A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Old Xanga posts’

A wedding and a tea meeting

June 11, 2008 · 5 Comments

Weddings are sometimes fun, but tea meetings with like minded addicts are always enjoyable. It was nice escaping to the clear blue skies of LA, going to the wedding of my cousin who gave out jasmine blooming tea balls as wedding favours, and then, on Sunday, meeting with a few of those from the LA tea group whom I’ve corresponded with before.

Two of them I’ve already met — Jason and Phyll — but the others I’ve only emailed on a number of occasions and exchanged teas with, but never met. It’s always good to know who is sending you leaves in sealed foiled packs. It gives me a little more confidence in drinking stuff coated with mysterious white powder sent by them :).

We started with two greens, each different and rather interesting, especially when we experimented with the “mineral rocks” (ch. maifanshi) that you can get from Asia which are supposedly used for adding minerals to water. They do seem to make a difference, even when there’s only one rock in the fairness cup and thus the water is only exposed to the rock for a short amount of time. I’ve always been rather skeptical of the ability of these rocks to do much of anything, mostly because they are exposed to the water for not very long periods and I wonder about the solubility of the minerals in these things… but I must say I’m sold.

After the two greens, we had two aged oolongs (one of mine from the Candy Store, and one an aged baozhong). The little rock still did the trick there, as we tried our tea with and without the rock…. when it’s in the fairness cup, the tea tasted better. Odd, and possibly placebo…

I think we ended with two Wuyi teas, one is simply called “Laoshucha” or “old tree tea” from Will, and another which is a dahongpao. The laoshucha clearly does have some nice qi.

If I seem to be short on the description of teas… that’s because I wasn’t paying all THAT much attention to them. It was far more interesting to meet old friends again, and in some cases, meeting friends whom I’ve only known through the cyberspace until now. Tea, after all, is a social drink, and it is nice to be able to do it finally in its proper setting — among a group of friends, instead of drinking alone. It might be nice to finally be able to live in a city with more than a plurality of tea drinkers whom I can regularly meet with again, but until then… there’s always this blog.

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Retry

June 5, 2008 · 2 Comments

Well, so I tried the tea today, with my stainless steel kettle, gaiwan (which I almost forgot how to use), small drinking cup…

Result? Inconclusive, as usual, but I ended much earlier than yesterday. The tea, somehow, wasn’t that interesting today. I do feel there was a little less complexity, or perhaps, it was a little less rounded. Seems consistent with the use of a porous pot — they are supposed to smooth out the rough edges. As should the water treatment.

The best, I suppose, would be if I could do this to somebody else, blind, but it is too involved and I am too lazy 🙂

This blog will be on a short break for a few days — traveling for a wedding in LA on Saturday, and then, meeting with those crazy people who drink tea on Sunday. Stay tuned 🙂

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Retrying Chen Guanghe Tang Yiwu Yecha, Fall 2006

June 4, 2008 · 2 Comments

I retried the Chen Guanghe Tang 2006 Fall Yiwu Yecha. I remember when I tried it last, which was quite a while ago, I thought it was no good. And I remember I was not the only one who thought so — some other bloggers and friends who are non-bloggers also thought it not very good (especially in comparison with the Chawang). This is my original post on the Yiwu Yecha. The impression stuck with me in Taiwan, where I found a place that sells those things for about $20 a piece. I thought it wasn’t that good anyway, so why bother (there were other, better things to be had for $20 a piece). So, the tea left my memory.

Until today, that is, when I tried to look for a young puerh to drink to counter the fried pork chop I had for lunch. Young puerh is great for cutting that feeling of pure grease in your mouth. I found this tea among my many bags of samples, and figured, why not.

(Sorry for a lack of pictures in recent entries — lighting in this apartment is atrocious in the summer when there’s a lot of foilage outside, and lacking a tripod, I’ve basically given up trying to take pictures).

The first thing I should say about this repeat, aside from the obvious fact that it has sat in the bag for a year and half, is that I am not using a single piece of equipment that I did last time. Last time it was filtered tap water, boiled in my Braun kettle, brewed in a gaiwan, through the fairness cup, and into my drinking cup. Everything, from water (still filtered tap water, but this one from Ohio) to cup has changed. So has my tastebuds. So has the tea itself, after more than a year in the bag.

The tea is decidedly better this time — more depth, more interesting notes, more body, less of the blandness I experienced last time. I think a good bit of it can be chalked up to the teaware — I have noticed, very obviously, that the tetsubin adds to the depth of a tea, especially puerh. It makes the throatiness much more obvious. The pot I use, the one that is rather odd looking and fairly porous, will filter out some of the nasty notes in a young puerh for me. That, and the extra year, might have made all the difference that needs to be made. Assessment: not too bad.

Now… it’s only fair if we give this tea a spin in conditions closer to what I used last time around — so, tomorrow, gaiwan and my trusty Braun kettle will do the work. Let’s see how it goes.

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Seasoning a tetsubin

June 2, 2008 · 3 Comments

The other thing that I discovered yesterday was by accident. We were making a red bean paste dessert for the guests, and when it boiled, it boiled over a little bit and spilled some onto the range. I didn’t think much of it, and when I went to heat up some more water as our first pot ran out, I put my tetsubin on the same range and started heating it.

It caught on fire, since there was some red bean paste on the bottom.

That, however, turned out to be a sort of blessing, for I finally found out how some of the other tetsubins I’ve seen get that old, black sheen — I think it’s from smoke and deposits on it, or some such. Maybe it’s also just the seasoning from putting some oil on it and then firing it, but it seems like good old smoke will do the trick on its own (or am I wrong?). My tetsubin, in some of the places where there was that fire, now has a bit of a black sheen to it whereas the other parts are still brown as before.

Now I am thinking…. a brazier might be in order….

Oh boy, the list of stuff to get is, indeed, endless

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Tea selection

June 2, 2008 · 2 Comments

It’s often not too easy to find the right teas to introduce people to making tea in the way we often do. Stuffing a pot full of leaves and then brewing is, usually, not what most people had in mind when they think of “tea”. Selection thus becomes extremely important — because picking the wrong tea can forever turn somebody off and make for, generally speaking, a very bad outing.

I hosted two people today from Central Asia. They’re, of course, not new to tea at all. Drinking tea is an age old tradition in the steppes, and they are quite familiar with tea — except, of course, tea is very different there. It’s usually black tea, made over a samovar with an extremely concentrated liquor, but then, they dilute it with water. Tea is also served with an immense amount of pastry and other foods. Not quite the same thing.

So, what to serve these new guests? It’s always a bit of a difficult question, made all the more difficult by my lack of good green tea or white tea. The only white tea I have are about three years old, which, actually, might make them good candidates, because I find some of the higher oxidized white teas actually do fairly well with age. Greens, of course, don’t do so well, and besides, I don’t have anything ready.

That leaves oolongs and puerhs (leaving out blacks — I figured they have enough black teas on their own). Puerh is almost always out of the question. Raw, young puerh is always a no go with people new to Chinese teas, or at least I think it should always be that way. While sometimes they can be nice, the downsides are high and I don’t like running those risks. Cooked or older puerh can be a possibility, but without knowing the tolerance of my guests for, say, mud, it’s hard to gauge.

That leaves oolongs. That is still quite a variety of stuff. I considered serving them the remaining sample D of dancong, but there wasn’t enough to serve a party of four sufficiently. It has to be something I have a little more of, something that I can use my bigger oolong pot for. I have some young gaoshan oolong that will probably do, and I think under other circumstances, I might’ve just brewed those. But… I don’t like new gaoshan oolong much. They’re, well, rather unpleasant after a few cups. They can also be a little bitter if you’re not used to that sort of thing.

I finally settled on a gaoshan oolong after all, but one that is aged maybe 5 years or so. It still tastes mostly like a gaoshan oolong, but it has lost a good bit of its bitterness (only really noticeable if you try very hard to overbrew the tea). It’s a little more mellow that way, and a little more easy going. It also paired well with the eventual food we had, including cakes, fruits, etc. We were accompanied by an endless swarm of flies (we just had a storm two days ago and it seems like the flies bred like nuts recently).

The tea held on for the whole afternoon, probably 15 or 20 infusions in all. I originally thought we could move to an older tea after a while, but the guests decided they like this one just fine… and we just kept going with it, chatting about various things all the while.

So, the lesson I learned is that slightly aged oolongs can be great for guests. There was another lesson learned today, but that’s for tomorrow.

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Teaware porn

May 31, 2008 · 5 Comments

At the end of the day

I really shouldn’t line my pots up like that with cats around.

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The result

May 31, 2008 · 6 Comments

The experiment, I must say, was not conclusive. Of course, that’s probably predictable right from the get go — almost no tea experiment is conclusive. However…. having tried pouring my water quite hard and fast today, I must say that it seems as though the tea came out a little more sour, and a little more bitter, without as much aroma…

Could it be that different?

Well, I think there are a few things that a high, slow pour will do, some of which have been mentioned by comments in yesterday’s post. The first is, of course, temperature — a higher pour means the water is ever so slightly colder. Also, the water is in touch with tea a little longer — of course you can time yourself so that your fast pour stays in the pot just as long, but the combination of slightly lower temperatures and longer time… might be interesting.

There’s something else too. If you pour harder, it distrubs the leaves and potentially change the way the tea brews. When I prepare a pot for tea, I always shake the pot a little so that it settles down — the leaves will be more tightly packed. When I do the slow pour, the leaves move very, very little. If you move the leaves around, it changes the tea — I think anybody knows that. So, the movement might also have something to do with it.

Of course, all this might be placebo and I’m just kidding myself. Blind test might be better, but that’s quite hard to achieve….

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How to pour water

May 29, 2008 · 4 Comments

Another topic that came up during my conversations with Sherab is pouring water into the pot. Think it doesn’t matter?

Well… the story he told me is like this

A certain famous tea master, who shall remain nameless, was brewing tea for a few people somewhere in China. Sherab has a friend who went. Two teas were made. The first was a wet stored cooked puerh, and it tasted like crap. The tea supposedly gave off the “locking the throat” feeling, where one feels as though the throat is closing up and is often attributed by mainland Chinese as a sign of wet storage — a bad side effect, so to speak. The second tea, which, while not specified (to me) I assume is also of a similar genre, had no such effect. Second tea is better, no?

Well… not quite. Apparently, when the master made the first tea, he poured water from up high and in a rather violent fashion, so the water hit the pot hard. The second tea he didn’t do that. Afterwards, as Sherab’s friend knows said master, he went and asked. Master said, “when you do that (high and fast pouring) with wet stored cooked puerh, you will always produce the “locked throat” effect”. Pray, tell, why would a venerable tea master do such a thing so that a tea will come out tasting worse? Well, I’m sure you all, my intelligent readers, must know the answer, and it involves profit, if you need a hint.

The fact that most tea masters out there have a profit motive is not something you need me to tell you. However, the significant part of this story is the pouring – how do you pour water into the pot affects the way the tea tastes. I remember, very early on in my own tea career, I was told that when making oolongs, one should pour from high up, in a small stream, gently, and slowly. Puerh, on the other hand, should be treated with a stronger stream, but NOT high up — pour low. When pouring from pot/fairness cup into the cups, ALWAYS pour low — don’t splash around like some bad youtube videos do.

Over time, I must say I’ve gotten sloppy with my water pouring technique. It’s easy to get lazy, but I decided to try that out again today. I pulled out my aged baozhong, a tea I know pretty well, and one of my pots, and made sure that whenever I made that tea, I poured in a small stream from up high. The result? My tea seems to be a little less sour, and a little smoother. I’m going to try tomorrow, with the exact same wares, but with a different water pouring style. Let’s see what happens, and of course, I’ll report back.

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Traditional storage

May 28, 2008 · 4 Comments

One of the topics that came up during Sherab’s visit on Saturday was traditional storage. Traditional storage is sometimes viewed with mythical vile — it’s bad, it’s awful, don’t do it, it’ll kill you, etc. I’ve heard versions of all that.

I think slowly, people have come to realize that there are two kinds of traditional storage, so to speak — good and bad. Good traditional storage can produce great results — witness all the “classic” puerh cakes from the 50s onward, most of which received some traditional storage treatment at some point in their life. Others can be incredibly bad — cakes that are moldy inside out, growing not only the usual (and all together ok) white stuff, but also yellow, red, black… you name it. The first kind is welcomed, the second should be avoided.

I think Cloud at some point or another wrote a few things for the Puerh Teapot magazine (Chinese version) that talks about traditional storage. I am not sure, but I don’t think they’ve been worked into English through the Art of Tea. I suspect, though, that it will be a useful exercise. Essentially (and this is also from my friends who are more knowledgable about this sort of thing than me) what happens is traditional storage is only one phase — usually not a very long one — of a cake’s storage life. It should not stay permanently in a “traditional” storage condition, which generally means high humidity and often accompanied by higher heat. After that, however, the cakes should be aired out and left alone in drier climes — storage units that are ventilated and not in the basement of buildings. Much of an aged tea’s life is actually spent in such storage units, not traditional basements.

Also, traditional does not imply spraying water all around or anything like that. In fact, sometimes it might even be necessary to control the humidity by putting things that will absorb moisture (I believe chalk is used — spread around the floor, although my memory is fuzzy on this). The cakes that are stored in traditional storage should never touch the floor, the walls, or anything other than each other, really — they’re put on racks so avoiding the very damp floor and they’re usually placed a little away from the walls to avoid condensation, etc. You don’t want them THAT traditional.

Ideally, teas that were traditional stored should spend time outside of that storage to age, and to also let the “traditional storage” flavour go away a bit. It will never entirely disappear, but it does dissipate over time. I drank some traditionally stored loose puerh today that has mellowed considerably comparing to when I first got it some two or three years ago. It is now quite drinkable, smooth, without any sort of nasty mustiness, and most importantly, it can be rebrewed many times (I think I drank around 20 today). Cooked puerh will be lucky to last 7.

So if you got some stuff that smells musty and looks a bit nasty, don’t give up on it and say it’s bad and throw it away (again, this only applies to stuff with white dusting on it — yellow, red, or really any other colour mould should be avoided). Give it time, let it air out, and after a few years, it might surprise you.

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The (not so) bitter end

May 28, 2008 · 14 Comments

I remember when I first started out drinking puerh, mostly by way of friends who had much better stuff and who made it for me, I was often told that the best infusions for an older puerh starts with infusion 5.

Yes, it begins with infusion 5 or so. Everything before is full of mixed flavours and merely a build up. In the words of one, you can pretty much toss everything up to that point.

Contrast that view with many bloggers, who generally think that by infusion 5, a tea is ending or close to its end. Anything above and beyond is, in American parlance, gravy. I think at the heart of this difference is a fundamentally different style of making tea, but just as important, a fundamentally different conception of what one should get from a tea.

Of course, when I say something like this I’m probably overgeneralizing a little. Yet, I do think that from what I can gather from many blogs out there, the largest focus is on the initial flavour of a tea, the strong feeling one gets from the first two or three cups and how the tea performs in the mouth in those fleeting moments. Is it apricot or is it peach? Or, maybe straw? Grapes? Mud? The list goes on.

I don’t think we often see a lot of discussion of how a tea reacts in the mouth after the initial impressions. That, I think, is partly because teas are about flavours in the West — what does it taste like? That, in turn, is something that I think a product of drinking a lot of greens, low oxidation oolongs, and that sort of thing. For those things, flavour is indeed often very important. They also tend to die faster.

But even in these teas, what the tea does to you and how long it does the same thing to you are very important, but I rarely see this sort of thing mentioned in reviews online. Discussions of infusions of tea after maybe 4 or 5 is usually an afterthought.

Are my impressions remotely correct? I often feel the best kinds of teas are the ones that keep giving after 10, 15, 20 infusions. But I don’t tihnk I ever really see anybody talk about brewing a tea out that far, aside from a very few individuals. Are these not mentioned because they’re deemed unimportant? Or is this simply not done? I’d like to know.

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