A Tea Addict's Journal

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Plane tea

July 5, 2007 · 6 Comments

Why are teas on the plane so bad?

These days they put supposedly ok coffee (Starbucks) on planes, no doubt because they get a good deal from Starbucks so that they get publicity. However, the tea they serve is so, so, so bad. On my flight from Beijing, the food tasted ok, but the tea…. my god, coming from China, you’d think the tea would at least be palatable. Nooo, they serve those lovely tea powder type thing, the ingredients of which I still haven’t figured out. What exactly are those? They’re the same thing you get from cheap Chinese restaurants in the States. At the price of a dollar a kg for the cheapest green tea out there, you’d think they can afford something like that. Apparently not.

I promptly got myself a cup of reasonable English breakfast from Peet’s as soon as I landed in SFO. Too bad I couldn’t brew my own tea.

More traveling in the next few days before I get to settle down anywhere. I have a feeling it’s more teabag teas for me… in various forms. Sigh.

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Traveling

July 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Flying back to the US tomorrow…. so not much time or opportunity to drink tea today, or yesterday, or tomorrow…

Drinking some loose maocha in a cup works well on the train though. In fact, I think that’s my favourite these days when traveling on some sort of mode of transportation that takes more than an hour or two.

I guess you won’t hear from me until I get back to Boston and in some semblence of consciousness.

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Restaurant teas

July 2, 2007 · 2 Comments

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China.  It’s been 10 years already, even though it seemed only like yesterday when the handover ceremony took place on a very rainy night.  There were many things that set Hong Kong apart from China.  There still are, even after 10 years.  One such thing is the way tea is served in restaurants.

In Hong Kong, if you go into a Chinese restaurant or a Hong Kong style restaurant serving localized western or Chinese food (typically known as “cha chan teng”*, literally tea restaurant), tea is automatically served.  The type of tea served depends on where you are.  If you walk into a usual Chinese restaurant, the tea served is determined by you among the usual selection of “polay (puerh)”, “soumeh (longevity brow, or soumee, etc, a white tea)”, “teek guoon yum (tieguanyin)”, etc.  You pick among the ones they have.  In a “cha chan teng”, it’s usually some severely watered down red tea.  It’s more like flavoured water.  Tea is often free, or priced fairly low with a “tea and (Chinese) mustard” charge on the bill.  It’s usually the same no matter what you order.

In China, however (with the exception of Shenyang, interestingly enough), teas have to be ordered.  Even at pretty bad restaurants, the teas are often quite expensive, often rivaling a main dish or more.  A pot of puerh can often cost you 50 RMB or even 100 (at the fancy places) even when it’s just a really bad, insipid cooked tea.  I’ve been to places where the whole meal for two costs maybe 200 RMB, and a pot of tieguanyin would cost you 250.  They’re almost never worth that much, and very overpriced.  It makes ordering tea a real hazard here, without first checking the prices.  You could be adding a lot of cost to the food bill without knowing it, and not getting nice tea in return.  I often never order tea here at restaurants, but eating without drinking some tea makes me feel like I’m missing something.

Tonight, for example, as we’re having a dinner gathering with a few other grad students from my school here in Shanghai, we ordered a pot of longjing.  I think it was something like 50 for a pot, but the tea we got wasn’t even longjing.  It was at best what they would call a “Zhejiang longjing”, which basically means super low grade longjing that is merely a green tea, and called longjing for the simple reason that they’re grown somewhere in Zhejiang.  Everybody noted how cheap the tea is.  The food was good, the tea was not.  It’s a shame that even when charging somebody for the tea, they couldn’t give us something slightly better.

I hope that eventually, China will have restaurants that start offering good tea for not much money (at least proportional to the quality and not outrageous).  Right now though, I’d advise anybody coming here to avoid teas in restaurants.

*This is non standard romanization, as I am merely trying to replicate the Cantonese sound and not following any romanization scheme.  Besides not knowing any well enough, there are a few competing ones and I feel that none of them make intuitive sense for people who aren’t already familiar with Cantonese.

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A productive tea gathering

June 30, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I had tea with L today.  Also present was a Taiwanese gentleman who apparently is quite an important man in the Taiwan tea business.  We had a long discussion on various topics around tea, from puerh to green.  The guy definitely has experience, and you can tell he knows what he’s talking about.  Much of it is just him lecturing, since we all know so little about tea production.

One thing that definitely comes across is that knowing about how tea is made is essential for a higher level understanding of why a tea tastes the way it does.  Being able to say “this tea is astringent because so and so did this during production” is very important.  For all types of tea, there’s a different set of rules, but there are also common things that are true for all teas.  It is obvious that knowledge from one kind of tea will transfer, at least somewhat, into others.  This man, for example, gathered a lot of data and knowledge from individual farmers and tried his best to improve Taiwanese oolong.  Everything from the wind direction, to the specific hour of the picking, to the location of the slope, soil type, etc etc are all important things to consider, and the way one processes a tea will change depending on any one of those factors.  Whether a tea is good or bad depends greatly on whether or not one is able to grasp all of these variables and make the tea come alive, a term that he stressed throughout the day.

What’s also important is that I’ve actually never heard of this man before, and I doubt few outside the trade has.  There must be many such low profile tea makers out there who are just really knowledgeable.  The people who know tea best are the makers, and all pursuit in tea, ultimately, goes back to the production process.  I wonder if it’s ever possible to learn so much, without being a producer myself.  But it’s a nice thought and certainly one goal to aspire to.

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Maocha in a cup

June 29, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I spent most of the day on a train from Beijing to Shanghai.  On the way, I drank a maocha I bought way back when I first got to Beijing.  I think I must’ve bought it on my second or third trip to Maliandao.  I remember getting 100g of it, wondering whether it will age well, or if it’s good at all.  I knew very little about maocha at that point, having not tried any before.  It was all an experiment.

Almost a year later, I am brewing it, grandpa style, in a paper cup with train water. Unfortunately, I packed the cable for camera-to-computer in my luggage that I left in Beijing, so no pictures… but the tea is surprisingly sweet that way.  Of course, I didn’t use much leaves.  Using too much leaves will mean it will get nasty, bitter, and astringent.  The key to making young puerh palatable, at least in these long, uncontrolled infusions, is to use little leaves and not quite boiling water.  Then, almost everything tastes good.

The leaves are very thick, and the taste reasonable.  It’s not too strong, although there’s some throatiness to the tea.  I think it’s fall tea, or possibly summer tea.  It’s definitely not spring picked.  I need to evaluate it more properly in a gaiwan under normal conditions to be able to say anything definitive about it, but as a drink to pass the time on a train ride, it does its job admirably well.  At the very least, I don’t think this is green tea puerh and should age.

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Moving

June 28, 2007 · 5 Comments

Moving a good amount of tea is hard work. Last night I packed up my tea cakes as best I could, by first tying them into tongs of varying sizes, then double wrapping them in food bags that are more or less like saran-wraps, I then hauled the tea over to the post office here with my girlfriend helping me. The thing about China Post is that all packages must be inspected before they are sealed — they want to know what’s going into them boxes here in China. At the post office closest to me, the guy who does the packaging said he can’t ship tea like this — too much tea is considered commercial goods, and have to go through the central international post office. Thankfully, that’s not too far away, and we went there — only to discover that there’s no restriction on tea export (as I have guessed). It’ll be insane to tax goods going out of your country, after all.

Most of the time packaging is also sold through the post office. There are almost no stores that will sell you paper boxes here — people reuse old ones, mostly, and if you’re shipping stuff, you buy it from the post office (since you have to bring stuff over for them to inspect anyway, it’s almost pointless to pre-pack anything). Unfortunately, most of the boxes there are not the right sized, so I couldn’t put all my tongs in one or two box, as I have hoped. Instead, I put about two tongs of tea in each box, buffered by other things including my loose teas, canisters, teaware, etc etc…. all in all, it took about 5 boxes to send all my tea related stuff over to Hong Kong. Most of the stuff will then stay in Hong Kong, at least for the near foreseeable future — I think my puerh will age better there than anywhere else, and since I’ll be moving around a lot… it’s better to stick them in one place.

Meanwhile, I am traveling to Shanghai tomorrow, with only one tea that I didn’t pack up — a maocha I bought on one of my very first trip to Maliandao this year. The rest… I’ll have to find my good friends who own more tea than I do to supply me for a few days while I’m there 🙂

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Last Maliandao trip of the year

June 27, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I arrived in Beijing on September 1st 2006. I came here to do research, but I also happened to have come here to study tea on the side. Now, almost 10 months later, I’m about to leave here. This certainly marks an end to one stage of my graduate student career, but also definitely marks the end of one stage of my tea education.

I went to Maliandao today, although the trip was cut short by heavy rain — I didn’t go as early as I had hoped. I went to Xiaomei’s store, to pick up some Benshan that I wanted her to get for me. 500g of benshan costs 40 RMB… so that’s about 5 USD. Selling benshan as tieguanyin can obviously make you big bucks.

While there, I tried a tea that was very odd. It’s a maocha of some sort, a year old, supposedly. Yet, there’s something in that maocha that tastes old. If it weren’t for the obvious and harsh bitterness of the tea, I might even believe that it is an older tea, dry stored. The guy who brought it there said it’s a maocha deliberately made to taste old, and if pressed into cake, it is indeed not too easy to tell and can masquerade as something aged in a dry environment. The leaves are, actually, mostly yellow leaves, of the large and rough kind, and the taste is that of a rougher, harsher, more bitter variety. But it was very odd… probably one of the oddest young puerh I’ve ever tried.

We also had a 3 year old Yiwu that was smooth and mellow, although lacking in any sort of real punch. I think this will develop into a high fragrance kind of Yiwu. Decent potential, and not too expensive. Alas, I’m not in the market for more tea at this point.

I then walked around the market a bit, noting how there are still so many stores I’ve never really been to, or looked at. Yet, I don’t have time anymore, not on this trip anyway. Maybe next time, when I return to Beijing (whenever that is) I will get to go to them, but they may very well not be around by then. As I’m writing this, I just packed up all my puerh cakes, readying them for shipping to Hong Kong tomorrow. I should probably take a picture of how I packaged them, but that’s for tomorrow.

I must say I feel a little sad leaving Maliandao. I’ll be back, of course, and I have learned a lot just wandering the different markets there. I think I have progressed from somebody who only knew a few things about younger puerh to somebody who can at least make some sense of a young tea I’ve never tried before. I am still woefully unknowledgable when it comes to some other kinds of tea. I am hoping that when I go to Taiwan in August, it will remedy my deficiency in Taiwan oolong just as Maliandao has helped me understand young puerh.

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Back in Beijing

June 26, 2007 · Leave a Comment

After a longish ride on the train from Shenyang, I’m back in Beijing.

There isn’t much to report, other than it’s really frustrating when you need a cup of tea, and the only place that sells teas to go in China is either a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. It’s sad. It’s sadder when the server made the mistake of pouring you coffee and you only realized when you walked out and into the train station, waiting in line, and sniffed….

Tomorrow afternoon I might make my last trip to Maliandao in quite some time. It will be kinda sad 🙁

PS: I was notified that the picture for the jade gaiwan for my entry two days ago didn’t show up. That has been fixed. Thanks DH for pointing it out!

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TenFu

June 25, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the things that I never really said much about in the 10 months I’ve been here is Tenfu, also known as TenRen, or in the States, Ten Tea. For those of you who don’t know them, they are a very big organization, and at least in China and Taiwan, they’re everywhere.

When you walk into TenFu here, you’ll be greeted by a salesgirl (they’re all salesgirls) who will ask you what you might need, and especially if you look foreign (as I, mystifyingly, apparently do sometimes) they will be presenting you with a cup of jasmine tea. On one wall you will see an array of those golden colour tea canisters, with name of tea on them and their price. On the other wall will be a slew of teaware.

The array of teas that TenFu sells basically goes something like… a few kinds of green, some with a few levels, a few kinds of other oolongs, and maybe a million different varieties of tieguanyin, all of the relatively green kind. Prices range from the 100 RMB/500g to the 20000RMB/500g (or even higher, I think). Their puerh are extremely overpriced, and so are everything else, for that matter.

They are ubiquitous in China. Everywhere you go, as long as you’re in a reasonable sized city, you will see at least one. I’ve seen them a few times in Shenyang already, usually in the most central shopping areas, or next to certain sites, or… next to the provincial government, in this case (for the gift-buying crowd). They are one of the few tea stores in China that will sell tea in packaging that is one level up from the ugly foil bags, and they are also a place where they will actually let you taste whatever you want, pretty much (a lot of smaller tea stores that are not in tea markets are a little reluctant about that, sometimes).

The good thing about them is that they do introduce a lot of people who otherwise don’t care much about tea a first entry to decent tea. My friend L, who now runs a tea business, got started with TenFu. He said his family, two generations ago, were tea merchants in Tianjin. Then came the revolution and communism, through which they lost their company, but he picked up interest in tea again when he got involved in tea lessons at TenFu. He’s just one example of many people who are like that. TenFu is actively involved in giving lessons to people in tea, and they have a nice community going. The amount of work they do in promoting tea is certainly worth commending.

The downside is, of course, their price. They are expensive. Everything they sell is overpriced. When I first got to Beijing, I bought a small set of teaware from them that cost me 100 RMB. I probably could’ve bought everything in that package from Maliandao for about 20. That was a lesson learned. A lot of ex-TenFu customers I know now no longer buy stuff from them, because over time they have learned that TenFu sells them stuff that are way overpriced. Far more people, however, just keep buying from them because they just trust them, somewhat blindly, I think. I think it is mostly because it is just too much trouble sometimes for what isn’t really that much money, or uncertain quality, or something like that. Many are happy with what they provide, and that’s that. At the end of the day, I suppose it’s just a matter of “to each his own”, regardless of what it is, where it’s from, or how much it is. So long as TenFu doesn’t lie about their teas (which I don’t think they do), it’s not really a problem. I think when lying starts happening, it’s a different matter entirely.

I do blame them for popularizing the ever lighter oxidation/roast of tieguanyin though, making it hard to find the higher roast stuff. Oh well.

Back to Beijing tomorrow. I think while Shenyang is nice… it’s enough to spend a week here especially with the lack of tea. The archives are not too useful here, for me anyway, although it’s a good thing I finally got to see the old palace here and some unexpected cultural treasures.

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Shenyang

June 24, 2007 · 2 Comments

Sorry for not posting updates the past day and half. I’ve been out touring the city, but also because the internet here is really spotty — up and down whenever it feels like. I’ve never had a stable enough connection to do much of anything — even my emails are only getting checked slowly.

Mind you, there isn’t a whole lot to report on the whole tea drinking thing here in Shenyang. One big reason is because they don’t seem to drink much of it here. Unlike most of the places in China that I’ve visited, which are either big cities or in tea producing regions, Shenyang is not a big city (I guess it’s better called a second or maybe third tiered city in China) nor in a tea producing region. It seems like people here aren’t really into tea drinking. There are very few stores that are dedicated to tea, even in the touristy areas, and the few that do have your very generic selection of regular offerings — jasmine, greens, a few tieguanyins, some oolongs, and maybe a puerh or two. I’ve encountered two puerh only shops, but the prices are not exactly low, and the selection lacklustre. All in all, a boring place for tea.

The “tea” we had today for lunch was a good example of people’s attitude here towards the drink. This is what was in the 500ml metal pot

See those black specks? Those are the only leaves in the pot. I should add that they were reused from the previous sitting — i.e. they brew out the same leaves, from what I can tell anyway, for the whole day. Yeah. In fact, I haven’t had a single cup of tea here that isn’t ultra bland, except what I had this morning

Which is from…..

Shoot me now.

So as you can probably imagine, I haven’t been spending much time with tea, and drinking the Assam and the Lapsang Souchong I’ve brought along as my supply of decent tea.

I have, however, been doing some touring of this rather pleasant city (apart from the lack of tea). As I’ve stated before, this was the capital of the Manchus before they conquered China, and so there are some historical sites here. Yesterday, we went to the Zhaoling, or the Luminous Mausoleum, for the second Manchu emperor Hong Taiji. The place is big…

If you look very carefully… you might be able to see a hint of the yellow roof of the main building in the distance. Or not. It’s big. The best part of the park was our ride around the park on a rented tandem bike (all 3 of us). Otherwise… it’s a lot of walking to get to places.

The actual mausoleum complex is not that impressive… but it’s the most elaborate this side of the Great Wall.

See that mound in the back? That’s where the ashes went.

The park has a conspicuous absence of any sight of a tea room — nowhere to drink tea. This further cemented my impression of the place as having not much tea.

We went to the Liaoning provincial museum today, which is a must-go. I was very very pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the museum itself, which was brand new despite the slightly ugly architecture

But they had a lot of Qing imperial collections, along with artifacts from earlier periods. Among which is one of my favourite calligraphers, Song Huizong, who is also the author of “Daguan Chalun” or the Treatise on Tea in the Daguan reign”. I took one picture of one of the stuff they had on display.

Among other collections, there was a nice jade gaiwan… note the more rounded lid (as opposed to the modern gaiwan with usually flatter lids). Gaiwans back then were used more for sipping tea out of (with leaves in there, I think) than just for brewing…. which I think might be part of the reason why.

We then went to the imperial palace, and the mansion of the last warlord who lived here, but that’s far too many pictures and probably not terribly interesting. Maybe another day, if it seems interesting enough. But if you ever come to Shenyang (4 hours train ride from Beijing, for those of you who might go to the Olympics or after) just remember to 1) bring your own tea and 2) go to the provincial museum!

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