A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Old Xanga posts’

Chlorine in water

May 12, 2010 · 4 Comments

The water here is heavily chlorinated.  Apparently, my town gets its water supply from wells, and in addition to being heavy on minerals, the processing of the water happens pretty close to where I live, and when I go to a restaurant  that serves unfiltered tap water, it comes out as bitter and nasty.  There is a very unpleasant taste to it, in addition to the chlorine that you can feel in the water that gives it a heavy, metallic taste.

Once filtered, the water comes out much better, at the very least it loses some of that nasty edge to the water.  The difference is not obvious to me, day in, day out, since I never drink the water unfiltered (so the only time I notice it is when I have to go somewhere and drink the tap water).  The thing is, when I tried to make tea for my class last semester, the students were able to pick up on the bitterness in one of the tea.  Knowing that tea, it has nothing to do with the tea itself — it’s the water that’s making the tea taste sharp and bitter.

BBB recently talked about assumptions about new tea drinkers.  The thing that we tend to assume is that younger drinkers like the more floral, lighter stuff.  In fact, I’ve been treated that way before by many tea sellers who assume that of me as well.  The fact of the matter is very often a newcomer to tea can have a better handle on what stands out as the dominant taste/characteristics of a tea.  If it’s bitter, they’ll tell you it’s bitter.

I always think it’s important to show newer drinkers of tea the difference in taste that different water can have.  Considering there are only two ingredients in making tea, there are few things more important than that.  As I’ve said before, changing your water is often the best, fastest, and cheapest way to improve your tea.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts
Tagged:

Puerhshop 2008 Fall Meiguo Hao Nannuo

May 5, 2010 · 1 Comment

Puerhshop’s Jim came out with the “Meiguo Hao”, or “American Hao”, a few years ago.  I’ve had this cake for over a year now, but have yet to open it for a tasting.  I did just that this week, twice, in fact.

The cake I bought was the 802 production, from fall 2008, and is of the 200g variety.  Not much decoration on the wrapper on this one, one of the earliest runs for his cakes.  His newer products have fancier packaging.

There’s a sticker on the back too keeping the wrapper together with a nice stars and stripes, and a serial number for the cake.  BBB reviewed this cake a while ago, and seemed to have liked it.  It’s important to note that “Half Slope Old Village” is banpo laozhai — the same place where the Sanhetang maocha came from.

I’ll tell you what I don’t like though — when you open the wrapper, the sticker is too strong.  It tears the paper apart even though I unwrapped it fairly carefully, ensuring that I can’t wrap the cake back properly without losing some tea or messing it up.

Blah blah blah cures cancer blah blah 10,000,000 years old tree blah blah will be worth a zillion dollars…… made by “Menghai Nannuo Mountain Banpo Zhai Old Tea Factory”.  No, it doesn’t actually say it cures cancer, it does say it’s from trees that are 500-800 years old or above, at elevations between 1250-2000m.  Take it for what it’s worth.

The leaves look nice enough, nothing too old, nothing with too much stem.  The cake is not terribly tightly compressed, and a few stabs with a tuocha pick does the job pretty well.

Enough with physical appearances.  How’s the tea?

Good.  Compared to the Sanhetang stuff, this actually tastes like puerh, although it retains its regionality and you can get that Nannuo taste from it (of which, I might add, I’m generally not a fan).  The tea is not too bitter, but it has that bitter note to it, especially when I brewed it a little stronger the second time around.  It’s a little on the thin side though, perhaps a product of it being a fall tea, and so it lacks a little of that fullness that I look to find in good, young puerh.  Given the price, however, one can hardly complain.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
Tagged:

Sanhetang Banpo Laozhai maocha

April 28, 2010 · 3 Comments

This is the stuff that, long time ago, Hou De used to carry.  It’s a nannuo area maocha, supposedly leftover from production.  Guang was quite fond of giving them away as an extra, and I got my share when I bought a few small things from him.

It’s been at least three years since I last drank it.  I can’t quite find my notes from Beijing, but here’s something from 2006.  Funny enough, I remember this tea quite well, because I’ve had it a few times now, and interestingly enough, every time I’ve had it, it tastes the same.  Fragrant, straw colour, tastes more like an oolong than a puerh, and even though it’s been a good four years since I first got it — my impression of the tea is almost exactly the same.  No real change going on here.

This compares with some of the other maocha I bought since then, for example one I got from Beijing, which has aged some since my purchase in 2006 and in fact provides a good study in comparative change.  I’ve always suspected these Nannuo maocha from Sanhetang were processed badly — killed green, which means it won’t age.  The leaves, as I’m staring at them right now, are bright green.  I don’t think it’s a good puerh candidate for aging.

At least this is the last I’ll see of it — it’s the final bits in my bag.  So long, Banpo laozhai.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
Tagged:

Four teas

April 18, 2010 · 4 Comments

If you look carefully, there are four teas here.  From left to right

1) My 2003 Bulang that I love a lot.  This tea is mostly buds — very small leaves, young, and fresh.  I think the reason why the tea is so punchy in terms of caffeine is because of the heavy proportion of buds in the leaves.  You can probably tell from the wet leaves that they are small, especially in comparison to….

2) A 2005 Manzhuan which is no longer available anywhere, not even Taobao.  I like Manzhuan teas.  Large leafed, but not old.  Very few “woody” stems in the cake, which is supposedly a good thing.  I like this cake a lot, and I think aging wise, it has real potential.  I can’t say that about…

3) A 12 Gentlemen Jinggu from 2006.  I’ve never liked Jinggu teas, thinking that they are poor candidates for aging, and this basically confirms that suspicion — the tea was thin, bland, and gave me a stomach ache for some reason.  It didn’t go down well at all, and I dumped it after a few infusions.  12 Gentlemen’s makers got some publicity back when they first started in 2006, and although I was never impressed enough with them to buy anything (other than a few samples, of which this is one) their other offerings were at least better than this.  There’s probably a reason why, after the explosion of young puerh a few years ago, you no longer see Jinggu teas showing up very much these days.

4) The last is a sample from Lew of babelcarp that I have kept for a few years now.  It’s from the 101 Plantation (not sure if they still sell tea).  The tea was quite expensive back then.  I used the remaining sample, and am happy to report that the tea is actually holding up quite well.  It’s got good body and flavour, and should continue to evolve over time.  Lew, how are the cakes doing?

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
Tagged:

Old vs new

April 14, 2010 · 6 Comments

Over the course of the past few years, I have grown increasingly skeptical of the idea that people used to keep tea around for a long time before they drink it.  I think generally speaking, we have a somewhat romantic notion, no doubt encouraged by many tea vendors, that aging your own tea is a good idea.  This is partly because puerh, as we know it, does age well, and partly because of this impulse to collect, that we now have a bit of a culture of “buy now, drink later” when it comes to tea, specifically with puerh.

However, I have yet to find anything definitive in historical texts that says anything remotely similar to what we consider a “buy and hold” strategy.  Yunnan puerh, when sold, seems to be new, or at least almost new.  At most they were a year or so old when they reach their final destination.  Oolongs and greens were definitely not kept around for the sake of aging them; you may keep them because you can’t finish them, or because they’re quite precious and therefore not worth drinking all in one go, but I have yet to find anybody writing anything along the lines of “I am deliberately aging this tea so that it will taste better x years down the road”.

This obviously does not mean that aging was not done; I’m sure it happened.  However, I think much of the aging was accidental, either because it was unsold stock, or because it was forgotten.  When I went to the “candy store” in Taipei and others like it, they were, mostly, selling teas that have been sitting around not because they were aged, but because they were not sold.  Sure, some collector somewhere might have been sitting on a few bags of tea to age deliberately, but that is almost always strictly for personal consumption.

One of the problems of storing your own tea is that you now take on the risk of spoilage.  As some of us know very well, this can easily happen even with the best intentions and precaution.  For those who live in places such as Los Angeles, the risk might be dryness.  For those in wetter climates, the problem can be moisture.  Either way, there is a lot of risk in storing tea long term, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s a good idea to do so.

If storage was never an option for tea drinkers, then is there a reason to do it now?  Sure there is.  Some of us like the way teas taste when they get older, so we store them, hoping that at least some of our tea will turn out well.  Others prefer them young, and that’s fine too, so long as your stomach can handle a steady diet of young puerh.  I guess what I want to say, though, is that the notion of storing tea as the “traditional” way of doing things is not really true.  At least, it’s not something for which I have found any reliable, written evidence.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

“Yiwu” cakes and “Qing” pots

April 11, 2010 · 6 Comments

I find that there are two things that the web will never run out of — puerh cakes purporting to be of Yiwu origin, and yixing pots that are supposedly Qing dynasty.

Let’s just pause for a moment to think — how likely is it that there will be an endless supply of such things on the web?

Take Yiwu tea for example.  I remember in 2006, every cake out there claims to be Yiwu.  Of course, if you’re selling young puerh, you want your tea to be from Yiwu — it’s the most famous of the mountains, and for the most part people have no way of telling if you’re lying or not.  So, you slap the words “Yiwu” on a cake and voila, it’s Yiwu, and you can sell it for 10x what you could if you call it Jiangcheng.  Add words such as “old tree” “wild” and the names of a few villages, instead of just “Yiwu”, and it seems more authentic.  Now you can sell it for 20x the original price.  Never mind that the amount of tea out there that claims to be Yiwu probably outnumber the amount of tea that the whole Xishuangbanna county produced in a year.  It hasn’t stopped people from doing it.  In the last few years producers have gotten more, well, inventive in their claims.  “Yiwu impressions” and that kind of name are now more common.  Consumers have caught on, and so the game has to change for the sellers to stay ahead.

More recently, we seem to be seeing the same thing with Yixing pots that claim to be Qing, at least in the English language world.  Somehow, everybody has a Qing pot to sell, often for the bargain basement price of under $1000.  Many of these so called “Qing” pots are suspect at best, frauds at worst.  A walk around Taiwan or a search online can yield many similar looking pots for a fraction of the price, none claiming to be Qing, and to think that such things can be had for the price on offer, well, I have a whole bunch of Qing pots to sell to you for $500.  When an authentic piece of work can go for thousands in the place where it came from, why would anyone sell it for hundreds online?

Unfortunately I find the tea business to be full of such sorts of schemes and half-truths.  Somehow, there’s always a supply of buyers ready to jump in for things like this.  Be careful out there; tea “masters” abound who are only too happy to take your money from you.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Better brewed in paper

April 9, 2010 · 1 Comment

These days I’m on the road a lot, and that means that I have to be expedient — can’t brew properly when I’m in a car driving, after all.  Paper cup + leaves is often the way to go, with refills on the way for hot water and hopefully, the water isn’t tainted by coffee, as it very often is.

What I’ve found sometimes though is that some teas are actually better brewed in a cup, grandpa style (it seems like this term is now in much wider circulation than I thought possible), than actually trying to make it in a smaller pot, etc.  Young puerh, especially, seems good for this treatment.  Whereas the tea may be very bitter and somewhat acidic when brewed intensely in a small pot, in a larger cup with a higher water to tea ratio, it actually can come out pleasant, with a nice but not overwhelming sense of bitterness, and the young tea’s acidity is not overpowering to the point where you wonder if you’re drinking drain cleaners.

Of course, there are tricks to the trade too.  You can’t drink it all before you refill — that’s disaster, because the next cup will be insipid, boring, and tasteless.  You are often better off drinking water at that point.  Also, you need a tea that can stand up to the sometimes coffee tainted water, so that if there’s that extra hint of java in there, you won’t notice it all too much.  A wonderful green can be destroyed if you add those kind of water in your cup.  I recommend a youngish (but changing) puerh or a roasty oolong.

The source of water is also important.  Some kinds of establishments are better than others vis-a-vis their water.  If you try to get water from a gas station, you’re pretty much doomed.  Starbucks is actually not a bad place, and they always give it to you for free.  Some places are stingy, like Dunkin Donuts, and want money from you for the water, which often tastes like coffee anyway.  I find it wasteful sometimes, but I will usually ask for a cup of hot water, rather than handing them my tea-filled cup — they are less resistant to giving you water that way, and at any rate, my “leaves floating in brown water” cup often leaves people wondering if I’m trying to do a science experiment.  Just like how kids no longer understand how meat comes from livestock, to a lot of people tea is that brown stuff you find in teabags, not whole leaves.

Time to go driving again, and today I’m drinking some of this.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,

Chinatown tea

March 31, 2010 · 5 Comments

I was in Philly the past weekend for a conference, and for much of the time I was there I spent in the hotel or in Chinatown, which was right next to it.  Normally I’d bring my own tea to things like this, so I don’t have to endure bad teabags with coffee-flavoured water (when will these places ever learn????).  However….. I forgot to bring my own stash this time.

So…. I was out of tea, and I don’t want to drink that nasty, nasty stuff brewed with coffee water.  What do I do?

Chinatown

Many of you live near a Chinatown or another, and no doubt some have visited these institutions before.  I still remember when I lived near Cleveland that they had nothing but Foojoy tea and a few other horrible abominations that could pass for “tea”, but at the same time, I also remember that the first revelation I had in tea came from a longjing that I bought at the now defunct Great Wall in NYC’s Chinatown.

I ducked into an underground market in Philly’s Chinatown, and walked into their tea aisle.  It’s quite well stocked.

It’s actually extremely difficult to buy any of this stuff with any confidence, because you know that for the most part, they’re not particularly great, and since there’s no way for you to look at the leaves or taste it first, you’re really taking a gamble.  Over the years the type of tea that they sell have been upgraded, at least in terms of packaging.  Instead of the ugly little tins for the old style, CNNP brands, now you have all kinds of Taiwanese and Mainland producers who vie for your attention.

I was, at first, attracted to a tin of Keemun, thinking that you can hardly go wrong — even the worst Keemun can be pretty ok, with inferior water and what not.  Then, however, I chanced upon a tin of puerh — specifically, one that is labeled “Nuoshan pu’er cha”.  Nuo, in this case, is Nannuo’s nuo.  It reminded me of the Nor-sun that I bought a few years ago in Columbus and which turned out to be quite all right.  I took a chance and bought this, $3.98 a tin tea.

The first thing I noticed when I opened the tin is that it smells — it has this odd medicinal smell that is somehow slightly citrus like.  The leaves are very broken, as you can see.  When I tried it out, it brewed a dark, dark liquor.  It does not, however, have that fishy, pondy cooked tea taste, but it’s definitely cooked (mostly, anyway).  Once you get rid of that odd citrus smell, which disappears quite quickly, the tea is remarkably decent.  At the very least, it probably beats all these loose puerh that online stores like Adagio sell at a much higher price.

I tried it again yesterday, now that I’m back at home.  You can taste the odd citrus flavour the first infusion or two, and then it goes away.  The tea is soft and smooth, and actually delivers that nice, plummy taste in the later infusions when brewed longer.   Definitely a winner for $3.98.

Moral of the story?  Try your local Chinatown, if there’s a sizable one next to you.  You never know what you might find.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
Tagged: ,

Haven’t done this for a while

March 15, 2010 · 1 Comment

I’m actually going to talk about a tea that I drank.  When’s the last time I did that?

Among the teas I bought from Taobao recently is a cake from a producer that I knew from back in 2006.  They made some nice Yiwu, and I’ve always been on the lookout for them.  According to things I’ve found online, they are located about 100m from the Sanhetang workshop in one of the Yiwu villages, and the cake I bought off Taobao (since soldout — thanks to me) is a Manzhuan cake.  I happen to like Manzhuan cakes a lot — more depth than Yiwu sometimes, and less watery.  There’s also less faking going on.

The leaves are fairly good looking

And the tea brews a darkish colour, for something that’s from 2005.

It’s got some sour notes early on, which I think is 1) fairly typical of some Manzhuan teas and 2) also a characteristics of a 4-5 year old tea, again depending on storage conditions, etc.  It has that nice, deep, lingering sensation at the back of the mouth that I love from my younger pu, and a sweetness that comes through after an initial bitterness.  My kind of pu.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
Tagged:

Heartbroken

March 5, 2010 · 8 Comments

It’s been many days since I blogged.  This is probably the longest break I’ve taken with blogging since I started this thing.

I’ve been rather distressed recently with a broken teapot.  Postal services are often your worst enemies, and in this case they’ve proven to be quite capable of destroying my teaware.  Of course, much of the blame lies with the person who sent this to me, and unfortunately, there is not much I can do now to fix this problem.  I used glue, but you can still see it.

Then again, in some ways, it’s not that bad.  I’m not a dealer.  This isn’t going to be sold again.  Resale value, therefore, has little meaning.  Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m not upset about it.

Sigh

Categories: Objects · Old Xanga posts
Tagged: ,