A Tea Addict's Journal

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How do you make puerh?

January 4, 2007 · 2 Comments

How DO you make puerh?

Conflicting versions abound. From my understanding, puerh making is very simnple — picking of the leaves, kill green, some rolling, and sun-drying. There it is in its entirely, raw puerh maocha is done. Then you steam it (enough to soften the leaves) and press it. Then you have compressed maocha.

Puerh, properly speaking, isn’t quite finished until it’s gone through at least some fermentation. Raw maocha just compressed is more like green tea.

Technically, I think, maocha can be classified as green tea, because it goes through the essential processes that green tea goes through, but there’s a crucial difference in processing temperature, which allows something in puerh tea to retain its bioactivity and continues to ferment naturally (into something that tastes good) whereas green tea of our normal kind is processed at very high temperatures, and the tea gradually loses flavour over time and turns into something nasty.

However, some now process puerh with additional steps such as the withering of leaves and the intentional breaking of leaves (to encourage fermentation before kill-green). This, generally speaking, is what you do to tea that is destined for oolong. This process creates honey or fruity like aromas, along with lower bitterness and astringency (relative to raw puerh). It makes a nice tasting tea right away… which will mean the tea is easier to sell. It also means you have something more like oolong, and the aging prospects…. are suspect.

There are other raw puerh that are processed like green tea, and tastes like green tea (a la longjing type green tea). They might not age as well either. The jury’s still out on the long term prospects of these teas. Xiaguan mixes some of them into their tuocha, but it’s only a certain percent, not 100% of it. What happens to these things 20 years from now?

This is what we were debating in the Best Tea House today with Rosa and Tiffany. We don’t really know. Nobody seems to really know. So many developments are so recent that nobody really could figure out what’s a good way of making puerh, what will really age well, what won’t, etc. I’ve heard at least 10 different versions of what makes a tea a good tea for aging. The only common point so far is that it should be strong, somehow. If the tea is mild and weak right now, it won’t do well (Yiwu is weak in many respects, but not in chaqi and thickness of the tea). Is that the only indicator of a good raw puerh?

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Provenance

January 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

One of the things that distinguish a Hong Kong tea vendor from a mainland (at least Beijing) tea vendor is that Hong Kong tea vendors tend to be very imprecise about the provenance of their tea. Most vendors in Hong Kong cannot tell you if the tea you’re tasting right now is from 1989 or 1991. Most vendors also cannot tell you which mountain its from, or whether it’s a fall or spring tea, or what not. Some do, like Sunsing, but that’s rare. At the Best Tea House, for example, such information are usually qualified… i.e. “I think this is from xxx” or “we started selling it in 200x”. The Mengku Yuanyexiang, for example, is, I believe, a 2001 cake, but Tiffany always thought it’s from 2003, because they started selling it in 2003. They don’t always sell everything right away, and that is fairly standard practice. Usually they are not in a hurry to sell… and why should they, with prices going up so fast?

This is in stark contrast to Beijing tea sellers, who will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the cake in question, from the production date, raw material origins, storage location, etc, down to every last detail. Sometimes it’s probably true, but more often than not, I think it’s probably at least sometimes fabricated. I’ve heard so many times from people in Beijing that their tea has always been dry stored since production in, say, 2001, etc etc, except that I find them sometimes to be slightly wet stored, damp, etc. They will always tell a story, but the story is not always true.

The other thing is… how many people can tell the difference of a tea when it’s ten years old? As far as I am aware, nobody knows what a 10 year old Banzhang tastes like. Pure Banzhang (substitute any mountian here) cakes didn’t appear until about 10 years ago. Before that, all we’ve got are recipe cakes, or cakes with leaves of unknown or only somewhat known origins. Who can say for sure where the leaves for the original 8582 was from? The season it was picked? Anything? Yet, we’re drinking them up like there’s no tomorrow (with prices to match). I recently heard someone tell me that this 1997 brick was made with Banzhang area materials. Huh? How do you know that? It’s not written anywhere. By taste? How many people can taste that much of a difference among these locations?

Yet, it is on this sort of information that prices are driven up. XXX cake is expensive because it’s a pure Yiwu from, say, 2001, and the 2002 and 2003 have correspondingly lower prices. If the materials (and the quality) are about the same… why buy the 2001 when its price is, say, 100% more? Your money won’t make 100% return in two years unless you’re a very good investor, so wouldn’t it be better to pay the 100% lower price to get the tea that is 2 years younger? There’s an opportunity cost involved. I guess if I were 65, I might pay the higher price to get the further aging, but otherwise… I’m willing to wait. This is mainly why I only buy cheap or loose aged puerh for current consumption, and buy mostly 5 years or younger compressed teas… because they are correspondingly much cheaper. At the end of the day, 15 years from now when I am drinking some of my current purchases (when they’re finally ready for consumption), I probably can’t tell the difference between the stuff I bought in 2006 or 2007.

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Bangwei 2006 Fall cake

January 2, 2007 · 4 Comments

While editing texts stuff like Xanga is ok, uploading pictures is still not really possible (too slow and unstable). So for now we have to do without pictures…

I tried the sample of Bangwei 2006 Fall cake that I received with the purchase of two Yiwu cakes from that guy on Sanzui. I have to say I really liked this tea, and thought it’s quite nice. There’s a robust aroma, with a hint of smoke, in the first few infusions, and the tea is not too astringent and also got a nice cooling feeling down the throat. The leaves are big, meaty, and soft. I gave up drinking before the tea gave out… around 10 infusions (I had to go somewhere). Even in the less than ideal setup of my home here, the tea tasted quite nice, so I can imagine if I were actually able to brew in a better environment, then the tea might taste even better.

It’s also selling at only about 2/3 the price of the Yiwu cakes, which makes this a little more attractive as well. I also think I need to diversify my holdings of tea. Right now, I have a disproportionate amount of stuff from Mengku for some reason (not all from the Shuangjiang Mengku factory). I also have some Yiwu, and a few other cakes, but in general, my holdings are pretty concentrated in a few areas. I should really branch out into some recipe cakes, and also some stuff from the “new” six mountains…

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Sunsing

January 1, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I went to Sunsing today for the first time since I got back. I don’t usually go there, mostly because their stuff, aged or otherwise, are all quite expensive (in some cases even more than Best Tea House). Also, the service I’ve gotten there before has always been sub-par. I’ve always found them to be a bit snotty and hard to deal with.

I tried three teas there today. The first two were Yiwu teas… one 2006 spring and the other 2006 fall, both made by Sunsing themselves. They are supposed to be Mahei teas, and honestly…. I found both to be pretty poor, especially considering the price they wanted for it. They were not smooth, not that fragrant, not that thick…. and just not that interesting. The fall one is especially poor, and charging the same price for both fall and spring, when there’s an obvious difference in quality, is a little…. meh

Then I tried the 2004 Yongnian cake… it’s a Manzhuan, and I don’t think I really liked that one either. The Manzhuan cake from Beijing that I bought was much better. Price is again a factor.

I think the next few days I’ll actually make some purchases. So far, I’ve only gotten a few loose puerhs in Hong Kong (and picking up the tong of tea I ordered in the summer). There are a few things that I want to buy and deem good enough for the price, and will start going around to buy them….

Time’s running out, but then, I’m going back to Maliandao. I think I learned something this trip to Hong Kong though… so that’s progress, at least.

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Water

December 31, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

I went to the Best Tea House today before the New Year’s festivities. Among the things we tried was using the different water with an older tea (1980s). The result was astounding…. whereas the filtered tap water is a bit thin, bland, and boring, the tap water infused with mineral water was nice, aromatic, and thick. The difference was night and day. This tea was tasted at the request of somebody who bought a piece of this cake from the BTH a few months ago (he wanted to try the difference between what he has and what the BTH is offering right now) and let’s just say he was impressed with the results and decided to try it out at home.

I’d encourage everyone of you to go try out different kinds of water for your teas, and try to figure out what’s best for what kind of tea. Otherwise…. you might not be brewing the teas to its full potential. After all, it’s the only other ingredient in the making of the drink.

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Luk Yu Teahouse

December 30, 2006 · 3 Comments

Seems like the internet is back to normal faster than I thought. Give it another day, and I can probably start uploading pictures again. Right now it’s still quite slow (think…. 28.8k slow with lots of packetloss)

I went to Luk Yu Teahouse 陸羽茶室 with family today for lunch. It’s a fairly famous old restaurant in Central, best known for rude waiters who only treat you well if you’re a regular, and a murder case a few years ago where a guy was gunned down in the middle of the dining room. Either way though, it’s a bit of a landmark and is not bad for food.

As many of you probably know, going to eat dim sum in Cantonese is “yum cha”, literally “to drink tea”. When we first sat down at the table and mom started looking at the food menu, the waiter commented “so fast?”. The expectation is that you will first sit down, drink some tea, talk, slowly look at what kind of food there is, wait for everybody to show up… and have a very, very leisurely lunch (or brunch, as is usually the case). A lot of Cantonese families I know would go at 9am and stay until well past 1. They sit, chat, read newspaper, etc, and it’s a time for the whole family to get together. Dim sum, the focus of this activity in the West, is only what fills the belly. It’s really a time when you are catching up with family, and tea serves as a lubricant for the conversation.

I think the kinds of tea that are ordered are often jasmine, shuixian, nongxiang tieguanyin, or puerh, with lighter teas being less popular (although I think they are also gaining in popularity). We got a puerh today. There’s no specific thing you order. You just tell them what tea they want, and they give it to you in a pot. There’s no asking of vintage, raw or cooked, or anything. It comes in a big pot where the water stews the leaves. It’s what’s called “cow-drinking”, which basically means drinking in big gulps rather than small cups for fine tasting. They also have gaiwans, if you prefer that, although with 10 people at the table gaiwan is quite impractical.

Usually, the puerh that is offered at these places are cooked or raw-cooked mix puerh, low quality, and quite nasty. The stuff at Luk Yu, while not fantastically good, is not bad. It’s all raw, at least the sample leaves I pulled out of the pot when we were done were definitely all raw puerh. It’s got some age. I can’t tell how long, but it’s not short. Drinking it from a big pot of stewed leaves also doesn’t help. After all, the tea’s just there to help you eat and talk. My family all commented though that the puerh there was better than the usual puerh you get outside, which is often dark and bitter (when overbrewed). I think for what it’s supposed to do, Luk Yu’s puerh is quite good.

I think tomorrow’s a tea shopping day 🙂

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Earthquake means no internet

December 29, 2006 · 2 Comments

As many of you might have heard, there was a fairly serious earthquake in Taiwan a few days ago. Among the damages it did was the severing of the underwater fibre-optic cable that carries much of the internet (as well as voice) data traffic between Asia and North America. For the past few days, there was no internet access here (for all intents and purposes) between here and the United States or Europe. Much of the net is still extremely slow or simply times out for me here, so updates will be a little more sporadic (and definitely picture-less) until things get back to normal.

Among the tea things that happened recently was a triple tasting of three different kinds of loose puerh…. which was rather interesting with varying levels of black liquor and aged taste. I also met a new tea friend, KL, who is quite nice and has interesting things to share. We might meet up again in a few days to try more tea.

Anyway, hope you all had a nice Christmas break, and are drinking lots of tea :). I think the internet will get faster as the repairs get underway, but at the same time, I am logging on at 2:30am on the Friday night before New Year’s, not exactly a time when net traffic is high (and even then it took minutes for me to get to this page). I think during much of the day it will simply be impossible to do anything on the net, still, until they replaced the damaged sections of the cables, which can take 2-3 weeks….

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Cheap loose puerh

December 25, 2006 · 12 Comments

I tried the loose traditionally stored puerh today for real, with this setup:

I know a few of you use a water dispenser like this one. My question to you — how on Earth do you control the pouring???? Because I find it extremely difficult, and the water always come out a little too quickly/strongly, and the water sort of spills everywhere. I can hold it up to the spout, but then I run the risk of having it splatter on my hands, which is not pleasant either.

Anyway….

This is the puerh I drank.


This is infusion 2


This is around infusion 8 or 9

The puerh is not bad. It’s got some Chinese medicine taste, and very good chaqi. The leaves are big, and I actually thought it’s not a bad value for the quality of aged puerh that it is. It’s not a fantastic puerh, but if you need a cheap, aged puerh fix….. it will do the job.

Maybe I should go buy a little more. It’s really quite cheap….

And of course

Merry Christmas!

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More puerhs…

December 24, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I went back to the Peninsula for a canister of their Darjeeling. It’s not that cheap, but it’s cheaper than I thought.

I went and visited Tiffany again in the afternoon, and tasted quite a few things today. The first was a puerh brick that they sell — a cake with no clear origin other than some vague “high altitude” claim. The tea was very buddy, with lots of young leaves. The taste was sweet, with a Jingmai taste, but not that impressive, and has some suspicion of green tea taste. It’s not terribly obvious, but Tiffany also said it reminded her of the organic green tea that they sell. We then chatted about the dangers of buying young puerh these days, and it seems…. basically nobody knows what will be good. Sigh

Then we tasted a purely dry stored Mengku cake… somewhat different from the stuff I’ve had before. It’s more refreshing in its taste, although I actually prefer the one that has been through some slight wet storage, as the taste is deeper and thicker. That tea didn’t last too long before we decided it wasn’t that good.

I pulled out the Jingmai sample that I have… and tasted it sort of in comparison with the first tea we had.

The one on the left is the brick, and the one on the right is the cake. You can really see the difference in size and completeness of leaves.

The Jingmai cake is a little less obviously sweet and aromatic, although I think it is still quite aromatic (the dried fairness cup smells a VERY strong floral fragrance). The cake also has obvious “throat feel”. I think maybe I should grab a few of these when I get back to Beijing.

At this point, some other tea drinker came in. She seems experienced, although mostly a client of another sales who works at the Best Tea House, and generally I don’t see her. She wanted to try something nice…. and so Tiffany pulled out the Zhenchunya Hao.

This sample cake they were using is at least poorly stored. You can see evidence of mould on the cake — some slight white dots on the leaves that weren’t on the surface of the cake. You can also smell the storage from the dry cake and the first few infusions. The tea… is nice and sweet, with an obvious Yiwu taste, but honestly… it doesn’t not merit the price being charged. The last Zhenchunya Hao I had at the Best Tea House in their main store was better — it was also better stored.

I heard that Mr. Chan of the Best Tea House actually bought this batch from somebody who originally got it from sources in Taiwan, and this is after he sold out (pretty much) his own supply. Therefore, storage conditions are not quite the same, and it’s obvious that this batch I’m seeing is not as well stored as the other ones…

Either way though, it just costs too much…. with a nice 25% markup to the price since I was last in Hong Kong… in August!

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Two darjeelings

December 23, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I had two darjeelings today at two different hotels. Colonialism dies hard, and afternoon tea is one of those institutions that the Brits have left behind in Hong Kong. At the better hotels and restaurants they generally serve loose leaf tea of various kinds, although some places I’ve been to charge you $6 USD for the privilege of drinking an insipid teabag.

So I went to two places today, and the reason it’s actually blog worthy is because the difference was night and day. I don’t know exactly where they’re from or anything, but the first one, served at the local Conrad, was a bit boring and probably not a real Darjeeling. It was a second flush type of tea, dark, strong, but without a lot of the signature “Darjeeling” taste that I like (and the only reason why I’d order it). This is why I suspected it’s just a blend, instead of pure Darjeeling leaves. The leaves were very broken, small, low grade. It was not worth the $$ they were charging for it.

The second one, tasted at the Peninsula, was so obviously better after having had the first one. The tea was lighter — most likely a first flush Darjeeling. The leaves were less broken (forgive me for not knowing the British grading system by heart). The taste… was exquisite. It’s got that lovely fragrance of a good Darjeeling, with a nice bite to the tea but still very smooth going down. I loved it.

Of course, it probably helped that there was a band playing there for the whole time in the lobby, churning out Christmas music for the crowds and what not. It also cost more, but IMO, I’d pay the extra $$ to drink the Darjeeling there than the much, much lesser version of the first.

I wonder if they sell this tea at their gift shop. It might be worth it. I should go back and take a picture of the place, as it’s really well decorated for the Christmas season this year, and drinking afternoon tea in the Pen is something that a good tourist to Hong Kong ought to try.

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