A Tea Addict's Journal

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Stomach problems

May 8, 2008 · 14 Comments

I had a maocha from Beijing today. It’s been almost two years since I bought it, and it’s showing the first signs of age. However, it’s still very young, and in case the taste wasn’t obvious enough, my stomach protested.

My stomach doesn’t like young puerh very much. It never really has. These days, however, I can’t drink it more than two days in a row, or in some cases, even one day, without it protesting that I’m doing it eternal harm.

The tea people I associate with in Hong Kong (and pretty much any other Chinese tea drinker in Southern China) believe that young puerh isn’t very good for you. It’s harsh, and it can damage your stomach, at the very least. It’s also supposed to be bad for your kidney, but I think that’s more a Chinese medicine thing and longer term. You don’t always see the immediate consequences for that, but you definitely see immediate consequences for drinking too much young puerh. Tiffany, of Best Tea House, has long complained of having a weak stomach, especially after so many years of drinking too much tea. These days if you give her a cup of young puerh or green oolong, she’ll sip it very slowly, trying to basically not drink any of it (or at most, for a taste to see how the tea is). The same problem doesn’t really apply when it’s heavy roasted tea or an aged tea.

I find myself more or less in the same boat these days. I didn’t drink a young puerh yesterday, but the day before I did. It shows immediately. It’s just a mild stomach discomfort today, but it can become a full blown stomach ache if, say, I drink more young stuff tomorrow. It doesn’t really matter what kind of young puerh it is — the result is more or less the same.

These things are obviously also affected by your diet, etc, but that’s why you don’t see me talking much about young puerh these days, and if you’ve sent me a sample of something (especially those under 5 years of age) and I haven’t gotten to it yet — please forgive me for being slow 🙂

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Mystery aged oolong

May 7, 2008 · 2 Comments

The tea I had today is something nobody has been able to identify definitively

This tea I got in Beijing, from a store that only sold dancong. The guy is from the Fenghuang shan area. He said this tea is something that was sitting in his home (or a neighbour’s) for years, and he took it out and tried to sell it. Didn’t really move very fast, since this isn’t stuff that Beijingers have any real interest in.

The tea is odd. The first few cups taste a bit puerh-esque. It doesn’t have the same bite that the “wet stored” tieguanyin has. Instead, it is a more subtle spicy flavour that lingers. Today the tea actually came out better than previous renditions. Maybe it’s the pot. Maybe it’s the water, but it came out full bodied, whereas usually it is rather thin and bland.

I am inclined to think it’s something they really produced locally, perhaps a lower grade shuixian from the area. It does have that green kick to it, near the end of the session, but it’s very subtle and hard to pinpoint. Toki thought this could be a liu’an, but I’m not sure what kind of liu’an looks like tihs (liu’an guapian?). The stuff was rather cheap, and I probably should’ve bought a little more. As it is, however, it provides a nice diversion and is always a good tea to use to stump people 🙂

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Different aging for different oolongs

May 6, 2008 · 6 Comments

What I’m about to say I have no basis other than my own drinking experience — a mere conjecture, more than anything else.

I think Taiwanese oolong age faster than mainland ones.

To clarify, I should say that Taiwanese oolongs age more markedly than mainland ones.

What I mean is that I think there’s a larger discernable difference between an older and a younger Taiwanese oolong. The difference is not only more obvious, but more qualitative. Mainland oolongs, by comparison, age slower — they retain more of their original character despite long age. I have yet to taste an aged Taiwanese oolong that really remind me of their original taste, but with mainland oolongs (and here I mostly have tieguanyin in mind) I find that I can easily tell it was not only an original tieguanyin, but have some basic idea of how the tea was, back in the day.

I have a feeling this might have to do with processing. I currently have no idea if this is indeed true, or if it’s just my small sample size playing tricks on me. I also don’t know if it’s because of the type of tea that I have found so far leading me down this road, but things like storage condition and such have large parts to play in this process.

Anyway, food for thought. Meanwhile, I take one last sip from my aged tieguanyin (mainland) before I go to bed 🙂

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Wet stored tieguanyin

May 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

This is a tea that I’ve talked about a few times before, a “wet stored” tieguanyin from my favourite candy store in Taipei. I believe it is around 25 years, from what I was told, but it’s hard to say for sure, for there’s no real proof of anything.

It is, I think, one of my better finds. I’ve sent a few samples to various people, with varying comments. The usual one, however, is that it tastes like aged puerh.

I don’t really know how the aged puerh taste got in there. I theorize it is the fact that the tea got slightly mouldy (you can smell it a little when it’s in its original big bag — a musty smell). The mould helped change the taste of the tea so that it has acquired a bit of that uerh taste.

It looks the part too, at least to the untrained eye.

Yet the tea is not puerh if you drink it carefully, because there are floral notes you’ll never find in a puerh. If puerh tastes earthy, this tea is more of a punchy floral note. It’s not fruity like the non-reroasted aged oolongs. They’re very different beasts.

The tea will last longer than you have the stomach for it. It might get boring in a way, but personally, I like teas that keep giving me many infusions of sweet water, hours after I first started. My requirements for a good tea isn’t very high.

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Aging takes… time

May 4, 2008 · 7 Comments

I pulled out a sample from a long time ago today — late 2006, when I first got to Beijing. I bought three samples of an up and coming brand back in the day called 12 Gentlemen. I remember I was only mildly impressed by their tea. Today I took out the 12 Gents “Arbour old tree” to try again, since I have a lot of it left. Wonder what a year and half has done to the tea?

Quick answer is… not much.

I’m sure something changed, but it still largely tastes like some very young puerh, with a greenish taste and some early promise of goodness. However, as the tea wore on it became very mediocre…. merely ok. Arbour tree? Maybe, maybe not. One thing worthy of note though is that the tea is very tightly compressed (despite claims of stone-mould pressed). I don’t know how one person stepping on a stone mould can get tea to come out like an iron cake.

Which leads me to the point of… it takes a lot of time to age a tea. I think anything under 10 years for aging a tea is really not much time at all, and just because old teas are not common this side of the Pacific doesn’t mean a tea is somehow more mature by being here. Unfortunately, I think puerhs are really not very good for drinking (if dry stored) until they’ve got maybe 15-20 years of age. Young puerh have their charms, of course, but those charms are really an accident and a bit of an acquired taste. It’s a tea that’s meant to be aged and drunk after some fermentation.

I’ve seen change in some of my teas, but not too many of them. Some have aged faster than others. This sample, having sat mostly in a plastic bag in Beijing and later Taiwan, has barely changed. I’ve had 15 or even 20 years old puerh stored in Taiwan that are only now beginning to be really drinkable, losing the harshness and the roughness that make young puerh difficult to down sometimes (not to mention bad for your body). I sometimes wonder if all this investment into cakes for furture consumption is really worth it, especially when it’s with cakes that are produced in large quantities and will still be available in large quantities in the future. Is it really worth bothering? It’s a lot of kilograms of tea to haul around for 20 years. Wouldn’t it be wiser just to stick the money in an index fund and harvest it 20 years later to buy tea?

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Growing out of a tea

May 3, 2008 · 5 Comments

It’s a little bit sad when you realize you’ve outgrown a tea — that it’s no longer good, even though once upon a time, you thought it was a nice tea.

I remember I used to really like this stuff

It’s some supposedly 30 years old loose puerh from Best Tea house in Hong Kong. I remember the first time I bought my 150g of it, I went through it probably in two months. The second time I bought it, it took longer. I still have the third one, and it’s been around for two years. I’m not even halfway through it.

Drinking it again today, I think now I’m quite sure this is a Vietnamese tea, not Yunnan, or at least it’s a blend of the two. There’s that distinctive Vietnamese sort of taste to it. It’s really not very good, when it comes down to it. Sure, if you need something aged and don’t want a cooked tea, this will do. And it does that fairly well, despite the fact that I don’t like it so much anymore. It’s not horrible. It’s not bad in any real sense of the word. I just don’t really enjoy it as much anymore.

The biggest problem is that this tea isn’t very cheap. When you compare it with stuff that you can buy in Hong Kong for maybe a quarter of the price, one wonders if it’s worth bothering. The tea is dry-ish stored. I don’t think I’ll be buying my fourth pack.

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Pot experiment

May 2, 2008 · 3 Comments

No, not that kind of pot.

So I tried to do the “drink the same tea in different pots” bit yesterday and today, especially with a view of trying out the “new” pot with young puerh. My selected victim was my Zhangjiawan puerh

Using the “new” pot first

And then, today, the pot I normally use

Both of the second infusion

And the leaves

Now, I am by no means claiming this to be scientific. After all, I don’t have a scale, I am not measuring carefully the volume to weight ratio. I’m not calibrating the temperature of the water precisely….

But somehow, the “new” pot has things coming out darker and the flavour generally “older”. It added a year or two to the age of the tea, methinks. I don’t know how that happened.

I might’ve put in a little more leaves, which might explain the difference, somewhat. If you look at the wet leaves, the left side is from the “new” pot. I’m sure the fact that it has been sitting around the pot for a day has changed it a bit, or has it? I don’t know for sure. I do remember, however, thinking that the leaves look awfully dark sitting in the pot when I made it yesterday.

So, no conclusions. Just…. lots of questions.

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Trying out a new pot…

April 30, 2008 · 1 Comment

I used my newly cleaned pot today to make Iwii’s sample 5. Originally, the thought was to see if this pot is any good for young puerh. However, I realized that I don’t know the tea well enough to really judge whether it is making it any better than usual or not, and since I used up the rest of the sample, I have no real way of comparing. One tasting does not a good impression form, I suppose, and so…. I decided that what I might be doing for the rest of the week (or even beyond..) is to use this pot to make a number of different kinds of tea, and see which one it goes the best with. I might actually brew the same tea two days in a row, except that one day it will be with the newer pot, one will be with my usual, and see if that makes any difference….

The new pot I got is really quite porous, so I am thinking it might be good for things like wet stored puerh…. but I guess we’ll find out soon enough, or at least, I’ll have fun trying.

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A new toy

April 29, 2008 · 6 Comments

Yes, many new toys these days, this one’s slightly different though

A chawan, a kuroraku hira chawan, specifically, but a chawan nonetheless.

I don’t drink much matcha, but I plan to play with it a bit in the coming days. This stuff isn’t so good for me in the winter, that’s for sure, but in hot summer days, a nice cool cup of matcha can actually be quite nice.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to decipher the artist’s seal

My first instinct is that this is a really stylized version of the word “raku” or “le” in Chinese. I tried thinking up what else it could be, but can’t. It’s a funny shaped raku, for sure…. or is it matsuraku (in which case this is upside down)? I can’t tell. Does anybody have any idea where one can go find better info on such things? Japanese books are fine…

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The power of bleach

April 28, 2008 · 8 Comments

Before:

A pretty dirty pot, if I may say so myself. I got this recently, and it hasn’t been cleaned. Time to clean it.

It took a dip in a diluted bleach bath for an hour or two. Then I dunked it in water to try to “de-bleach” the thing. I figured I’d first soak it with some water and see how it does, and then try to do some tea with it. It’s interesting to note that the water turns yellow after a while of soaking — I was using cold water at this point. There’s truth to the “old pots will brew tea on its own” theory.

The pot is now very clean

Now I’m going to let it soak some more, then probably sink it in some tea to wash away the bleach…. then it’s time to try making some tea in this thing.

Exciting, isn’t it? I should’ve taken more chemistry.

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