A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

MarshalN’s Curated Samples

September 17, 2012 · 82 Comments

Every so often, I get people asking me if I would get into the tea business. After all, I’m well located for it, I spend a lot of time hunting for teas anyway, and I always talk about things that people can’t buy easily in the West, so if I don’t provide it, who would? I’ve always refused, because I don’t want to become a vendor, which would compromise my ability to speak freely on my blog here, and it also simply isn’t what I want to do.

At the same time, I do want to send people tea to share, especially if it’s something they can’t find easily. I send samples to friends often, but usually only in a limited capacity. My last attempt at a big tea distribution, which took place in 2007, taught me to not do it again. It’s a real drag – spending a lot of time, effort, and money. I did get feedback on both samples, but I felt the experience underwhelming and ultimately rather superficial, so I never did it again. Buying things for people can often end badly, so I don’t usually do that either.

Recently I’ve been thinking about what’s useful in terms of learning about tea. And then, at a recent tasting I hosted for two friends in Portland, it hit me that comparative drinking is really at the core of what we do when we try to learn more about teas. You can’t know what is good without knowing what is bad, just like you can’t be aware of the range of possible tastes among shuixian if all you’ve had are light roasted ones. Sampling is about broadening horizons, and it is a low risk way to stretch into areas that you might not be familiar with.

So with that in mind, I think there’s something that I can do here that’s both intellectually interesting and not devolve into just merely selling tea. Working off the idea of having flights of tea, I am going to try and organize what I call Curated Samples. These are teas that I have found that I believe, together, will hold some educational/learning value. In other words, I think the samples, together as a group, will have more value than merely sum of the parts. They are going to be limited in quantity – perhaps 20-30 sets at a time. They are also going to happen pretty infrequently – currently I am thinking perhaps 2-3 times a year, depending on whether inspiration strikes or not and whether it is practical or not. Some will take a considerable amount of time to gather – for example I want to do one with age Taiwan oolongs, showing what I think are the four or five standard “types” that exist out there, but finding the right teas in sufficient quantity will take a good amount of time, so that will be ready when it’s ready.

These samples will have to be sold, to pay for the tea, the material, and the time and effort to acquire them. What will not happen is that the samples will not be sold separately – it’s either all or nothing. Also, there will be no more of the teas, even if you love them. If they are acquirable (sometimes they are) I am happy to show you around if you come to Hong Kong, but as currently conceived, at least some of these are not going to be found anywhere. If you liked them, well, I’m glad, and I hope you took good notes so next time you run into a tea like it, you’ll know. Of course, because of the nature of the Curated Samples, I am not going to say you’ll love them all. Some will be placed in these sets precisely because they make a point, rather than because they’re enjoyable, although I’d imagine at least a few teas each time should be pleasant. Pricing of the samples will differ depending on the teas we’re dealing with. Since this is an educationally minded project, if you can prove to me you’re a current student somewhere, I will give you a discount.

Having said all that, the first set of samples I want to provide is going to be around roasting. Specifically, it will be the same tea, a tieguanyin, repeated five times, but with 0, 15, 30, 45, and 60 hours of roasting by the seller. Only the 60 hours version is what the shop sells – the rest I requested with a special order for him to do for me, and are teas that he doesn’t think taste very good but will do anyway, because I asked for a favour. I just got a call two days ago that he’s about to start roasting them, so they’re being roasted as I type this, and I should get them by the end of the week. There should be a total of about 25-30 spaces.

I’ll write more on the teas when I have them in hand. In the meantime, if you are interested in this, please let me know via the comments. This way I can gauge if people actually want this sort of thing, and, should there be greater interest than I have space for, I have to devise a way to make sure distribution is fair.

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House blend, or floor sweepings

September 13, 2012 · 12 Comments

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Finally, some tea.

I’ve unpacked all my teas, although my teaware is still largely confined to their respective boxes. Turns out I have a lot more puerh than I thought – about double my original estimate, now that I have taken an inventory of everything I’ve got. It does scare me a little bit, and puts things in perspective. I think one reason I underestimated the amount of tea I have is mostly because I forgot about the gifts I’ve received, and also some tongs of teas that I bought a long time ago but have been in deep storage, or more less, and therefore wiped from my memory. Well, no more, as now I have a spreadsheet of everything I’ve got, minus the half cakes and the broken pieces that I have collected in various bags.

When you move, you also end up with a lot of fannings. Using ziplock bags means that the fannings are, by and large, contained, and so as a cleanup measure, I emptied the bags of their fannings and then brewed them in my little gaiwan. It’s actually not a bad cup, despite its mixed nature. Hobbes has something like this at home, and we can all do this with leftover samples and bits and pieces, as Scott from Yunnan Sourcing also does. It’s not a bad way to consume tea.

It’s also an interesting, uncontrolled exercise in tea blending. Since we currently live in the age where a lot of more premium puerh teas tend to be single-origin, sometimes down to the farmer level, it is increasingly common to find cakes that are very one-dimensional – they display one single trait very strongly, but there’s a certain hollowness in other aspects. That has generally not been the case in the past, when tea merchants would blend cakes. The public factories obviously did massive blending, with their famous formulas, but even private shops pre-1949 did a certain amount of blending as well. We don’t know their formula, but we know that the leaves on the exterior of the cake and the interior of the cake tend to be different, and there’s a mixing going on perhaps of age as well (different seasons or even years). So, these single season, single-origin cakes are really new in many ways.

I sometimes think of my cakes as raw materials. When aged, I look forward to blending them with each other, possibly to create teas that are more interesting than they are on their own. With blended teas there is a certain fullness that comes with the mouthfeel that you can’t get with single-origin teas. Whereas one tea in the cake might be sweet all the way, another might show more bitterness, while a third may be particularly minty. Blending them in the right proportions can create a tea that does all three things at the same time. Some will claim that’s no good, that they enjoy finding the unique characteristics of one village or another. That may well be the case, but it can also get boring.

I do wonder how all these teas will age in time, and how we will view them twenty years hence. I suspect many will be viewed unfavourably – stuff like laoman’e, with its everlasting bitterness, might not be liked as much by then. I even wonder if this whole single-origin thing is just a giant fad that will fade within the span of a few years, and the blended stuff, especially high end blended stuff (and they do exist, even now – I should post about them) will be treasured among all. Only time will tell.

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Confessions of a tea hoarder

September 10, 2012 · 9 Comments

I think it’s pretty obvious that I have a good bit of tea – probably more than I can reasonably consume within the span of a few years. Moving actually gives you a pretty good idea of how much tea you have, what you have, etc. I, for example, have found that I have a lot of aged oolong

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It’s not entirely clear to me what I can do to consume all of it. I think I still have some in some of the other boxes of tea that I have not opened yet, so that’s why the third shelf is mostly empty – still have space for more.

Conservatively, I think there’s probably something along the lines of 10-15kg of aged oolong in here. I got to this point mostly because I was burned earlier on in my drinking career with not buying enough tea when I like something, and with aged oolong, even if you have money, you won’t find that tea again, because quantities are usually limited to a few kilos, at most. So these days, when I run into an aged oolong I like, I’ll buy loads of it, to ensure that I will not run out of said tea. That, of course, creates another problem – which is that of the “too much tea” variety.

Similar issues exist with my puerh, although not quite as acute, I think. Most things I only have a tong of, if I really liked it, and there are only a handful of cakes for which I have more than one tong. I also have a lot of “stamp collection” bings – one or two cakes each of something or another that I found interesting, but not interesting enough. Again, a similar strategy exists – I need to have enough of the tea to make sure I won’t run out of it easily, and in this case, also because I want to age it (aged oolongs are meant for current consumption and not aging). So, as you can imagine, I have too much tea there too.

I’ve done calculations before regarding how much tea I can reasonably drink within a year. If you assume about 10g of consumption a day, every day, we’re talking only about 3.6kg a year. Divided by 357g, the standard size for most puerh cakes, that’s 10 cakes a year. Granted, ten cakes is not nothing, but I’m pretty sure I’m buying at the rate of more than 10 cakes per year, and I’m sure most of you, if you’re reading this and you drink puerh, are as well.

This is why I think that for a lot of the teas that are mass-produced, there will never, ever be the skyrocketing prices that you’ve seen in the past. It will not happen. A new Menghai 7542 from, say, 2010, will never be very expensive. There’s just so much of it out there, and there’s always a limit to where a market can expand, there will be a point in the future where prices will stabilize and it’ll just stop moving. People who buy these things for investment need to get out while the going is good, or they’ll be sitting on a lot of tea. There are small productions from these big factories, such as the 黃金歲月 craze recently, but that’s because of active intervention of a few speculators who tried to generate interest in the tea, and also because of the limited quantity of the tea itself. You can try chasing those things, but if you’re outside China, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose and be the guy who ends up holding the tea when all is said and done.

The reason prices for teas have been going up in China is twofold: 1) the market for tea drinking is still growing, as people have more disposable income and thus more money to spend on things like tea, and 2) general inflation, which is pretty serious. My friend L told me that he’s having trouble finding sales people for his teashop in Beijing, even though he’s offering to pay about 1600 RMB a month. Back in 2006, when I was there, a similar job would’ve been taken if the pay were 800 RMB. That’s double the salary within the span of six years. Of course, this is only one datapoint, but it seems generally true as I walk past “help wanted” signs at restaurants and shops. It’s hard to find good help in China, and if you want them, you have to pay up.

So it’s no wonder that this year’s new crop of tea is costing more than ever. We’re at the point where a new cake is going to cost you upwards of $200 per cake, more if it’s some famous brand making it. This is not the same as the bubble from 2006/7, when everything and anything puerh was expensive – I remember new 7542s from Menghai getting to these kinds of prices pretty quickly, only to come crashing down in the summer of 2007.

Nowadays, the only things that are expensive are the quality stuff – or at least, stuff that claim to have quality. Of course, not every expensive cake is going to be good, but good tea is not going to be cheap. There are, however, gems to be found from the 5-10 years old category of teas – some of them are woefully underpriced because they were produced under a no-name label and been sitting dormant in some small shop in, say, Fangcun. Sometimes they can be made of the same material as some of the more famous cakes, or in fact, better. The problem, of course, is finding those gems, which takes time, energy, and confidence in your own palette. Once found, however, you need to buy them up, because you won’t find them again, just like good aged oolongs.

Now if I can only solve the problem of drinking them all, I’m all set.

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The sample conundrum

September 6, 2012 · 7 Comments

I’m a fan of sampling, and I think it’s a good way to learn about teas. Whether it be greens, oolongs, puerhs, or whatever, sampling gives you breadth that you otherwise won’t get, and exposure to things that are otherwise hard to get (imagine having to buy 357g of something even if you just want to try). One of the problems with sampling though is this: what do you do with the leftover?

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Every time I move, it seems, I create a new box for samples that are leftover. Now I have four of these things (the above is just one of them). There are always, always, more samples to drink than time to drink them, and oftentimes the samples, if they are not very good, very memorable, or interesting, are never touched again. This leaves lots of small, open bags of tea that sit around, and eventually get collected into boxes, never heard from again. Since I moved back to Hong Kong and before this particular move, I don’t think I ever took out those three boxes of samples I had sitting on the top shelf of my tea storage cabinet.

These samples come from three sources. The first are ones that I bought myself. You can see, for example, a lot of Yunnan Sourcing samples in this particular box. There are also samples given to me by friends, sometimes very generously. I am still sitting on some samples that I haven’t had a chance to drink, sometimes because they’re valuable teas and I don’t want to waste them on an individual session. Then there are the worst kind – the ones that I get from vendors while shopping, for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s because I want to try something, sometimes it’s because they’re pushing something, but inevitably, I come home with a little plastic bag, maybe try the tea, and then…. it’s forgotten, with no labels, identifying marker, or anything. Two years later, I find it in a box, and I have no idea what it is other than the general type. Once in a while, with teas that look distinctive, I can remember where I got them, but that’s not so easy when you’re looking at a small chunk of some green leaves.

There’s a good Chinese expression, “chicken rib”, to explain this. Chicken rib (雞肋) featured in a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, where Cao Cao, one of the warlords, was contemplating retreat and was brought some chicken soup, and he repeated “chicken ribs” a few times. Chicken rib represented the part of the chicken that was “tasteless to eat, but regretful to throw away”. I feel that way when looking at a lot of my samples.

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2011 Fall Tea Urchin Guafeng zhai

August 22, 2012 · 1 Comment

I’m a slow sampler. Since I normally only drink a tea a day, and since I am no longer in the mode of drinking new teas I don’t know every day, it sometimes takes quite a while for me to get to samples that I intend to taste. A few months ago, Eugene of Tea Urchin did a sample trade with me – I sent him a bunch of teas, he sent me a bigger bunch of teas. I’ve tried some of them so far, but I still have a few that has been left unopened. One that I tried recently is the Guafeng zhai 2011 Fall tea that he made.

There’s been a general trend in the past six years of increasing specificity Guafeng zhai is one of those villages in Yiwu that popped out of nowhere and, over the course of a few years, gotten really famous. Nowadays, you even have sub-regions of Guafeng zhai that are showing up as single-estate regions – Chawangshu, Chaping, and Baishahe. Other places, like Wan’gong, Tongqinghe, etc, are all appearing these days as places of good quality. So, increasingly, we’re talking not only about regions of tea (Yiwu) but down to specific villages, often of relatively small sized areas. I guess this is the beginning of appellation claims.

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Tea Urchin gives generous sized samples. It smells like Yiwu when you open the bag. It also smells like Yiwu when the leaves hit the pre-warmed pot, and it, again, smells like Yiwu when I pour out my first cup after the wash.

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Guafeng zhai has a very strong umami taste to the tea produced there, and it tastes a bit more “wild” than some of the cleaner, brighter villages of Yiwu, such as Gaoshan zhai or Mahei. I find teas from Guafeng zhai to be a bit darker generally, and with lower register notes than areas that used to be considered Yiwu proper (Guafeng zhai is basically on the outskirts, right next to Laos). This tea is no different – deep, a bit dark, with notes that remind you of Yiwu, but also has that spicy/umami note that sets it apart a bit. The throatiness comes and goes in this one, but it has good qi that persists. It also suffered a good many infusions. It reminds me of the nights I spent drinking new Yiwus in my Beijing apartment back in 2006.

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This is good tea. This is, I think, tea that will do well in the future, fall or spring. Just because something’s from the spring doesn’t mean it’ll be good, and likewise, just because something’s from the fall doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. Yes, side by side, from the same trees, the spring might be indeed better, but so many other factors, including weather, processing, etc, go into the production of tea that relying solely on season is probably not the best approach.

There’s been a few reviews of this tea by others already, and aside from Hobbes, the reviews have been positive. There is, however, the matter of price – and I have heard complaints, almost universal now, about prices of new tea in general and, if the comments on my last notes on Tea Urchin were an indicator, specific to this vendor. What, exactly, is a fair price for newer teas?

Many of us remember the days when new teas can be had for $20 a cake or less. In fact, I remember in 05 or so, a cake of Haiwan’s Laotongzhi was under $10 USD when new. It was almost free, considering you’re getting 357g of tea from it. Those days are long gone, especially when you are talking about higher end boutique made teas claiming old tree status. I was at the recent Hong Kong Tea Expo, and prices were uniformly high – a decent new cake would cost no less than about $40, and that’s sometimes very average quality stuff. Teas claiming to be from old trees (not all of which tasted like it, mind you) are often sold for $80-100 USD, or more. I bought a cake that was priced at $80 for a new, 2012 spring Yiwu. I also went to a shop a few weeks ago in Shenzhen that sold new 2012 teas at almost $200 a cake. Granted, these are spring prices, which are a bit higher, but high prices are here to stay and they’re not going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to get worse. The supply of old tree tea is relatively limited, and there’s no good way to scale production – you can’t just make more. So, as the market for such teas expand, the prices will keep going up until it reaches that equilibrium where prices no longer go up because it’s already so high that it knocked everyone else out of the market. That day is coming, and not too far either.

Does that mean you should throw all your money in now to buy these things before they get even more expensive? I’m not advocating that, since I can’t read the future and don’t want to give investment advice. One thing I have learned though from 10+ years of tea drinking is that when I see a tea I like, I now tend to buy a lot of it, as long as I can afford the purchase. Some things are going to be there forever, and cannot keep, so there’s no point in buying lots – fresh Longjing, for example. In other cases, however, the teas that you like will go away, and you’ll never see it again, ever, anywhere. I recently tasted a nice sample of a tea from 2006 that I’d love to get my hands on, but I haven’t even seen it on sale after searching high and low, while the 2007 version is over $250 USD. Chasing teas is a dangerous and expensive business.

So, back to the point, I like this tea, but I’m not sure I want to buy lots of it. In the meantime, I’ve just ordered a sample of every 2012 tea that Tea Urchin has made. Given the large sample sizes, I guess I have some time to make up my mind.

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Perils of shopping online

August 14, 2012 · 13 Comments

One of the perils of shopping online for tea is that you don’t get to try the stuff you’re about to buy. A little while ago I recommended the 2005 Chenguanghe Tang Menghai Yesheng to Hster as something worth buying. The only place online that sells it is Hou De Asian Art. I recently procured a number of this cake from Taiwan directly, and I’ve always like this cake. Since I am fairly sure Guang from Hou De sourced his teas from the same place I bought mine, I was rather confident in recommending the cake.

Well, Guang, rather unhelpfully perhaps, doesn’t offer samples. So when I sent Hster a bunch of teas recently for her to try, I included a sample of this 2005 tea for her as well. I didn’t realize that another tea from, Ira, also sent Hster a sample of this, but his sample is from a cake he recently purchased via Hou De. The result is this rather interesting post. Seems like while the two cakes are from the same batch, they are not quite the same after all.

So now, time for some pictures to compare the two. First up are Ira’s pictures of his cake, published with permission.

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Other than the first picture, I didn’t white-balance them because it’s difficult to do without any good reference point, and the picture looks like it might have two light sources, one natural and the other one not. Ignoring the colour of the leaves, there are a few things you can notice from these pictures. The first is that the surface of the leaves look dull, and not very shiny. The leaves also seem to have copious amounts of white dots on them, a sign of mold, perhaps, unless it’s an artifact of the camera. More importantly, the dots seem to be present on the leaves that are inside the cake, not just on the surface. All this is slightly difficult to draw conclusions from, but it seems as though this cake has seen a lot of moisture and perhaps some mold grew on it. Whether or not it is controlled in a traditional storage environment, or bad storage that caused mold, is harder to say.

So I took some pictures of the cake I used for Hster’s sample as a comparison

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What you can see here are a few things: the leaves are shinier, without the slightly furry look of the other cake. The sheen on the leaves is indicative of a drier storage, although I think the cake should best be termed as having undergone natural storage – just left around in a relatively humid environment generally, such as that of Taiwan. More importantly, you also see no obvious indication of mold growing on the cake – there are a few stems that are slightly white, but generally speaking, they are absent.

I obviously cannot comment on what happened – who knows. There are possibilities – perhaps the cake at Hou De was poorly stored to begin with, due to excessive moisture or some such, during a part of its storage somewhere. Sometimes it is quite possible even for cakes within the same tong to develop somewhat differently, especially the cake at the top or the bottom of a tong – they can get moist easily and grow mold while the other cakes are fine. I don’t know if Hou De’s entire batch was bad, or if it’s just one cake out of many. I also have no way of knowing if this problem developed before or after Hou De acquired their cake.

It is quite possible that even Guang himself doesn’t realize there is a problem (if he considers it a problem at all, that is). After all, a customer might feel weird if they receive a cake that was opened prior to purchase, but that is in fact sometimes what must be done to ensure that you’re getting something decent. Just yesterday I bought two cakes from Sunsing, and before taking the goods the employee there actually encouraged me to look at the cakes to make sure they’re ok. For teas that have been aged some years, it is usually a good idea to do so, because you never know what’s happened under the wrapper. It doesn’t help that this 2005 Yesheng has a particularly thick and inflexible wrapper – the thickness of the wrapper may also trap any moisture and cause higher likelihood of mold than otherwise. So you can’t even see through the wrapper to see what’s going on underneath.

Obviously, sampling wouldn’t have helped either, because the samples come from one cake, and the full cake you receive is another one. They could very well be the same, and very often they would be more or less the same. There is still, as always, the risk of something wrong having happened. I suppose this is not too different from corked wine that you end up with once in a while at perfectly well meaning stores. The important thing there, I guess, is to make sure they have an ironclad return policy. Although, in the case of tea, a bit of moisture often doesn’t kill, and if aired out sufficiently and properly, the tea can actually taste quite good.

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Flights of tea

August 10, 2012 · 9 Comments

I was recently in Vancouver and then Portland, Oregon to visit friends and family. One of the things I did was to arrange a tea meeting with ABX, whom I’ve met before when we visited Serenity Art together (the store has since closed and reopening is uncertain). I also contacted David Galli of the rather grandly named Portland Tea Enthusiasts’ Alliance, which is actually a tea space that’s shared with a wine tasting/education outfit and offers classes and tea meetings of various sorts. We ended up settling on drinking tea there.

I promised the two of them that I would bring some aged oolongs of various sorts for them to try, and I ended up taking with me about six different teas, all aged oolongs of one kind or another that I have gathered from one place or another. The result of the tasting, unbeknownst even to me at the time, was a comparison of different aged oolongs and their characteristics.

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We ended up drinking seven teas, six of them aged oolongs and one a cooked/raw mixed brick from the 80s. Most of the aged oolongs, other than one, was tasted in a pot I brought along for the ride. I also ended up doing most of the brewing, so it turned out to be a pretty reasonable proxy for a controlled tasting of the teas.

I think there’s actually quite a bit of value in drinking teas this way. Comparing teas that are, ostensibly, in the same genre, it is quite possible to discern the more subtle differences in the teas by having them back to back. Whereas when drunk separately, they might each have their own strong or weak points, drinking them together, one by one, it is easier to say “this tea is better than that tea because…”. The same, of course, can be done through cupping, but cupping a tea is a lot less fun.

There are some general rules that I try to follow when constructing such tastings though. The first is that one should always start light and end heavy. Going the other way will seriously disrupt the tastebuds, and will often result in sub-optimal experiences. Drinking a green tea right after a heavy, pungent puerh is probably not a very good idea, especially in attempting to detect the high notes of the green tea. It’s generally a much better idea to go from the light and airy to the full bodied and deep teas. I suspect the same is true for wines.

Also, I think it is useful to taste things that share some similarity. Drinking, say, a sencha, then a white tea, then a young puerh, then an aged oolong, for example, can be fun, but I think there is less to be gained in the experience. Drinking the same kinds of tea over a short session, on the other hand, allows for more direct comparison. Differences in aroma, mouthfeel, longevity, and depth become very obvious.

There are also unexpected surprises. The puerh we had at the end, for example, seemed very sour. I think if we had tried that early on, it wouldn’t appear as sour, but because it came after a long line of aged oolongs that are mostly sweet, the sourness was magnified somehow. To me, the tea also tasted somewhat unpleasant overall – it’s hard to pinpoint what was wrong with it, but I know that if it weren’t preceded by the teas that it did, I probably would have liked the tea more.

It would’ve been nice though if I had more time to drink with the two of them. Alas, we only had a few hours, and so some of the teas were still drinkable when we abandoned them for other things. I do wish David good luck though in setting up this new space, and it’s Portland’s good fortune to have a number of locations to drink teas of different kinds.

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Anonymous teas

August 3, 2012 · 7 Comments

In the Western hemisphere people who reads blogs like this one and drink mostly Asian teas in loose-leaf form are a distinct minority, and shops that serve our kind of needs are, by and large, niche players who get relatively little business from those who are not so serious about tea. I suspect that the largest source of loose leaf tea consumption in retail format comes from places that serve loose leaf tea as part of a cafe style operation – with cakes, scones, snacks, and the like.

There are different ways in which such teas are served. On a national scale, the large chains almost all serve teabags, and for good reason – teabags are easy, they’re cheap, the margins are high, and they’re consistent. Anybody can stick a Tazo teabag in a cup and throw hot water in it, and out comes a breakfast style tasting tea that is going to be the same everywhere you go. Smaller shops, on the other hand, especially higher end shops, tend to serve loose leaf teas these days to distinguish themselves from the big chains. If the teas are taken in store, they’ll come in big pots and cups. If you order to go, you’re going to get a paper cup with a t-sac of tea. That’s much harder to do for the average shop – you have to make sure your employees have some idea of what they’re doing, otherwise the teas can be quite nasty. When done well, the teas can be quite decent, and for a traveling tea addict like myself, it can be a welcomed caffeine fix, and it can also be a good introduction to loose leaf tea, or a great place to experiment with teas that one’s unfamiliar with, for people who are otherwise not so tea inclined. Two days ago, I found myself going to a tea and macaron place called Soirette in Vancouver while I was visiting the city for a quick trip before heading to Portland OR. I had a “Wuyi Rock Oolong” which turned out to be quite ok, even though it was made a bit too weak for my taste. But then, any tea in a paper cup is going to be too weak if it were a yancha, so I’m not complaining.

The thing though is that teas are anonymous. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the difficult things are tea purchasing is that two shops can sell the same tea under different names, and you could be none-the-wiser even if you tried them one after another. Unless you do a strict comparison tasting side by side, it’s not always obvious that they’re from the same source. Places like Soirette must source their teas from somewhere – I have a hard time imagining them purchasing teas in bulk from a number of different sources, for that would require a level of work beyond what is necessary (unless, of course, the owner is a tea addict). So, the question is, where?

I tried looking through the web to see if it is possible to find out who they source their teas from, and it turns out to be quite difficult. There are really two possibilities – some big, national stores, or local shops that supply teas for them. Alas, after searching, there’s no real way of knowing with any certainty. I think the only time when you can tell for sure is if some more or less branded teas are used wholesale, without any type of name change. On Soirette’s tea menu, for example, there’s a “Harbour Morning”, which is some type of breakfast tea and named in reference of Coal Harbour, where they’re located. Pretty obviously they named it for their store’s location, and very likely it used to be called “English breakfast” or some other generic name. Then there are things like Jade Oolong, Organic Iron Goddess of Mercy, Marsala Chai, etc etc…. at first I thought it might be Mightyleaf, which has a lot of similarly named organic teas, but then, they also didn’t offer a lot of what Soirette had either. Some look suspiciously similar, but…. the point is, barring some amazing discovery of identical names, etc, and a tea I recognize by taste, there’s just no way to tell.

Perhaps in some ways, that doesn’t matter. However, I do think it speaks volumes about the kind of difficulty faced by newcomers to the hobby – having to deal with the byzantine naming conventions of the trade, and the idiosyncracies of individual shops. If you really love that Harbour Morning blend, you could certainly ask the shop where they get their teas from. In this case, they might tell you, since I don’t believe Soirette sells tea in bulk (although I could be wrong). Try asking a retail tea store, however, and they’ll probably spin some story about sourcing the best teas from the best places, etc. You can go on a quest trying dozens of breakfast blends and not finding the same tea, and even if you end up with the same tea, you might miss it because you feel it’s somehow different. It’s tough when you try to hunt specific teas down, and it all comes down to the problem of teas not bearing names when they’re in loose form. Which is why it’s probably always a good idea to not get too hung up on “the XXX tea I tried at Y shop” too much, because chances are you won’t find it anywhere else.

Categories: Teas
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Digging for gold in basements

July 25, 2012 · 7 Comments

The best and the rarest teas that you’re ever going to drink is most likely to come by serendipity, unless, of course, a few hundred thousand dollars to you is spare change that can be blown on tea. For those of us not in the 0.05%, that’s not really an option.

Thankfully, these chances to drink nice tea come more often than you think, especially if you hang out with the right people and get to tag along when someone with a lot of tea happens to invite you over. Or, you can get lucky.

During a recent visit to a friend’s place I was given a 3/4 of a puerh cake to examine. I was told that this was given to them by one of their moms, ostensibly for stomach issues. The cake looks like this

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The center is loose because I had to pry it open to see the neifei. Unfortunately, the neifei decided to stick to the surface leaves that I pried open, instead of sticking to the leaves underneath. Either way:

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And closeups

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And the back

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When I saw the cake, I thought this is something very old. There are traces of a bigger ticket on the surface of the cake that fell off. Everything about the cake, from the type of neifei to the leaves to everything, suggests to me that this is something quite old. I was tasked with taking it home and trying to determine what it is.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a back story for this tea, other than that this is a cake from a family that’s been in the US for decades, and that some member of the family (the grandfather, I think?) was a customs officer in Yunnan before the war. Ok, sounds good.

Now, I do not profess to be an expert in antique-era cakes, namely cakes produced prior to the nationalization of the tea firms post 1949. I’ve had somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen examples of these things, at various places in various conditions. Prices for these things these days are astronomical – a full cake, retail, would probably set you back about $100,000 USD. That’s not a cheap tea, and one brew will easily cost $1000 or more. These are not teas that mere mortals drink, not on a regular basis anyway. They also do not offer the greatest bang for the buck. But, you try them because they are what they are – rare teas that offer a glimpse to the past, because they offer unique tastes and qi that other teas simply do not possess. So many things have to happen for these teas to survive – and chances are, many of these aren’t even the best examples of teas, because the best ones have long been consumed. So, take it for what it’s worth.

It is in that spirit that I tried this tea. After all, I had no firm idea what it is. Searching around, I think the very faded neifei looks very much like the horizontal ones used by Tongqing hao, with the few characters that I can make out and the border decoration. The tea brews dark, very dark, like they are supposed to.

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The taste is very hard to describe – the first few infusions have a very strong, unique taste that I find to be common among these very old teas. It’s smooth, and full bodied. The tea is still very slightly bitter, with a clear cooling sensation down the throat. The qi is strong, soothing, and obvious. Very often you see people bandy about qi as if every tea has it – well, not really. This is what you’re looking for when you drink a tea for qi, and when someone tells you that the 10 years old cooked puerh they were drinking has qi, well, please take it with a grain of salt. This is what good, strong qi should be. There’s no faking it.

It’s really rather luxurious drinking this tea by myself. The only other time I had an antique tea mostly for myself was when I had Tongqing at Wisteria, but there their tea was loosened up years before, so the qi and the taste were both less immediate. This tea, for some reason, is slightly more compact than other antique teas I’ve seen – possibly because it’s never changed hands in the past decades and has been stored in a drier environment than Southern China. The leaves are very brittle, and break on command. In retrospect, I probably should’ve been more careful peeling the leaves away to check the neifei, but at that time, I had no idea what this was.

Teas like this fade quite quickly – within about ten infusions the initially intense taste will die down, but what replaces it is a very consistent tea that lasts much longer, with the same throatiness and soothing sensation. In some ways, I think these antique teas have gone over the hill a bit – they are not as strong as, say, a Red Label. On the other hand, there’s a soothing calmness to these antique teas that make them very attractive. Twenty or thirty infusions later, when the taste from each individual infusion becomes very weak, I grandpa’ed a few more cups of the tea, which also allows for good shots of the wet leaves. You can see the tea is still brown, not black, and the leaves are not stiff or carbonized in any way – they’re still very flexible. Also, unlike cooked puerh, they retain their shape and consistency when lightly rubbed.

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And finally, you can boil these things. Boiling old teas will yield a strong jujube taste, but once you do it, the tea is spent and there’s nothing left to do with it other than send it to the garbage bin or the compost pile.

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Two kettles later, I called it quits. I think I wrung everything there is to wring out of these leaves. Is it great tea? Yes, maybe, depending on your perspective. It’s not as exciting as an oolong or a newer puerh. It’s not as impressive as a 30 years old puerh. It’s not as fragrant as a green tea. It does, however, possess an old man’s quality to it – it has depth and strength. This is also probably the most potent of the antique teas I’ve had – again, might have to do with its storage conditions in the United States, rather than Southern China. Having said that, it’s not a tea you’d drink every day, or even every month. It’s also not a tea you buy to drink, unless you have too much money to burn. For the approximately five grams I had, this tea cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1200-1500 USD. In other words, it’s worth more than its weight in gold. Having tried it is already good enough.

Categories: Teas
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Poof! It’s gone

July 20, 2012 · 9 Comments

Back in the heady days of 2005/2006, when everyone was getting interested in puerh, there was a plethora of new workshops, tea merchants, and factories that sprung up around this new craze. Everything from tiny workshops of a few people, to individuals going up the mountains, to big investments in big factories were going on at the time. There are actually two levels of manufacturing puerh tea. There’s the farmer who does all the pre-processing, and then there’s the presser, who collects the tea and then gets them pressed into whatever shape s/he fancies. When we talk about producer of a tea, we’re really often talking about the presser, whose function is basically that of a middleman – they collect maocha and then press them into cakes. Technically speaking, there isn’t a lot of skills involved, and the amount of involvement a presser makes in his or her cakes is entirely up to them. They can spend months living in Yunnan and hike four hours every day to go to the forest where the trees are and watch the farmers harvest, making sure everything is right. Or they can just stop by the side of the road, try two or three maocha from a farmer, and pick one they like and just press those without having actually any idea what’s in the bags. As you can imagine, the former type is rare, the latter is common.

So when we look at the market structure of puerh, there are actually two kinds of markets involved. The first is the market between the farmers and the pressers. The farmers don’t generally directly see the end consumers – they sell, primarily anyway, to the pressers. The presser then resells what s/he buys to the collector/consumer (via intermediaries, or not). Back then there was really only one kind of farmer – the smallholding farmer who has a plot of land that he controls, and who sold to whoever they wanted, usually for the best price they think they can get. The pressers, however, are much more varied, and ranged anything from Menghai factory to the individual tourist going in for a few tongs.

It is pretty obvious where the value added for the farmer was – s/he tended to the trees, harvested the leaves, and processed them to the point where it became maocha, ready to be pressed into cakes. Some did the pressing themselves with what they had, other sold their tea by the bag in loose form. The pressers’ value added, on the other hand, is much more varied. As I mentioned already, some really do provide a valuable service, while others are nothing more than people who got the goods from A to B, a typical middleman, with the added step of hiring someone to do the pressing and the transportation. There’s no real skill necessary for pressing – it could, but it need not involve any. The most skillful are the ones who can discern what’s good and bad tea, who took careful steps to ensure that their tea was exactly what they thought they were getting, who protected the process to make sure nothing went wrong, and who, in some cases, blended the tea and created new things from a collection of maocha. That’s what factories like Menghai make their money too – they have the know how to blend teas, and also the ability and skill to amass large quantities of tea so to achieve their blends’ unique tastes. Production of cooked puerh, of course, involved another set of additional skill and input, but we’ll ignore that topic for now.

One of the most interesting thing about this market dynamic is that the chief producers of the tea, namely the farmers, don’t really get a lot of direct feedback from the consumers, at least not in 2005/2006. All they saw were the prices that the pressers were offering, as well as, sometimes, specifications from the pressers. The farmers varied in their skill in processing, the tools they had at their disposal, and also their experience in handling tea. Some have been at it for decades. Others were relative newbies who, until the mid 2000s, were living off their family’s rubber trees. All of a sudden, the influx of demand for young, raw puerh outstripped supply greatly, so prices went through the roof, increasing more than tenfold within the space of two years. As farmers rushed to meet this demand, as you can imagine, a lot of things were done that were not necessarily good.

One of the things I remember the most about trying new cakes back in the day was that out of every three or four cakes, at least one was intensely smokey. They can smell and taste like someone just lit a fire under the cake and roasted it for hours. The smoke can be so intense that even after many infusions, you can still taste the smoke and not the tea. This was a really regular occurrence back then, and there were always issues surrounding whether or not these teas can indeed age into something decent. The belief is that over time, smoke will dissipate and what is underneath will shine through. The question, of course, is how, and how long.

I am reminded of this because I tried a sample today sent to me from Hster, of the 2004 Tailian Youle. She drew a cigarette on the label she provided me, because, well, the thing does taste like cigarette. You can’t tell by looking at the leaves though

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The tea looks great on the surface, but when you brew it and sniff the cup, there’s an unmistakable smell of smoke. The taste confirms that. Ten cups later, smoke is still in your mouth.

It really struck me today when I drank this, because I haven’t had a smokey tea for a while, certainly not a new tea. It seems like the transmission mechanism that I talked about a little earlier does work, in a certain way – consumers don’t want smokey tea, and so over time, smokey teas get phased out. Obviously, farmers now also have better skills and more practice, and are oftentimes equipped with machines that they did not possess back in 2006, so that they can do things to the tea that wasn’t possible before. Chief among the reasons for smoke, at least from what I have seen, are either bad pan frying process so the smoke from the stove was getting in the way, or they used fire to dry leaves because the weather was too wet, causing it to be smokey. Whatever the reason, the technical issues that led to smokey teas are no longer present, or smokey teas are selected out because the market no longer wants any of them, so that these days, of the teas that make it to market, very few, if any, are smokey.

Smokey tastes do indeed fade, but the problem is they can take a long time. Hster’s cake has been in Bay Area storage since 06, I believe, and 6 years hasn’t really done much for the smokiness of the tea. I’d suspect another 20 years won’t do much either, maybe only dissipating it slowly. Is it worth the effort? Probably not. People have said that many of the older, classic recipes from the 80s or earlier were often somewhat smokey, but I think people no longer tolerate that. I can tell the tea underneath this Youle cake is pretty ok, but when there are better, non-smokey alternatives out there, it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for this tea. In more humid or wetter climes, the smoke might go away faster, but maybe not.

Categories: Teas
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