A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Old Xanga posts’

Aged? Taiwan oolong

November 6, 2007 · 2 Comments

One of the things that makes dating aged oolongs difficult is the lack of any sort of packaging. They usually just show up in a canister, and packed for you on the spot depending on how much you want. You’re lucky if the canister is labeled, but the label sometimes has nothing to do with what’s inside, so go figure…

This tea I found in a teashop near National Taiwan University after dinner with a friend. The shop was interesting looking. It was sort of like a regular mom and pop shop, but better stocked (so it seems) than most. I asked if they have aged oolongs, and the owner said he had a bunch. I ended home with just one, although there was another one that was made purely of buds that looked more aged and very interesting, but the price tag was pretty steep and I didn’t want to gamble on it.

So this is what this tea looks like

Doesn’t look much aged, does it? When he opened the big canister the tea smelled more aged. In smaller quantity, it’s not as obvious.

It brews a darkish yellow/orange tea

The taste… is decided that of a younger Taiwan oolong but with a touch of that “aged” character to it. That aged character is very fleeting and isn’t at all obvious at first, but having drunk a lot of that stuff recently where it’s much more prominent, it becomes a lot easier to identify. The taste is without a trace of the grassy notes that I dislike in a Taiwan oolong, and the tea itself is full bodied and VERY smooth, lacking that slightly rough edge that one often finds in the lighter Taiwanese oolong. If there was roasting done for this tea, it must be very minor, and given the small amount of this tea that the store keeps, I doubt it’s worth reroasting. The taste is primarily that of honey-like aromas, plus a bit of that typical Taiwanese floral note. It also has the additional benefit of not making me dizzy even though I drank it on a mostly empty stomach before dinner. Can’t say that for most Taiwanese oolongs.

I think this tea probably rarely sees the light of day, as few people will seek out a tea like this from a store like that one. The price is a bit high, mind you (something like $180 per 600g) but I do like this tea quite a bit. I bought a new, slightly roasted oolong that, from my memory anyway, tastes similar and is cheaper. Maybe I should drink that tomorrow and compare them against each other to see which one’s better and if the aging of this has done anything to it.

The wet leaves are healthy, thick, and the stems are kept

It is probably best drunk just as a typical Taiwanese oolongs with a honey note, rather than anything aged per se. Yet… pretty enjoyable all around.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Lies, damned lies, and sales pitches

November 5, 2007 · 11 Comments

If anybody I know asks me for advice in starting a business selling tea, I’d suggest they pick up a job in a kindergarten telling stories, because they’ll need the practice. I think there are few businesses out there that tell as many stories as a tea store generally does.

Let’s start with the simple ones that everybody buying tea has heard — Monkey Picked oolong. “They’re really picked by Monkeys!” I’ve seen a website saying that, which….. bothered me. Do they believe that? Do they think their customers believe that? Really? Do they consider what kind of message this sends to people browsing their website?

Then you have the “premium”, “reserve”, “special reserve”, “limited edition”, and that sort of thing. This is nothing unique, since most retail industries have them — they’re everywhere from cars to magazines. The thing with tea though is that very often I find these to be merely ok teas… if even. Tea is a difficult thing to judge. A top end longjing look very different from a low grade one, to be sure, but only if you know what to look for. Otherwise, they’re just some green hairy leaves (low grade, of course, has less hair and is darker, generally). Couple this problem with online sales, where you’re at best treated to a high resolution picture, and it becomes nearly impossible to tell one from the other. Kudos to the vendors who sell samples, and woe to those who don’t.

The same sort of thing happens in puerh, where cakes are slightly more distinguishable by production number, factory, etc. So what do you do? You commemorate. 66th anniversary of your brand? Why not. Trade fair? You need a commemoration cake. A China-US Summit? Of course. 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong even though you’re a factory in Yunnan? Hey, it’s a day of national significance. Except that when every year you have a commemoration cake for the same event, it gets old fast. I think when they first came out, these things did often mean something. Now, though, every other cake I see commemorates somthing… and they are often made of the same tea (or similar quality) but cost more because they’re “special”. C’mon. Time for a new pitch.

The more egregious and IMO annoying stories are the “this is a special tea only through so and so”. In some ways, this is an extension of the “reserve”, “special reserve” stuf, but with more specific details aimed at making you think this is somehow a special tea. The more common is something like “this tea is made/stored/found by Tea Master X and I have secured a bit for sale here”. The less common is “this is from a deceased Tea Master Y who had a secret way of making this tea taste so good”. Even less common are more convoluted stories such as “this was a tea that was stored in the warehouse of a factory in exchange for cash payment back in the day when puerh was worthless and the factory had no money to pay, and was just rediscovered last year by us and we bought up all of it”. All these, by the way, are stories I’ve heard in person. The first one you’re probably all fairly familiar with, the second conceivable, and the third are usually one of a kind, involving details that are so minute they almost have to be fake. Of course, back in the 70s or 80s, these stories could indeed be true, and I don’t dispute that even now some of these things could potentially be true. However, it is very important to remember that for tea, scarcity does not always mean quality. I can make 2kg of oolong by sneaking into a farm and picking tea at night and making it however I do. That tea will be very scarce, it’ll be one of a kind…. but it doesn’t mean it’s good.

It’s surprising how often the above happens — and I think quite frequently, the person pitching the tea to me him/herself believes the story to be true (told to him/her by whoever who sold it to him/her in the first place). It justifies the higher price being charged, but also helps give the store an air of quality, rarity, etc, all that. Sometimes, these teas are genuinely interesting or good. Other times… they’re just run of the mill. These pitches can also combine with the bait and switch — knowingly providing a tea that is quite regular (say, a Menghai cake or some middle grade tieguanyin) but dressing it up, mixing in something, changing the wrapper, putting it in a nice box… and here you go, a super special reserve limited edition tea provided only through me from some mystery person who I can’t tell you about (this is why I don’t have original packaging/neifei/bag/whatever for you!). Expensive, of course, but it’s worth it!

How many people pay good money for a bottle of wine that has its label obviously ripped out? Probably not many. How come people are willing to tolerate that kind of story when a neifei has been ripped out of a cake of puerh? More than a few, apparently. I’ve received a gift cake that’s sort of like this…. a store-brand cake that is obviously just some regular cooked puerh bing, but I bet the person paid big money for it because the wrapping is nice and the store is upscale (with a functional and pretty website — a rarity for a mainland Chinese store). They probably told him that the tea is very special and old and specially sourced, when it’s obviously just some regular brand new factory stuff that’s been rewrapped.

And don’t even mention Wulong for Life…. if I see one more of their ads when I check gmail, I’m going to kill somebody.

Don’t get me wrong, stories in and of themselves are fine. In fact, they give some “flavour” to the teas and make it more colourful, and I’m fine with that. It’s when things don’t add up, when quality isn’t there, and when they are way too common and transparent (like commemoration cakes) that’s when things start to bother me.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Impressions of a “wild arbour” tree

November 4, 2007 · 1 Comment

I drank this today

“Yiwu Impressions” from Zhongcha, given to me by L. L is a first line distributor for Zhongcha’s puerh, and as he told me — this is made from plantation tea. The tea’s wholesale price is 100 RMB, which means that by the time it gets into hands of consumers…. it’ll be probably double that, or more, who knows.

There are some broken stuff

So I used those. The colour of the liquor is ok enough

The tea is bland, uninteresting… it has a bit of that Yiwu taste to it, but overall I find it weak and boring. The leaves:

Are varied… but I think looking at this sample, it tells me that everything everybody told me about how to identify an old, wild, arbour tree tea based on looks is wrong, because you can find some leaves in this sample that will satisfy one or even a few of those criterias, yet, this is plantation tea.

So we can forget about trying. It’s all about how it behaves in the mouth, and this tea just doesn’t cut it.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged:

Will travel for tea

November 3, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to see Aaron Fisher today again at Miaoli. I don’t think I’ll ever go to Miaoli if I didn’t know anybody there. It’s a small town halfway down to Taichung, and it doesn’t have a lot to offer. But hey, if there’s another tea head there, I’ll go.

Especially if said tea head brews up a nice roasted Taiwan oolong (sweet, mellow, nice aftertaste), followed by a late 70s/early 80s dry stored Xiaguan iron cake (it’s fun when the stuff still taste kinda young when it’s closing in on 30, with a mix of aged and young characteristics — proof that iron cakes can probably benefit from wetter storage), then on to the Blue Label (very nice), and then finishing with a 1930s Liu An (BBB, I see why you love this stuff). Thank you, Aaron. They were all great.

Meanwhile we talked about things tea related, and I also watched him cleaning an old pot he just got using some Japanese pot-cleaning stuff, which he gave me a few packs of to clean my pots. Time to experiment.

I didn’t sleep well last night, and so my tea endurance was a little lower than usual, but it was a good day drinking tea. He also sent me off with a bunch of samples — more on those later 🙂

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Dry stored aged baozhong?

November 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

I am thinking that if that super-heavily roasted tea can be thought of as a “cooked” version of aged oolong, then this tea today can be called a “dry stored” baozhong.

The dry leaves are not too indicative of anything. You can sniff a faint smell of aged oolongs, but the leaves are obviously quite intact and look good — it doesn’t show very well in the photo

The cup of tea looks similarly good

It starts out a little sour — the first cup or two has some sourness in it, but it dissipates quickly and by the third infusion you’re not getting any sourness from it anymore. Instead, it’s got a nice aged flavour to it — I can’t describe quite how “aged” it taste, but it reminds me of old puerh, plus a little fruitiness. There’s no roasted flavour at all to the tea, and in fact, after a few infusions you start tasting some greeness in the back end — it seems like there’s a green oolong undertone to the tea. It hits the throat well, with an obvious aftertaste that lingers well after I swallowed. There’s also some qi — I was feeling the effects of drinking this tea. It’s always a good thing.

The tea lasts many infusions — this is taken after maybe 10 cups?

The wet leaves are a bit interesting

You can see there are some leaves that are almost green, while most are brownish. Most leaves feel a bit roasted — they’re not soft and pliable like unroasted oolongs, but are a bit stiffer, but not stiff enough so that you can’t open them up. The roasting done on these teas is probably fairly light — and I even wonder if it was reroasted at all. The taste is sufficiently aged to tell me that it’s probably not faked, and it probably took some time to develop, especially considering the relatively light roasting done.

You can see the slight variations in the colour of the leaves

It did occur to me whether or not this tea was blended with some new baozhongs. I would think though that the dry (and new) baozhong would stick out like a sore thumb with its dark green rather than dark brown colour. I didn’t see any of that when I put the leaves in. I’ll probably look more carefully next time to make sure.

Regardless though, I really like this tea, and it’s also nice that it’s not expensive at all.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged:

Internet outage

November 1, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Internet at my place died two nights ago, and is still being restored.

So I’ll be taking a short break until whenever it gets fixed, hopefully within a day or two.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged:

This is how you clean an old pot

October 30, 2007 · 11 Comments

I went back to Fuxing (Fushen) today… and as usual, the owner talked and talked, interesting info spewing out during the tea session. Among other things, I asked — how do you clean an old, dirty pot?

“Bleach”

Huh?

“Yeah, bleach — stick the pot in bleach, cover it in bleach, leave it there for a day, and then take it out”

So, apparently, what you’re supposd to do is to bleach the damn thing, inside and out. Then, you take it out, rinse it a few times with water (I suppose cold is good enough?). Then, you use spent tea leaves — throw them in, fill the pot up, and fill it up with water. Leave it overnight. The next day, your leaves and the water will smell like bleach, but the bleach from the pot will be gone. If you feel queasy, repeat this a few times.

Sounds rather insane to me.

But… maybe not? After all… we use bleach on a lot of things.

Maybe that’s what I should do?

Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: , ,

Cooked oolong

October 29, 2007 · 1 Comment

As far as oolongs go, the tea I had today is what you’d call a cooked oolong.

Sometimes reasonably roasted oolongs are called cooked (shu) oolong, but there are different degrees of this stuff, and today’s is pretty extreme. Look at the liquor

I picked this tea up at the Fuxing store. They had a small amount of it left, and I thought it was fun, if nothing else. They claim it’s an aged oolong, 10 years or so. I somehow don’t buy it. Look at the wet leaves

They’re almost pitch black. The leaves are like little springs — you stretch them and let go, and they bounce right back to their original shape. They won’t unfurl no matter what you do, and will break if you try too hard.

Don’t get me wrong though, as far as super heavily fired oolongs go, this one doesn’t taste too bad. It has its share of charcoal notes, but it also does have a little bit of an aged taste, and plenty of woody notes in the tea. It is probably better if brewed a little lighter because of its very heavy firing, but I want to compare it on a more equal footing to the other stuff I’ve been drinking recently. Whereas some of those aged oolongs you’ve seen can actually look quite normal, this is anything but. Yet, there will be people who tell you this is aged stuff… and I suspect that with enough work put into it and giving it some more time to lose the “fire” flavour, it can indeed be a reasonable aged oolong. It just isn’t one yet.

There are charms of such teas, but they tend to be a bit boring and sometimes just a little too much charcoal. I think I will revisit this tea after leaving it around for a few months and see what happens.

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Chenguanghe Tang Yiwu Spring 06 revisited

October 28, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went back to this sample – what’s left of it – today.

One thing about these teas is that they are stemmy — lots of stems

Stems are not a bad thing. In fact, some see it as an important part of a cake that will age well. Obviously Mr. Chen agrees.

It brews bright yellow

The tea is smooth (as young raw pureh goes), sweet, classic Yiwu taste, clean, deep, strong qi… the only thing I had a problem with was that it dropped off significantly after about 7. There was a steep drop off into another step — something much milder and sweeter, and it is on that plane that it remains. It still brews infusions after that, just… it’s a bit of a jarring turn.

One thing I’ve noticed about this after brewing it is that the leaves don’t unfurl on their own. Now, there are people out there who will claim that leaves that don’t unfurl is a sign of a bad tea, but I think that really only applies to aged stuff or highly roasted stuff. Here, the leaves are sticking onto each other (or themselves — rolled) and don’t unfurl despite long brew times. You need to peel them open. Is this good, or is this bad?

There’s a recent post on tea4u, a Taiwanese forum, that sums up all these debates – basically, the simple answer is “nobody really knows”. Everybody agreed that “it’s better to spend more on a good tea than to pay less for a crap tea”. Ok, that’s easy. The next question is — what’s a good tea?

That’s where everybody starts getting stumped. Keep in mind these are collectors, dealers, that sort of thing. People who are hardly unknowledgable about tea. People who are widely read, have drank lots, etc… and most couldn’t come up with a straight answer.  When somebody proposes something, someone else will challenge it. My conclusion from all this is that — there is no concensus, and if you talk to 100 “experts”, you’ll get 100 different answers. The simple way of explaining this? Nobody really knows.

So we’re basically all guessing, and none of these newer cakes really have had enough time to mature into something truly aged yet. We’ve been doing this for, what, 10 years, since the mid 90s? All the new experiments are just now entering the second decade… whether somebody’s right or not will take considerably longer to figure out.

I guess one way to ensure you have a nice cake for the future is to hedge your bets — buy different styles of stuff, preferably from different kinds of people who believe in different kinds of aging formula. Or… just not worry too much and go with the flow, drink what you feel makes you happy. I’m somehow more comfortable with that approach, but just in case, I’m also practicing a bit of the first as well to hedge my own bets 🙂

Categories: Old Xanga posts
Tagged:

Chayuan

October 27, 2007 · 3 Comments

There’s a tea mall in Maliandao called “Chayuan”. “Cha”, you all know, is tea. The word “yuan” ç·£ in this case can mean “predestined affinity”, or something like that, anyway. Chayuan, when combined, can mean something like “some natural affinity through tea”, either between two people, or between a tea and a person.

I suppose I had some of that today, when I went walking around the Chungking North Rd. area again where the old teashops of Taipei are located. There aren’t that many of them nowadays, and one or two that I went by looked downright imposing…. even worse than the “Grand Old Store“. They were so imposing, I didn’t go in at all.

Then I found this place that’s across the park from Youji. It still looked like a Grand Old Store — old decor, lots of big (I can comfortably sit in one) canisters for tea, all lined up along the store and two women sitting there watching TV. No customers. I walked in, and asked if they have “laocha”, old tea. This is parlance for old Taiwanese tea, usually, when one’s in Taiwan. Surprisingly, she took out some puerh — cooked, loose puerh at that. “No no no, old Taiwanese tea”, I said. “Ok, we have some”. She popped open on of those big cans, inside of which is a big plastic bag, and there it was… kilos of what look and smell like aged baozhong. It was then the owner of the store, a man in his 60s, came out. Wanna try some?

Sure…

The tea itself wasn’t very good. It’s a bit too sour — sour enough to make it unpleasant. The conversation, however, was going well. I think the owner liked the fact that I know a few things about tea, and that I am a young person seeking old Taiwan teas. These days, he laments, young people don’t know these things anymore. They just drink the new stuff, and all those new stores that are popping up — those owners know nothing about tea. You can’t drink that green stuff too much. It’s too stimulating, and is bad for you. This is what we drank in the old days, etc etc

Not surprisingly, he then brought out some better aged baozhong… they look better, and tasted far better. It’s a little sour in the opening, but it’s only a touch sour and is entirely acceptable. There’s an aged taste to the tea, although not a lot of the fruity sweetness, but the qi is strong and obvious — I was sweating profusely, and today was hardly hot. This rarely happens with me, so I know I’ve got a winner here.

So I got some of this, and then, the guy was like “want to try some of our gaoshan oolong?”. I think he likes educating a young man in tea. I’m a happy and relatively knowledgable audience, so he was having a good time talking and brewing. He took the stuff out — looks like good gaoshan oolong. Roasted about 8 hours, he said. You can’t really tell by the way it looks when dried, or wet. The stuff is still pretty good.

You can, however, tell by the taste. There’s very little of the grassy notes in this tea, which I loathe in a green Taiwan oolong. Rather, it’s fruity, smooth, with a nice hint of sweetness and also some floral notes. The difference between something like this and some of the unroasted stuff is quite obvious. It doesn’t have that nasty, green, and metallic edge to it that I really dislike in green Taiwanese stuff (and which generally makes me feel unwell after too much drinking). This tea was good… not awesome, mind you, but good, and I don’t say that very much about green Taiwanese oolong.

The best part was the conversation though. He was telling me a variety of things, some of which I knew, others I’ve heard for the first time. It’s always interesting to hear a man who’s spent his life in the tea business (since 13, he said) tell you his take on things. As I’ve said before, these are the real tea masters who really know their stuff.

So I got some of both, left…. picked up a gift along the way, and ended up at the place that sold me that $10 pot again. I couldn’t resist going back there to see if there’s one or two more pots to pick up that are cheap enough. I ended up choosing two…. he sold them to me for even less than 350 per pot. Amazing, eh?

So here they are. The first one is not bad, I think, the second a little more iffy (the nub on the lid, as you can see, is not well done). The clay on that thing though feels awfully silky and soft. You almost feel like you can push it in and turn it back into a ball of clay. Heck, it’s not even $10. All in all, a pretty productive tea shopping day.

Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: , , , ,