explicitly wrote about blogging about tea, it was more than four and half years (!!!) ago. The post, which is still on the hibernating Cha Dao blog, talked with enthusiasm about how tea blogging is like a “constant tea meeting” which enables us to share our experiences, exchange views, and in general meet like-minded people who are interested in the same thing you are. It was a pretty optimistic post, and the youthful exuberance is obvious.

The whole blogging scene has changed much since then. I think among all the blogs from the time when that post was written, and not counting blogs associated with vendors that try to sell things (either physical goods, or advertisements) only the ever diligent Hobbes remains. Lew’s Babelcarp is still an essential resource for those who haven’t fully mastered the mysteries of the Chinese language. Of course, Bearsblog is around, but it wasn’t there in that form when I last wrote about blogging. BBB’s previous project, the Puerh Community, has basically died, due in no small part, I think, to the fact that livejournal is not the most friendly place to conduct such business anymore. Mike Petro’s Puerh.net has been dormant for many years, and I think we have lost hope for its return. There have also been many personal blogs have were around at the time, or about to spring up. Many, in the intervening years, have died. Others, too numerous to name, have sprung up, although even some newcomers are already showing signs of slowing down, often the first hints of death for any blog. It’s not really a surprise that they come and go – tea blogging takes time, effort, and money. It’s no wonder that after a while, people give it up. Heck, even this blog was relatively dormant for stretches of time, especially when I was trying to finish my dissertation. Of course, many, if not all, of these people are probably still drinking tea. Some blogs, after all, do show signs of life once in a while.

Of course, the overall sum of things on the internet about tea has grown, not shrunk. Among blogs, of the few surviving ones from when I first wrote about this topic, most have turned into vendors of some sort. Stephane was already around back then, and is still selling tea and teaware from Taiwan today. Toki now has his own online store, and a physical presence as well in New York City. Gongfugirl is, from what I understand, a co-owner of Phoenix Tea. Imen still runs her TeaHabitat from the web. There are others, of course, but then we start to veer off from Chinese tea, and the universe gets bigger all of a sudden.

Then there are vendor blogs, which are too numerous to name. Those without a blog or something similar back then have often now included one, in order to provide better, in depth information for the customers. Teachat still exists as a good beginner type forum for all sorts of things, and it’s to Adagio‘s credit that they run it at arm’s length, so that people can talk about other vendors, teas, and what not on there freely (the software, however, can really use an update). Twitter, of course, is a great leap forward in this regard, and enables many to send out timely information and updates to thousands of people directly. I also discovered that it’s a good way to let people know about new postings on this blog, and increasingly traffic comes from Twitter feeds, not more traditional channels.

There are also social networks of sorts that have sprung up that are specific to tea, although personally I have not found them to be most interesting or rewarding. I know of Steepster and Ratetea, but neither seem particularly suited to the task of categorizing loose tea and even then, meaningful reviews are rarely shorter than an average posting on the Half Dipper, haikus notwithstanding. The “constant tea meeting”, I think, needs to be conducted in the long form, and a short, snippet view of tea just doesn’t work that well when describing the nuances of the fourth steep of a Menghai 2005 7542.

On some level, this reflects a general trend in the online world – blogs are now very specialized things, generally speaking. Those who used to use blogs for personal reasons have migrated to twitter, or to places like Tumblr. In fact, I think Tumblr might work very well as a kind of continuation of the tea exchanges that I originally thought we’re doing online.

Of course, in real life, groups like the LATA and others are still thriving, and without all these online communities of one sort or another, I don’t think many of these groups would ever have been possible. I, for one, have met dozens of tea friends entirely because they read my blog, and we happen to be in the same place. Some of these exchanges are very enlightening, and I have learned much from them. It’s worth it, in the end, to keep this up, both in treasure and time. If others reading it feel it’s worth something to them, well, I suppose that’s why they keep reading.

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Dongguan tea shopping

February 29, 2012 · 6 Comments

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Upon the recommendation of Nicolas, I decided to venture up north to the heart of world manufacturing and to see the Dongguan tea markets for myself. Alas, I underestimated the difficulties of traveling in this part of the world, and by the time I arrived it was too late to go shopping. One meal and some food poisoning later, by the time I arrived there the next morning, I was really pretty sick, and I’m surprised I didn’t collapse while there.

From my research, Dongguan has two major tea markets, and a whole host of smaller collections of tea shops here and there. I decided to hit up the older, and larger market in Wanjiang district. It’s about 15-20 minutes from town center, depending on where you are and the traffic, which, at times, can be quite bad. The day was rainy, and cold, and generally rather unpleasant. I only took one overexposed picture while there, since I was basically in no mood to do so, and the scenery was depressing.

As is rather common today in China, many of these places have extremely wide roads, with shops on both sides. Here, the teashops are generally one story, and are basically uninterrupted for a few blocks in each direction. The first rule of shopping in places like this, especially if you’re low on time, is not to walk into stores that look uninteresting, which basically means don’t walk into almost all of them. They all have the same features – puerh cakes lined up on one side, big bags (5kg bags, or some variation of it) of tieguanyin or other Fujian oolong on the other side, vacuum sealed. In the middle area between the two walls, there are usually shelves full of either teaware, pots, tables, or more tea. Or there might be boxes or jians of puerh, or other types of loose tea (although you can imagine what it does to the tea’s quality in this super-damp environment). The back wall usually has a tea table set up, with a very, very bored looking young person, often a female, but sometimes male, staring blankly out onto the street, backed by a wall of puerh cakes encased in either glass or, more likely, yellowed plexiglass and set in these yellow artificial silk lined boxes. Even though these cakes are supposedly the more “exotic” or higher valued cakes, often times they’re just more run of the mill puerh cakes of no discernable value.

It is not impossible to find value in these shops. But if you’re pressed for time, that’s not the best way to spend time in a tea market. Instead, look for shops that seems specialized in one particular type of tea, whatever it is that you’re looking for. For tieguanyin, stores that only sell tieguanyin is likely to have more interesting stuff.  Likewise, for puerh, if you want old tea, go to a store that seems to only sell that. For younger tea, you can always spot the top end young tea stores pretty easily, especially if they press their own cakes.

So after having spent about 20 minutes just wandering around, I finally did end up in one store that seems to do their own pressing of young puerh, focusing on Yiwu and Jingmai, two of the most interesting tea mountains. The boss wasn’t there, and only a young male shopkeeper who said he’s from Yunnan was there. They had a number of cakes, although most of them they only had a handful left – the rest were all sold out. What remains are the lower end stuff, which, although not cheap (180-200 RMB a cake) are really not very interesting. Because of my health limitations that day, I only tried one tea, which I eventually bought a cake of – a Jingmai old tree tea, which is very potent, good, and interesting. I need to try it again, but I think this year once their spring tea arrives, I may head back up to Dongguan and buy some more of this. Although it’s not cheap at over 400 RMB a cake, it is, I think, worth the price of admission.

By the time I had a few cups of this tea, I was starting to really feel the effects this had on me, and the general situation was so that I had to go back to the hotel to lie down. It’s too bad I couldn’t spend more time at the tea market there, as I’m sure there are other stores that will present items of interest. Oh well, it’s only about two hours away, and there’s always next time.

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