A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

Water shock

July 7, 2025 · 3 Comments

I’m currently on the road. The place where I’m at boasts that their tap water is great. Ok, lovely. I can taste the minerals in the water. It’s heavy. Boiling it in the kettle at the hotel, the water leaves a lot of minerals after even one boil. When I brew a lighter oolong with it grandpa style, it leaves weird solid deposits on the bottom of the cup. No matter, the tea tastes fine. Heck, it even makes hotel black tea bags taste pretty decent.

That is until I tried it with an aged oolong I’ve been drinking fairly often recently. It’s a roasted tea that’s well aged. It goes down pretty smooth, usually, with nice fragrance. However, I brewed this one cup in the hotel mug – and the tea, instead of its usual fragrance, smelled fishy. It’s the same kind of smell you get when you drink cooked puerh, except, well, it’s not that at all. I frankly was not expecting it, and tried smelling it a few more times. Funny enough, taste wise, the tea tastes about the same as normal. But I can’t ignore that smell – it’s so obvious and so offputting I ended up dumping the tea instead of drinking it further.

I’ve said it on multiple occasions – water, being the second most important ingredient in your cup of tea, is actually quite important to the quality of what you’re drinking. People often spend a lot of time and money on finding the best tea to drink, but completely ignore the water they used it with. Folks regularly drink with reverse osmosis water, or distilled water, or water that is just unsuitable for the tea in question – like this particular case of fishiness. If someone living here got a sample of this tea, they would think it’s awful and smell funny. Can’t blame them – the water here does make it smell funny. The tea isn’t the problem, but the water and tea combo is.

It’s just like when you use, say, silver cups to drink dark teas. The silver highlights the bright notes in the tea and mutes a lot of the deeper notes. That’s great for a green or light oolong, but is generally not ideal for darker teas. Unlike silver cups though, water is (relatively) cheap. Everyone serious about drinking tea need to be regularly checking in on the water they use, and make sure that it’s not doing funny business to the tea they’re drinking. I have, in the past, recommended using something like Volvic as a baseline. It’s still valid – Volvic is generally a pretty reliable water to test your teas with. It being widely available worldwide is a plus as well – people drinking teas on separate continents can compare notes.

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Village names

July 4, 2025 · 2 Comments

A bit of a history lesson from an old tea drinker here. Back when I first started drinking tea in earnest, around 1998 or so, I mostly hung out with older tea people here in Hong Kong at the Best Tea House. The crowd was mostly an older generation who grew up drinking dim sum tea, and then discovering this new style that was getting popular starting in the late 80s and early 90s. They would tell me that when they got into tea, especially in puerh, the scene was still dominated by the old sellers who only had traditionally stored teas. When they asked at these shops if they had any dry stored, new cakes to sell, the store owners looked at them funny and asked “why? That stuff is undrinkable.” Back then, teas were identified only through names made up to denote different batches. So you have Red, Blue, and Yellow Marks, you have 88QB, you have traditional characters and simplified characters (nobody called these 8653 back then), you have things like Snow Mark and Water Blue Mark (shuilanyin) etc. The definition of batches were based on the wrapper plus maybe some characteristics of the tea. Where did the tea came from? Nobody knows. You knew they were from Xiaguan or Menghai tea factories, but that’s about it.

Enter Zhenchunyahao, and you have the emergence of Yiwu. Now, Yiwu isn’t a new name, per se. For people who owned and drank the antique, pre-war teas, they are familiar with the name Yiwu, because it was where a lot of these antique tea outfits were based. Their neifei would say they are from there, etc. This is also why the Taiwanese who made Zhenchunyahao went to Yiwu – their express goal was to recreate antique teas, so they went to the one place they knew where the antique tea shops were from. Zhenchunyahao had three productions – 95, 96, and 98. The next batches that started getting made with a place name attached (or advertised) was things like the very early Yichang hao – which was Yiwu – in 99.

It’s not actually true though that antique tea outfits all came from Yiwu. And as puerh gained popularity, people found references to other mountains – the old six great tea mountains of Gedeng, Mangzhi, Manzhuan, Yibang, Yiwu (Mansa really, but let’s not quibble), and Youle. People also started calling teas from north of the river by their mountain names, because that’s actually where a lot of tea was and is still being produced. By early 2000s, you started seeing cakes produced not only with Yiwu on the name, but also some of these other places. Bulang, Jingmai, Nannuo started appearing on cakes by around 2003. Some of these names, like Jingmai, have totally fallen out of favour. Back then, from what I understand anyway, one of the reasons they were more popular was because they had good road access. To go to some of the more remote areas meant dirt roads or even having to hike. Nannuo could be reached by car easily. Also, for western facing vendors, one of the earliest to appear was 101 plantations, which I just googled to still exist. They were one of the OG Jingmai producers (along with He Shihua, another name consigned to history).

By around 04/05, and certainly in 06, more specific names, especially village names, began appearing. At first it was villages in Yiwu – places like Mahei, Luoshuidong, and Yishanmo. Even Gaoshanzhai was sort of far out, and nobody had heard of Guafengzhai yet – certainly not in 06/07 when I was in Beijing and hanging out at tea shops every week. 06 was also when Laobanzhang became a thing. I remember how hyped it was, how everyone raved about the strength of the tea from Laobanzhang. Prices were astronomical by those standards – a few hundred RMB a cake! For new tea! Insane!

Since then, every year you would have one or two places that became the village du jour. Names like Bingdao, Mengsong, Xikong, Xigui, Walong, etc etc. Most of these only became known to the general public after 2009/10. I cannot remember the precise years when they appeared now, but every time someone “discovers” a new village, it would get hyped, prices would shoot up, and everyone floods the market with a cake claiming to be from there.

Does it mean that these places never produced tea before? No. I think two forces are at play here. One is an infrastructure one – as roads were built and communication improved, information about more remote villages went out. Producers, especially boutique producers looking for an edge, would namedrop these new places as pristine, undiscovered fields of ancient trees. There’s usually some truth to these, but as is the case with all such nomenclature, it’s a giant case of “trust me bro.” I remember when CGHT came out with those Tongqinghe cakes in maybe 2009. What’s Tongqinghe? Nobody had heard of them. He claims he went out there with some armed guards or something because it’s close to the border and found this great new tea that’s super strong. I think in the past, what had happened was these teas would’ve been brought to the more central locations like Yiwu and sold that way, but as producers were looking further out for more “authentic” teas, they instinctively narrowed geographic designations to match this new reality. All of a sudden, a new village was on the map as the next best thing. But how much of the cakes actually consist of real tea from those particular villages? Honestly, only the producer knows. How are we, the average consumer, going to be able to tell if something is from a new place if nobody has sold tea specifically from this place before?

Then by maybe 2015 or so you start seeing people talk about Guoyoulin. Technically, this means forests that is owned by the state and is a legal designation of protected areas. However, it is possible to have permission to carry out some commercial activities in these forests so long as they’re not harmful to the overall environment. Again though, because there is no appellation control regime in China for puerh, anyone can slap any name on pretty much any cake they make. Go to any tea market, or on Taobao, and you’ll see Guoyoulin galore. Just like how the Laobanzhang “three stamps” wrapper is probably the most common wrapper of cakes on Taobao, Guoyoulin, while an interesting concept, has no real meaning so long as there’s zero enforcement of what is actually in a tea.

Sometimes you can sort of date things based on village names – a 05 cake claiming to be from Xikong, for example, is at best a retcon and at worst just a fake. Is a 2025 Xikong any more reliable though? Yes and no. Now there have been enough productions of these places (and thankfully, not much new villages anymore, relatively speaking) so that you could theoretically go back ten years and say “yeah, this tastes like all these other ones from this area from different vendors.” But when it’s different – you could just as well chalk it up to different season, maybe different areas within the same village, or different production processes, etc. Place names are, in many ways, more of a marketing device than something of actual value when it comes to evaluating a tea.

Categories: Teas
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Green tea pu

June 30, 2025 · 14 Comments

Just about a dozen years ago I wrote a post about the dangers of green tea puerh. In short, young puerh that has been processed at too high a temperature that drinks well immediately but will age poorly. The same way if you drink old longjing it’s just…. bitter and gross. Well, a few weeks ago at a tea session with Alex of Taiwan Tea Odyssey we drank a tea that he has held for almost 14 years. It was a Yunnan Sourcing fall 2011 Yiwu Gaoshanzhai. The tea looked pretty ok – nice looking leaves, turning a bit yellow, but smells faintly of that old honeyed slightly aged puerh scent when dry. We brewed it gongfu. The first couple steeps seem ok – the tea has been aged in Los Angeles most of its life, only moving to Taiwan last year. We ascribed the issues with the tea – a bit of rough texture, weird flat notes and a bit of bitterness – to the LA storage. Then, we brewed it some more, and the nicer aspects of the tea – a cooling sensation, and some aged notes, started falling off, and the only thing remaining are stale green tea notes and a long lasting bitterness that doesn’t turn into sweetness.

Ok, here I thought we have a tea that is probably a mixture of green tea pu with some properly processed materials. The properly processed stuff was what made it taste ok in the initial steeps, but it gets overpowered by the bitter notes of aged green tea pu in the mixture. But, to be fair to the tea, we tried it again, this time in a lineup of bowl brews.

The lineup here is (left to right) 2010 Yunnan Sourcing Fall Manzhuan, 2011 YS Fall Gaoshanzhai, 2012 YS Fall Wangong, 2013 YS Spring Xiangming, a 2009 Spring Dianyi Mahei, and a 2012 Tea Urchin (RIP) Manzhuan. We used the same amount of tea and brewed with the same amount of water and just let it sit, which is a good way to evaluate a bunch of teas quickly while being able to compare them side to side. Try it sometime.

The first five teas all came from Alex’s storage, and were acquired around 2012/2013. The Tea Urchin tea was stored in Singapore almost this entire time. Of these teas, unfortunately our early friend the Gaoshanzhai was probably the worst of the bunch – the bitterness is the most obvious here, plus the poor mouthfeel. The other two fall teas also didn’t fare very well, but are a bit more faded but less bitter, to the point where they’re a bit bland at this point. The spring Xiangming was, I believe, cheaper when bought, and it showed. The Dianyi Mahei is ok, but not great for something that is now 16 years old. Finally, the Tea Urchin tea. It’s the best of the bunch – no weird bitterness that lingers, for one. It’s aging all right. But nobody can buy it anymore since the store is dead, so that’s that.

Now, dear reader, you might be thinking – Los Angeles is a horrible place to store tea! It’s not a surprise the Singapore stored tea is the best! Yes, I know. It’s dry, hot, and just not very good for aging puerh. Those of you who live there, go buy oolongs.

But I digress. To make sure that it isn’t Alex’s bad storage talking, I decided to do a public service and spend forty American bucks to buy two samples fresh from Yunnan Sourcing to make sure it’s not the City of Angels that’s causing problems for the teas.

After their arrival, I tried them.

Unfortunately I must report that Kunming or whatever storage Scott has for his teas are no better. I mean, we always know that Kunming storage isn’t the best, but in order to eliminate the possibility of Alex’s storage doing bad things to the tea, I had to find another source for it to make sure that’s the case, and there’s no better way to do it than to buy it from the source. After all, you can still buy whole cakes of these things from Yunnan Sourcing. I used 3g for 5 minutes brews. The Manzhuan, it turns out, is just very, very bland. It’s a bit rough, a bit bitter, but mostly just rather bland and hollow. The Gaoshanzhai is clearly made of better material – throat cooling, a bit of body, it has signs of good base material, but it also has the same problems as Alex’s sample – rough, very bitter, not much fragrance.

For an almost 15 years old tea, this is not good. It’s not going to get better at this point. It is quite clearly at least contaminated by at least some measure of green tea processed puerh in here. If you have cakes of this, I would be curious to hear your reports of how they taste now. I myself am wondering if a few cakes I bought from them around then are doing similar things – I haven’t tried them since I bought them. But if it’s at all similar to how these batches are turning out, things are not promising.

There were some questions in the dozen year old post about how to notice these issues – green tea processing most often shows up as teas that have a sort of green bean fragrance. It’s sweet and soft, with a beany taste. That bean taste is a product of a higher temperature shaqing that turns the tea into green tea – which also stops any prospect of future aging. If you’ve had stale green teas that are a few years old, you’d know how that tastes. It’s dry, rough, grassy in a bad way, and bitter. I haven’t bought that much new teas in the past ten years, so I have little idea how prevalent this issue still is at this point. However, if your puerh is getting more bitter over time, it’s a bad direction to go in.

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An old ghost

January 20, 2025 · 8 Comments

This is the 19th year this blog has been in existence, which, frankly, is a long time, even if the past few years it’s more of a ghoul and less of an active blog. The reason I still pay for hosting to keep all this up is because, every so often, people would tell me that they’re going through the backlog and finding interesting information in it. I know how annoying it is to have a resource online just disappear on you, especially in this age of social media where everything goes away eventually, so, this site stays up.

It does also mean that there are lots of what are now skeletons on this blog, memories and impressions of places and people that are no more. I was in Yongkang a couple days ago, and passed by this storefront. It’s a dead shop, obviously, but I remember it as a teashop I visited on a few occasions the last time I stayed in Taipei for a while, back in 2007 when I would mundanely post every day about what I drank that day. The shop was called Hui Liu, and at the time was a vegetarian restaurant/teashop. I think I even bought some tea there, a couple ounces. Even by the end of my stay in 2007, I had stopped going to Yongkang for tea – it’s too touristy, with prices to match. These days I visit there mostly for the food, and for spaces where you can sit down and brew tea with friends.

But it did trigger a couple memories of how it used to be like there, and I dug up the old post of me talking about it. I was rather eager to learn more back in the day. Funny thing is, I don’t think I ever went back to either Yetang or Hui Liu. Yetang, from what I can tell, is still open. Hui Liu closed I think in 2018, replaced by some other place which has also now closed, as you can see in the photo above. I should really go back to Yetang and see what it’s like now. The owner, from what I can gather, spends most of his time in the mainland teaching tea these days. Hui Liu, on the other hand, is now just a memory.

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Pay attention to the others

January 11, 2025 · 9 Comments

Yes, I’m still alive. Not sure how many of you will see this though.

Today I went to a tea producer’s house to chat with him here in Taiwan. He showed me a bunch of teas he made while we talked about the state of the industry, etc. Aside from drinking some pretty interesting teas, one thing stood out to me – he’s constantly watching what I’m doing with the cup.

This is I think something that is underrated for a lot of people who don’t often gather for tea, and for those of you who tend to drink alone. The person doing the brewing for a group tends to overly focus on their brewing – I’ve done this in the past too. I’m watching myself, thinking of what to do next, talking, etc, and forgetting that there are other people drinking. I’m still pouring, but I’m not really paying attention to their drinking, when in fact, they’re giving you hints.

How fast are people drinking the tea? How are they reacting? The person I was with today was watching me like a hawk – one of the teas he brewed was a tea he rescued from some production problem. It’s not great – it’s fine, but clearly muted as a tea. The tea he brewed previously, a black tea using qingxin oolong, was great. So the moment he noticed that I was drinking the new tea a lot slower, he went back to the black tea – which lasted a good while longer. We never drank the rescue tea again – and I’m not even a customer. I was just there for the conversation. Now, having said that, I smoked plenty of second hand smoke today, but there was no way around that.

When doing a gongfu session with folks, you don’t have to brew every tea to its natural death. Some teas are not so great, or not to the taste of those who are present. Be happy to just give up on a tea and move on – rare is the tea that gets better with more infusions. If by cup 3 or 4 it’s not good, that’s it. It’s done. If someone’s not drinking, maybe re-make something that they liked previously. Part of being a good host is to notice these things, and to give the guests something they like. It’s the little things that count.

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Crashing prices

February 26, 2024 · 5 Comments

A couple years ago I posted about an outing with a friend to go to the local Dayi store to drink new 7542s (I think I deleted the image by accident). The tl;dr is that they’re very average and way too expensive. Now, two and half years later, we have this:

This is a screencap from Donghe which shows you prices of puerh. For the 2020 7542, which reached a peak of around 50,000 RMB/jin (42 cakes) we are down to around 29,000 RMB. It’s still really expensive at over 600 RMB a cake, but nowhere near the peak. I’d also imagine prices will continue to fall as the quality simply isn’t there.

More importantly, you can easily buy ten, even fifteen, years old 7542s on Taobao that are genuine that cost around this price. People trying to sell you the 2020 version will tell you it’s special, they used better leaves, blah blah, but in reality it probably is just another run of the mill 7542 with very little difference that you, the drinker, will notice some years down the road – certainly not at a price that is so inflated.

I have increasingly come to think that for most teas, especially ones that aren’t special in some way (i.e. most big factory productions) you’re just better off buying when you are ready to drink them – there is such a huge backlog of teas that are sitting in storage somewhere by people who bought them years ago to “invest” that are, well, looking for drinkers. Why buy new, when you can buy old?

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Good baseline tea

August 1, 2023 · 7 Comments

I just spent a month in Taiwan doing research and other things. It was spent almost entirely in Taipei, so there wasn’t much time to go to the tea farms or anything. I did do some tea shopping, revisiting old haunts and finding new ones. A shop ran by someone who’s been there since he was 16 (now 75) is, for example, a pretty fun place to go, and a witness to all the changes to the tea industry there in the past two generations.

As food in Taiwan is invariably pretty cheap and the rental apartment kitchen subpar, I ate out a lot. Food comes with drinks in sets, and more often than not, it’s tea. One thing that got me thinking, and for once a new thought that perhaps deserves a blog post, is that there is such a thing as a good baseline tea. In Hong Kong, for example, the baseline tea one might drink is some watered down Lipton that you might have at a cha chaan teng, or some rather nasty cooked puerh with some storage notes in a big pot in a dim sum restaurant. It’s…. not good. In Taiwan, the baseline tea, at least in terms of what you normally end up drinking in a lot of situations, is iced black tea. They are often listed as “honey fragrance black tea” – bug bitten black tea, lightly roasted. The stuff actually in plastic cups may or may not be that – who knows about truth in advertising here – but the teas, in general, are pretty good, and far better than whatever junk Hong Kong places serves up.

But the profile of that baseline matters a lot, I think, and shapes tea preferences. Hong Kongers are not afraid of traditionally stored puerh, because you encounter it so often. It’s what you would expect to taste when you want some puerh. In places where bottled, bitter green tea is the norm, like in Japan, then the drinker is going to be pretty immune to those kinds of bitterness. The Brits and much of Europe has teabags with blended black tea as their baseline. It is our daily encounter with tea and often is what comes to define what “tea” is for these people.

The worst, I think, is when you have places that just don’t do much tea in daily life. This ironically includes Mainland China, where tea is not usually served with food (and when it is, the tea is similar to the cheap powdered stuff you get in American Chinese restaurants). In these cases, there is no “tea” and no baseline. In a way, I suppose, that opens doors – you go in with no preconceived notion. But I think by not having a daily encounter and a daily baseline, there’s also less ability to discern quality, to know that something is “ok” or “off.” This is something a typical Taiwanese, I think, would have a feel for, even if they can’t articulate it, because they see it so much.

Alas, I’m back in Hong Kong. So, maybe I’ll post some thoughts again in a few years time. Ciao.

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Packing teapots

March 11, 2023 · 2 Comments

So…. this is how I pack my teapots for moving. You buy those butcher paper – enough to wrap them all. Then, just simply wrap the pot with the paper – usually trying to get a sheet between the lid and the body, so it’s at least cushioned if not snug. Although, take care not to be too snug – you could, theoretically, crush your lid that way if you try to force it in and the lid is tight to begin with. Thankfully, with my loose lids, that’s rarely an issue.

Then you just put them in the box – the point is to 1) stop the pots from touching anything else and 2) cushion it enough so that there’s no room for shaking. This is a box that’s filled to the brim, probably something like 60 pots total. There are a few of these boxes that I need to unpack. It’s gonna take me a little while….

Categories: Teas

Housecleaning

March 11, 2023 · 5 Comments

So, it’s been a while. I have sort of neglected this place – partly because I have nothing really new to say, partly because, well, blogs are a bit of a dead genre. Either way, this place has languished.

But I do have plans, at least, to try to change that. One impetus is that I moved recently, which means that, once again, I packed up all my teapots and am reminded of the gargantuan task of cataloging all of them. I should take photos of them all, and while doing so, I suppose I should also post them here. So, I’m making myself do that, and you can expect to see teapot porn soon. I will, however, make a small change. No more volume measure – it’s a finicky thing that doesn’t really serve any purpose anyway. I think I’ll just put physical dimension here and call it a day. Measuring volume requires me to pour water in, weigh it, pour it out, and then let it dry – a time consuming process that also adds risk of breakage. I’d rather not do that. So, physical measure it will be.

Another thing of note is that finally, this website has an https address, so Chrome won’t freak out anymore about it being not updated. Sorry for the long delay in that. I also have a lot of links to my old photobucket that probably should be fixed. I’ve been working on it, but it’s taking a long time and I’ve got other things to do, alas. That’s what happens when you run a site off old, old web services from the early 2000s and never spent the time going back fixing everything…

Anyway, hope you’re all alive and well.

Categories: Teas

A year long hiatus

August 31, 2022 · 10 Comments

Last time I wrote a post here was July 2021. That’s more than a year ago and the longest break I’ve taken from this blog. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been mostly busy dealing with various projects of mine, the most important of which is what you see above – the publication of my first book. I just got my own copies a couple days ago, which is pretty exciting. It’s also a long, long way away from when I first started this blog when I was merely a second year grad student. That year, I first started conceiving of this project that ended in this book, so in a way, it’s a nice milestone.

My next project is going to be much more about tea – I’ve been doing some research on various aspects of tea for the past few years now, as many of you have seen. The project is now slated to be mostly about tea production in Taiwan over the course of the 20th century, and its implications on what we can learn about skills, artisan production, and global trade. I originally wanted to do something more comparative, but Covid-19 travel restrictions means that it’s much harder to get that done in any reasonable timeframe. I do hope that in the next few years I’ll be able to go more to Taiwan to finish up some research and to get a book out, this time in less than than it took my first one.

Otherwise though, on the tea front, not that much is going on. I’ve been drinking lots of deathroast tieguanyin these days – just grandpa style in a mug. It’s easy and tasty. Without much travel and with all the Covid silliness, there’s been much less tea activity than normal and so not a lot to write about. I suppose a recent highlight is a session with a very well stored 1950s Red Label. That was nice.

Now that the book is out, it’s time to get cracking on the next book. Hopefully I’ll have some meaningful updates on here once I have made some more progress.

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