A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

A pile of aged oolong

June 13, 2012 · 8 Comments

I just came back from another trip to Taiwan, this time having a few days between work and tea hunting. Taiwan really is the island of teashops, and the kicker is, quite a few of them are very decent places, with good tea and run by good people. As one of my commenters mentioned, they don’t try to rip you off the way they do in the mainland.

While MadameN and I were a little early to our dinner destination for a meeting with some colleagues from grad school, we decided to take a quick stroll around the restaurant and look at the amazing coffeeshops that are in the vicinity of the restaurant. While doing that, we ran into a tea store that looked as terrible as you can imagine – old, slightly broken and very dirty shelves, lined with bags of tea that have been stacked into pyramids, a common feature of many community teashops in Taipei. On the far end of the shop are bags and bags of teas, and some puerh cakes lining the wall. I decided to try my luck and walked in, asking if they have any aged tea. The woman who was in the store said she has to ask her dad, who really runs the operation, and ten minutes later, the dad walked into the store.

I expected nothing when I walked in, since most of these stores have nothing other than reroasted-to-death “aged” oolong for sale. However, in the subsequent twenty minutes, which was all the time I had, he brought out about five different aged oolongs for me to taste, each one decent, some better than others. It was clear that my twenty minutes were not enough. I decided to go back the next day.

So the next afternoon, after meeting up with Action Jackson, I went back to the store. We tried many teas.

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Aside from the rather obvious advantage of trying teas this way, which is that you can drink as much or as little as you want, while comparing them honestly without any interference with the brewing skills and parameters, it also allows you to literally throw away teas that are no good. What you’re seeing here is already after a few teas have been thrown out, with three young gaoshan oolongs, two aged oolongs, and one roasted one. More were tested before we stopped after having tasted a dozen or so teas.

The shop’s proprietor also showed us his rather unique way of roasting teas. It is an interesting use of what looks like an oven, because it’s not what it seems

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Whereas the exterior of the oven looks like, well, an oven for maybe baking bread, once you open it up you can see that the heat is actually being provided by charcoal at the bottom of the oven, with pans of teas being roasted above it. It’s actually not a bad idea – this way, he can do charcoal roasting while keeping the room’s temperature to a reasonable level, and also limits the amount of charcoal he needs to use as well as being able to roasted a relatively small batch at a time. To the left of the oven is where he rests his recently roasted tea, and to the right, with the big white bags, are aged oolongs of one kind or another – no vacuum pack, no jars, nothing, just plain bags with good aged teas that are surprisingly not bitter at all. Nor does he re-roast the tea, ever, because, as he himself correctly states, once you reroast an aged tea it loses the aged flavour. I heartily agree.

In the end we all walked out of the store laden with tea, all sold at a very reasonable price. Having spent many days tea hunting in Taipei both on previous trips and this one, I can safely say that oftentimes the best shops for buying tea are also the ugliest looking, messiest, and dirtiest ones, with bags of teas piled everywhere, old, sometimes broken pots lining the shelves, and the most disorganized tea tables you’ve ever encountered. The shops that are neat, clean, with nice rows of boxed teas lit with mood lighting and packaged in designer bags are, more often than not, rather mediocre and rarely surprising. They might have a few things that are rare, interesting, or, better yet, sold with a story, but you have to pay a pretty penny for them, and I’m not sure if that’s worth the money, because what you can drink is the tea, and not the story.

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Grandpa style in action

June 2, 2012 · 12 Comments

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See it? The little bottle with leaves in it. Some kind of roasted oolong – probably shuixian. Taken on the street in Mongkok

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Drinking with your body

May 23, 2012 · 17 Comments

My friend L from Beijing has come and gone for a quick visit to Hong Kong. I took him around town to take a look at various older shops here, and drank some interesting things along the way, such as an aged baimudan that’s quite good and some 40+ years old tea seeds that have an interesting fragrance to them. If you look hard enough, you can find interesting things in all kinds of places.

L also brought some things himself, including a cake that he sells, made by the same people who were behind 12 Gentlemen cakes that I tried in 2006. They have now moved to a different philosophy of tea making, and L recently went on a trip in Yunnan with them, visiting their own maocha production facility (they only buy fresh leaves, not maocha) and talking to the producers. The idea behind the cakes is that the cakes are produced with the intent to minimize the aroma and fragrance. As L quotes the maker of the tea, “beginners drink tea with their nose, experienced drinkers drink with their mouth, and the connoisseurs drink with their body”. They’re taking it to the next level, so to speak, by trying to make teas that don’t possess fragrance or aroma, and in so doing taking out the distractions. More on their tea another day.

This is by no means a unique insight -  I have both heard similar things from others, and have also witnessed this myself. It is indeed true that beginners tend to drink with their noses – fragrance, above all, is what they focus on. This explains why jasmine is a perennial favourite of so many casual tea drinkers, and why a light oolong or green teas tend to be “gateway” teas that get people in the door – they’re fragrant and they’re nice to drink. Then, as you progress through the collection of more experience and the like, you start learning about the nuances, and the mouth comes into play – the body of the tea, whether it stimulates the various part of the mouth, the tongue, whether it is smooth, etc. Then finally, you get to the point where you are drinking the tea with your body, where the taste, the fragrance, etc are all less important than how it makes you feel. You can call it qi, even though I dislike the opacity of the word because it means little to those who hasn’t experienced it, or you can call it energy, or whatever you fancy. Yes, every tea has qi of some sort, although I don’t think many will actually be strong enough for you to experience it. In fact, any time a vendor talks too much about qi it is probably a sign that s/he is up to no good, and the tea is really not very good at all, which is why I prefer not to use the word at all – it needlessly adds to the learning curve and there’s a high potential for the Emperor’s New Clothes here.

Yet it is true that beyond a certain point, what distinguishes between a good tea and a great tea is the energy the tea has. Fragrances can be manufactured – they’re mostly the product of the post-plucking processes and can be easily manipulated by the tea processor who’s skillful enough to do the deed. It is much harder to fake energy. The best teas will give you a sensation of a current running through your body, but not in a way that makes you nervous, jittery, or uncomfortable. The 1997 brick I tried recently that made everyone at the table feel jittery was not a good tea in that sense – it was not something I’d consider drinking any time soon, if ever. On the other hand, genuine, good old tree teas tend to provide that energetic sensation in a way that is pleasing and comfortable. It’s hard to describe it, but once you’ve tried it you won’t forget it.

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So with that in mind L brew me some tea. We tried a number of things over the course of two days – one of the produced cakes, some maocha they collected (with him seeing in person the entire process from plucking onward) and also a number of other things. The cake that they produced was, indeed, very bland in the “no fragrance, no taste” sort of way, but it does interestingly enough have some decent energy. He insists on drinking the tea quietly, without comments, which of course helps you focus on the tea in question, but once again, might cause an Emperor’s New Clothes problem.

I think in general this is a good idea – experimentation, even failed ones, are probably good for tea in general. Someone who has a new idea and who wants to produce a tea based on it, and actually having the ability and the skills to do so, should be encouraged to do his best. I still remain a bit skeptical of the end product, but I certainly applaud the general direction in which they’re going. I would also much prefer to drink their bland tea than a newly produced tea using boring old plantation leaves. Now, if someone can figure out how to satisfy all three parts, then you’ve got the perfect tea.

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Not paying the resale premium

May 18, 2012 · 12 Comments

Puerh is different from most teas in a number of ways, but one of the traits that it shares less with tea (other than liu’an) and more with wine is that puerh holds resale value, at least in the compressed form. When you have a cake of puerh, you can resell the tea to someone else quite easily, and if you have held it for a while and the cake is famous, the cake can resell for quite a premium. I was talking to some friends last weekend about tea while we were drinking together at a local teahouse, and they mentioned that they bought some Yellow Labels back in the day (about 10+ years ago) for 500 HKD a piece. That tea is now easily 20k HKD depending on the condition of the cake, so it’s quite a markup over the years. While they may not be able to fetch that kind of price, it is quite safe to say that someone who bought tea twenty or even ten years ago would’ve made a lot of money keeping it.

This is drastically different from most teas, which, upon being sold, holds little value. Sure, you can resell 200g of whatever oolong you bought from some online shop probably for little loss if you grew to dislike the tea or simply want something else. Try doing that with 2kg, or 20kg, however, and you’re in real trouble – it’s no longer feasible, and chances are nobody will take it off your hands without a substantial discount. With puerh, that illiquidity haircut is much lower than that of other teas.

This also means that when you buy a cake of puerh, you’re also paying the premium that comes with the liquidity of the underlying asset – the tea itself. When you spend 15k HKD to buy a cake of Zhenchunya, for example, you know that you can quite easily resell the tea to someone else for pretty much the same price. This is also one of the reasons, I think, why teas from Dayi tend to trade at a premium to other factories. Of course, with Dayi tea we more or less know what we’re getting, and there’s definitely a “trust” factor involved here. However, there is also the case that Dayi teas are among the most liquid of puerh teas on the market today, which therefore commands higher prices. This is why there’s the very strange phenomenon, observed by friends in the mainland who deal tea, where one jian of Dayi tea costs more than 42 loose cakes (Dayi jians are all 6 tongs now) of the exact same thing – the jian is more valuable because 1) the packaging of the whole jian gives it one extra layer of anti-counterfeit measure and 2) the jian is the basic unit of trade for tea traders, whereas once you’ve broken up the jian you have to sell it retail, and there just isn’t all that much demand, retail, for this sort of tea.

So when you buy an aged cake, one of the things you’re paying for is this resale premium. You are, in other words, paying for the ability to sell it at a later date. What if you can strip this value away and not pay for it?

Well, there are ways, one of which is to buy broken up pieces of cakes, which are always substantially cheaper than the whole cake itself. Some of these, when you can find them here anyway, are quite tasty and well worth the value. Another option is to buy cakes that are damaged in some ways so that they are no longer sellable in the same way a whole cake with original wrapper, etc, can be sold. Some of these were used as samples. Others were just damaged. Still others… who knows. For the end user of tea – drinkers like you and me – this is something that matters very little.

One of the cakes I acquired recently is in this vein – cheap (relatively speaking) aged tea because it has no wrapper, lost a decent amount of tea (it’s about 300g instead of 357g) and just generally not very appealing looking. It doesn’t mean it isn’t aged, and it isn’t tasty – it’s just no good as something to be sold to someone else, so the only people who’re going to be willing to buy them are people like me – drinkers.

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You can see this is typical Menghai factory stuff (the neifei is “submarine” i.e. under the surface of the cake) with a layer of finer leaves on the face of the cake, and on the back (and inside) rather big leaves. The tea is not particularly great or anything, but it is superior to many of the loose, broken pieces that you can find, which tend to be a little lower in quality. Also, this being a whole cake, it provides a nice reference point for the age and the type. The seller claims this is about 20 years old or thereabouts. The information is, at best, sketchy. The tea has been through some traditional storage, but that was definitely a while back, and the time spent on the shelf of the seller’s store has made it rather mellow.

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With teas like this, is there any reason to pay full price just to get a wrapper?

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The retaste project 11: 2005(?) Chenguanghe Tang Yiwu brick

May 7, 2012 · 1 Comment

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This is a brick that, I think, I bought in Taiwan while I was there doing work. I seem to remember picking it up along with a few other things, more as a curiosity piece than anything else. Back then Chen Zhitong, the proprietor of Chenguanghe Tang, was just starting to press his own stuff, so I’m not sure if this brick was his own, or if it were one of the “someone pressed it and I named it” sort of deal. I do remember it being relatively cheap, which is why I bought one.

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Unfortunately, there’s a reason the tea is cheap – it’s really, really broken up, as in the leaves are very chopped. Other than the surface, which has a layer of decent looking leaves, everything in between is pretty much chopped leaves of the smallest variety – stuff you might expect in a teabag, but in a brick form. When I used my pick to pry out a piece, it was basically effortless, and the leaves more or less crumble when you pressure the leaves.

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The result is rather disappointing – nasty early brews because of the high surface area, and then weak late brews because the tea has been exhausted. What you see above is the result of the wash – just lots of tiny sediments and fannings. There wasn’t a single whole leaf in there, and most of it is too fine to even make it into big factory cakes. In other words, it was the leftovers pressed into a brick. There’s a reason why my friends generally stay away from bricks unless they know it’s a good one.

Categories: Teas
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The learning curve

April 26, 2012 · 30 Comments

If you are serious about tea, meaning that you are spending time thinking about the teas you’re drinking, learning about their nuances, and doing things like reading this blog, then chances are you have discovered that there’s a pretty steep learning curve to tea drinking in general, and puerh teas in particular. With any kind of tea this is hard enough – the different types of teas that exist, with different locations of origins, processing, and grades. The different ways to brew them, and what water to use with what, and the brewing parameters. There are so many moving parts that to say that you have “mastered” tea in any form is a claim that can serve as Exhibit A of human hubris. There’s always a learning process, and there’s always something you can discover about a tea you’ve already had many times before. This is what makes the hobby fun.

There are, however, ways to speed up the learning process and allow you to delve deeper into the art and science of tea appreciation on various levels. What triggered the writing of this particular post is a recent tea session I had at one of the stores in Hong Kong that sells puerh. Over the course of an afternoon, I drank, with some of my friends, about five or six teas. The youngest of the lot was from 1998, and the oldest was about 30 years old. The fact of the matter is, for tea drinking in general, and puerh in particular, it is important to sample a wide range before you really have a clear idea of what’s out there, and what’s possible given the complexity of teas. The tea aficionado is really building a mental library of teas that s/he can recall and compare against. In so doing, s/he is learning about the different teas and whether something is good, bad, or just different.

Likewise, for aging teas, it is crucial to know what you’re trying to get to before you even know what you’re aging for. I see people talking about building their young puerh collection hoping to age them into something great, except the only aged teas they have had may be some third rate 1990s teas that are, at best, poorly stored, or sometimes even none at all. This is not to poo-poo those who have not had the opportunity to try these things, but if you haven’t had a properly aged tea from a variety of storage conditions and starting points, how would you even know what you’re trying to get to? Is it a “wetter” taste that you’re after, or do you want a dry stored taste? Do you want something sweet, or something smokey? We had a brick from 1997 that was still, even as I drank it with the friends a few days ago, extremely powerful. It was strong, smokey, very active, and got us all tea drunk. It was, in other words, a very potent tea, but even now, 15 years after production, it is still too harsh to drink. Sure, it has great aging potential, but how many 15 years do you have that you can just hold on to these things forever? When new, the tea must have been extremely smokey and also super-strong – to the point where many might give up on it all together. Also, keep in mind that this brick has been aged 15 years in Hong Kong, a pretty hot and humid condition. If it’s aged in, say, Chicago, how long would it take to just get the tea to its current condition as I tried it? More than 15 years, I can guarantee you. Then what?

The same can be said of aged oolongs. Many aged oolongs I’ve seen for sale, both in Asia and online, are really terrible teas that have been roasted to death. They are not so much aged but charcoalized. They’re sweet and nice, sure, but they’re also not what I’d consider a great aged oolong, which should be fragrant, active, and isn’t one dimensional. For example, how much sourness is acceptable, and how much is too much? Sure, individual taste plays a part in this, but there’s also some basis for a universal yardstick. Alas, unless you’ve walked through Taipei and tried dozens of aged oolongs from different stores, ranging from the amazing to the terrible, it is impossible to say with any kind of certainty “this is a great aged oolong”.

What I want to say is that while it may be very tempting to just drink lots and lots of new teas and read other people’s blogs, books, and magazines to learn about tea, there’s nothing that will prepare you for a lot of these deeper questions except personal experience. One could theorize all they want with regards to aging potential, durability, etc, but a crucial question is – what will it age into? Is it going to be soft and sweet? Harsh and smokey? Fragrant and floral, or woody and deep? There are many possible endpoints (unknown) in addition to the infinite starting points (known). Unless you have tried many potential endpoints, how, if at all, can you determine which start points link up with which endpoints?

So the life of the foreign tea aficionado is made considerably harder by the lack of availability of good, aged teas, which are distinctly absent from the market. For example, how many versions of Menghai factory (not some other imitation) 7542s from 2000 or before are there on the market? In what condition? How about 8582? Or 7582, of which I bought one cake while shopping, and which one of my friends said “this will be an interesting reference piece”? Or how about Xiaguan’s 8653 from the 80s and 90s? Here you can find them ranging from dry to very wet, with different batches (which all taste somewhat different, if you pay attention) and with varying quality. I certainly haven’t figured it all out – not by a long stretch, but I feel at least I am lucky to have access to things like this, through stores that sell them and friends who have them. It greatly flattens the learning curve of figuring out aging of tea and what not. When your access to old tea is limited to second string products and, in many cases, discards from the Asian market, what does that mean for your learning of how to age teas?

Alas, I don’t think there’s much to be done in the way of solving this problem. This post is, unfortunately, a negative one – I don’t have any solutions to propose, other than to try more tea, except that the availability of old teas is such that this is not really possible as an option. I can count on one hand the outfits that offer aged teas for sale, and of these, I think only one or two are actually worth bothering with. So, until then, I’d advise travel to parts of Asia with good, aged teas, as a temporary remedy. There really aren’t many other ways, unfortunately.

Categories: Teas
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2011 Fall Tea Urchin Gaoshanzhai

April 19, 2012 · 20 Comments

I recently had a sample exchange with Eugene, writer of the Tea Urchin blog and owner of the webstore of the same name that sells young puerh, many of which with maocha he sourced himself. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the store was already open for business, so I asked if I could buy some samples. We ended up trading tea instead, with me supplying some teas from my own stash, and him giving me a pretty generous haul of tea from his various offerings. I think I made it out of this exchange in the positive.

The range of teas that are new and available is vast. They can go from the most run of the mill mass produced teas, to high end, hand made, old tree teas. There are, of course, a great chasm between the two, and unfortunately many of the old tree teas actually properly belong to things that are in between, or even wholly on the mass produced side. I have heard many stories of tea farmers selling adulterated maocha to people, mixed with different kinds of teas, and unless you really know what you’re doing, very often such mixed teas or even more inferior ones will make it into erstwhile old tree cakes. Clearly, the offerings from the Tea Urchin, at least those of his own pressing, are at the high end of the market.

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Although this is the first time I’m writing about Tea Urchin’s tea, this isn’t the first sample I had. I already drank four or five of them, and for this 2011 Fall Gaoshanzhai, I tried it twice. I’m not myself a great fan of fall teas these days, and will generally try to avoid them if there’s something available from the spring. In this case, however, a sample can’t hurt.

The leaves are certainly good looking, and they look robust and thick, which is a good sign.

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The tea itself also brews a nice, thick liquor, with a good aroma that is straight out of Gaoshanzhai, which is probably my favourite Yiwu village in terms of aroma, even though Guafengzhai teas are often better overall. The tea, I think, really is quite good. The first time I used lots of leaves, the second time less, and I think in some ways, using a little less leaves does bring out the higher notes more, although for the physical sensations of drinking the tea, a heavier dose is often preferred.

Prices for old tree teas have been going one way only – up. This year the prices of maocha has gone up yet again, partly due to a drought in Yunnan, supposedly, but mostly I think has to do with the insatiable demand for such teas. Another problem, of course, is that many so called old tree teas are anything but, sometimes with a small mixture of lesser leaves, sometimes it is an outright fraud. I think in this case, the tea does show what I understand to be old tree teas. Prices here, of course, also reflect that. Unfortunately, you can’t really find decent Yiwu teas at anything less than about $80 USD a cake these days.

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Now that samples are easily available from his website, I think it’s worth your time to try it out. $7 for 30g is not terrible, and you can do a lot worse than this if you’re looking for a young puerh.

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2006 Jasmine sheng minituo

April 18, 2012 · 1 Comment

No, the title is not a joke.

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I got this bag of minituo from a friend back in 2006 while I was doing research in Beijing. The friend is not a tea drinking friend, but I appreciated the gift nonetheless. Having said that, I never actually worked up the courage to try it. I remember when I first got it, I could smell the jasmine pretty clearly from the bag, even though it was pretty well sealed. The minituos then sat in the bag for six years, and was recently retrieved from my storage because Lew of Babelcarp wanted to try it. Well, why not? You gotta try everything once. I figured I’ll give it a go too.

I grandpa’ed the tea, since I was expecting the worst – a cross, perhaps, between a nasty stale green tea and an awful artificial jasmine. I didn’t really want to risk it by going heavy with a gaiwan, and this thing certainly isn’t going to see the inside of any of my teapots. The thing took a little while to loosen up, and once loose, it mostly stayed at the bottom of the cup, with a few stems that look like they came from a Japanese sencha floating upward. The brew was darkish, and surprisingly drinkable, probably because I only used one minituo for a large mug. More, and I think the tea might have been nasty. There is a jasmine scent, but it’s not too strong and entirely bearable.

Not surprisingly, contrary to its claims of using top quality tea, the leaves were chopped beyond belief.

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I think I also spy some grain husks and other random objects in there that isn’t quite properly tea. Oh well, who knows what it is. It was drinkable enough that I didn’t immediately want to throw the rest of the bag away. Maybe I’ll try it again in six years.

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The best tea-at-work companion

April 3, 2012 · 11 Comments

I think it is safe to say that, us being all tea addicts of some sort or another, that we have to drink tea every day. The result of no tea can be quite painful, literally, and going anything longer than maybe 36 hours without tea is not something I’d advice you do. Since I get home quite late on most days, drinking tea at home after I get back is not normally a practical solution. Since I don’t get up early enough either, the only solution to proper caffeine update during the day is to drink at work.

I know lots of you drink tea at work. Some bring in what looks like a full gongfu set, with gaiwan, water source, a tray, and some cups. Others bring in modified sets with a few elements missing, but good enough for drinking. Or, you can just grandpa it.

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This is what passes for work setup for me. It actually works surprisingly well, and as long as you pick the right teas, it can yield decent results. In my cup right now is a lightly roasted Taiwanese oolong. Yesterday it was some aged tieguanyin that performs remarkably well in grandpa style. One thing I’ve been doing lately is that I drink the entirety of the cup when I am drinking the aged tieguanyin, and then right before I leave for work, I fill it up with boiling hot water and close the lid. The next day when I come in, the tea’s brewed again, with a nice brown colour, and a pleasant, sweet taste that is very typical of nice, aged oolongs. You should all try it sometime, even after a long gongfu session. It’s a great way to finish a tea.

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2003 Menghai 7542

March 20, 2012 · 12 Comments

I went tea shopping this past Saturday, hitting a few of the old, venerable teashops in the Sheung Wan area of Hong Kong. Sheung Wan used to be where the Chinese section of the city began, and to this day it is an area that is best known for Chinese medicine and dried seafood stores. Among them are a number of older teashops that have survived the test of time, some having been around for decades or more. They are, in some ways, the best places to shop for tea in Hong Kong, because it is here that you can find real, Hong Kong style tea. Visitors to the city may have a little more trouble navigating these places, but they are, by and large, friendly establishments and you’ll find things here that are not available anywhere else – whether it be Taiwan, China, or overseas.

One of the teas I picked up is a 2003 Menghai 7542. It was cheap, and at least at the tasting I had at the store, it was good. I thought I’ll give it a spin and bought one.

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The tea is traditionally stored, but only lightly.  There’s no obvious evidence of mold or anything along those lines, and smells only faintly of the storage. You can see the surface of the tea is changing colour to a greyish brown. It looks a few years older than the Yiwu girl puerh, for example, but it probably should anyway. The tea, once I chipped off a chunk, is very choppy. Early 2000s Menghai (or any factory, for that matter) tend to have fairly uneven quality control, and some cakes can be quite high in chopped up leaves. This is one of them.

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I christened my newly acquired shuiping with this tea, and after two infusions, you see this darkish brown liquor that is the hallmark of a traditionally stored tea. The tea is still somewhat bitter, but is already exhibiting sweetness and a pleasant taste. It is slightly sour, as they often are at this sort of age, but I think it has started to round that corner and is yielding more pleasant tastes than not. Compared with the traditionally stored Lao Tongzhi, for example, this tea is not only better stored, but also better, period.

The tea was sold with no wrapper. Their sample cake had the regular CNNP wrapper, and I am wondering if I can get more wrappers from them for the purpose of storing these things. Otherwise, it can become a bit of a pain, because I don’t want my tea wrapped in plastic (even though it’s loosely, non-airtight at all plastic).

PhotobucketAs you can see, the tea is all chop. It didn’t stop the tea from brewing many infusions without losing too much power, however, so it bodes well for the future. It’s time to stock up again, if I can make more space for it.

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