I’ve been delinquent in updating this series. Here goes.
This is a pot marked “Gemingchang”, a producer of Yixing pots in the proverbial “Late Qing, early Republic” period. There are lots of these on the market, many of them fake. I’ve got maybe half a dozen of these, and I think after a while you notice a few things. This shape here is a pretty classic one for this mark. The cut on the spout is usually sharp. Really nice, practical pots. 100ml
Categories: Teas
Tagged: teaware, yixing, Yixing Inventory
The tea we drank for this past Sunday’s livestream was this tuo. On his site, Glen from Crimson Lotus Tea lists it as a 2003, because that’s what he’s been told the tea is from. The reason I have it here as 2005 is because of what’s on the wrapper – the wrapper claims this is for commemoration of the establishment of the Changtai Tea Group, which happened in April of 2005. Given that wording, the pressing of this tea cannot have happened before that, thus the year. It’s entirely possible that the tea is made with leaves that were a couple years old by then – nobody knows, and frankly, once you go past ten years or so, plus one or two years doesn’t matter.
What does matter, however, is the storage condition. One thing that I worry about when I buy aged teas from China these days is where it was stored – and sellers don’t always tell you that. If you can taste it in person, then it’s easy – just judge it by the tea. If you can’t though, then it’s a lottery. I bought a cake from 2007 recently that has been stored in Kunming the entire time, or at least it tastes like it – it’s like a cryogenically frozen tea, barely aged. It has some Kunming aged notes – leaves are a bit darker, tea brews a little more orange, but, it’s still tasting very young.
That’s not the case for this tea. I said on the stream it’s decent – and I might have undersold it a bit. I drank it once before the stream and once during. My initial impression, without knowing anything about the tea (I didn’t even look at the website) was that it tastes like something that’s been dry stored in Guangdong, with an ever so light hint of wetness. It seems like the story is that it was stored in Xishuangbanna – entirely possible, as I’ve had some pretty good teas that’s stored in Banna before that are similar. It has that slightly musty aged smell, but that’s not too strong. The tea, despite it being from Changtai, is pretty good.
The thing about Changtai is that since 2005 when they became Changtai group, the quality of their teas took a nosedive. They built their reputation on the early Yichang Hao stuff from 1999-2004. There was a fair amount of hype around the tea, whipped up by a few individuals online. However, the tea itself really was decent. It wasn’t worth the exorbitant, post-hype price, but it was decent tea. There’s a reason Changtai Tea Shop became Changtai Group.
Once that happened, however, something changed. I think it has to do with them ramping up production volume, but whatever happened, a lot of the teas they pressed just weren’t that great, and their top of the line stuff, the Yichang Hao pressing, was expensive. In some ways, I think that diluted the brand a lot – most people couldn’t afford their top flight stuff, so bought the lower grade ones. Those, however, was very average (or worse), and so people (like me) swore off Changtai tea as a result. They also did some private pressing for individuals – Wistaria’s 2007 Hongyin, for example, was processed by Changtai with materials that were sourced through them. But that does not reflect on their standard pressings.
These days when I do buy teas I mostly buy ones that are semi-aged – 10 years or so old is a normal thing to buy, instead of something brand new. At that point, you basically know what you’re going to get. When you buy a new tea, there’s a fair amount of risk involved – some teas never aged into anything decent. When you buy something that’s aged 10+ years, if the storage has been good, then the tea would be pretty nice to drink.
This tuo, at this moment, is pretty good. With his rather short Chinese new year 15% off sale (ends in a day or so I believe), you can buy a 100g tuo with at least 15 years of decent aging for $31.5. I don’t browse much in the Western-facing part of the tea market these days, but I believe this is a very good value for what you’re getting. If you don’t have much aged tea in your stash, this is a very good candidate for some decent aged tea.
Full Disclosure: I got one tuo for free. I probably won’t be buying more of these, but that’s largely because I am a hoarder who has more tea than I can drink in a few decades. I didn’t promise him I’ll say nice things about it.
Categories: Teas
Tagged: aged puerh
Someone on the tea discord pointed out to me that my blog is now 15 years old. I started it on a whim sitting in the Quincy dining hall, waiting for some meeting. For the first 5 or 6 years of this blog, it was basically a diary of what tea I drank. Back then, everything was pretty new – at least new enough. There were a number of blogs out there each chattering in their own way. Most of them have fallen silent, while there are a handful of (relative) newcomers such as Cwyn’s blog or Wilson’s. Blogs, as we all know, has moved on.
After this blog moved to my own domain, I started writing less of the “daily tea” type of post and started writing more topical ones. I had felt that with enough time under my belt, I could start to say something interesting about things I’ve learned through the years of tea drinking. I don’t think very many people ever look at the old “daily tea” type of posts, but I know people still refer to some of the longer form pieces I’ve done since then.
Then of course, between work, kids, and a general lack of things that I feel I haven’t covered, posts trickled to a crawl. My main tea stash doesn’t live with me at the moment, so trying things from my own storage is difficult. I should, however, really work on cataloging my pots, even if just for my own use. I hope to work on that this year.
Online activity has now turned to other social media sites. There’s a vast array of content on Instagram, although I’ve always found that medium to be too superficial, more suited for marketing than anything else. Joining the tea discord recently (thanks to an invite from a kind soul) has rekindled that feeling that I talked about in 2007 of a “Constant Tea Meeting,” where people are, now in real time, sharing their tea escapades. Reading their comments, I feel old. On Sunday my time (Saturday night 9PM EST) I’ll be doing a livestream with Crimson Lotus Tea on their Youtube channel. I don’t know what we’ll talk about, but I’m guessing it might have to do with tea.
No, this isn’t the “I’m going to shut this down” post, even though every time I write something like this it sounds like that’s where it’s headed. If anything, seeing people refer to my random thoughts from the distant past tells me I should keep this up. I should probably spend a little more time to fix this place up and make sure I have a backup in case anything happens. In any case, maybe I’ll see a few of you on Youtube in a couple days.
Categories: Teas
I was just randomly browsing through Taobao the other day, looking to maybe buy a couple cakes of those mid-2000s Dayi that I finished up during the pandemic. Except, they’re all gone, and the seller that I bought them from no longer sells any Dayi of any kind. This was unusual, since he used to have quite a few of them and it’s unlikely he’s sold out of all. Now his store only sells stuff like Nanqiao… and nobody wants to buy mid-2000s Nanqiao when Dayi is only a little more expensive.
So I DMed the guy and asked what was happening. Turns out, recently something was going on and Dayi basically managed to get Taobao to kick off all these small time tea sellers selling Dayi. Now when you search for Dayi, the only people who sell them on Taobao are the official stores, and at prices that are way higher than what was possible only a few months ago. If you look for, say, 7542 from 10+ years ago, you get less than 20 hits. Previously, you’ll get literally endless pages of the stuff. Granted, there was a fair amount of fakes in there, and you have to be careful, but there were also lots of sellers selling real tea among them. Now they’re all gone. I can still get the tea from the guy I DMed if I want, but that’s not really something you can do if you don’t know Chinese or if you don’t already know who has the good stuff.
This means that if you are bargain hunting on Taobao, that door has just closed. It’s possible to find older teas from small producers that could be good, but those are a real lottery ticket and it’s very risky to do so. If you just want some cheap Dayi, chances are finding a vendor who is located in Guangdong and has physical access to a place like Fangcun is now the better bet.
This is a troubling development. It’s probably done in the name of protecting the brand and to kick out counterfeit goods, but also ends up stopping people from undercutting officially set prices. So, just know that if you now go on Taobao to check prices… what you see is not what really happens in the market place. A lot of these teas from the big brands are being traded at a level lower than what you see on retail there. You can go to www.donghetea.com or something like that to check wholesale prices, but that still doesn’t give you access to the retail market unless you already know someone who’s there.
Categories: Teas
Tagged: shopping, young puerh
Since there’s no travel or anything of that sort in the pandemic, tea buying has to go online (well for those of us who used to do it in person anyway). One thing I’ve done recently is try about a dozen different 7542s from 10+ years ago. These are all from about 2006-2010. The advantage of this is that none of them are too expensive – the most expensive one is still under 1000 RMB, which, for a 10+ year tea, isn’t so bad. The cheapest is around 300 RMB, which at $50 is a lot cheaper than even a lot of newer teas. All of them I bought off Taobao. Retail is usually not much above wholesale prices, which you can get a rough check on with sites like Donghe. They even have an English version of the site.
The prices are reasonable because there just aren’t a lot of buyers. Some years ago I was musing about how in ten or twelve years, there will be a lot of people sitting on a lot of aged tea and they are going to let them go at prices that weren’t too far away from what they paid. The supply is too large and demand relatively small for these teas to rise astronomically like the stuff from the 1990s. If you are an “investor” and looking for capital gains on your tea, you buy those special production stuff from Dayi instead of 7542s. If you’re a drinker, you’re probably not storing 7542s en masse. There were a lot of these made, and the volume drinkers (restaurants, etc) aren’t using Dayi anymore in their teapots.
Storage for these tea is paramount – if you go on Taobao and you buy the same production from Kunming, the taste is a lot younger than some guy selling it from Guangdong. Location is no guarantee – a seller in Guangdong could’ve bought his lot from some guy in Kunming, or Beijing, or whatever. So finding the right guy with the right storage at the right price takes a bit of guesswork and luck, but once you find it, it’s worth it.
What’s the result of my tastings? Well… they’re all pretty decent. 7542s, from batch to batch, could have fairly obvious differences, although these differences are more obvious the more experienced you are drinking pu. One of the teas I bought, from 2007, has a distinct fruity taste up front, while another one costing double does not, but is instead stronger and lasts longer in the cup. Is the more expensive one a better tea? Yes, certainly. Is it worth the extra price? That’s much harder to say. It probably depends on how much those $50 is worth to you.
There is also the risk of buying fakes, that’s unavoidable when dealing with Dayi or any of the major factories. You could try to get yourself a black light and play with the labels, you could do comparisons, but at the end of the day, once you’ve had enough 7542s, you can tell the basic 7542 taste almost immediately – fakers don’t normally use decent tea, otherwise they can’t make money (they’re better off selling it as “ancient tree single village tea” or some such). There was a point in time when fake teas could be as good as real ones, but not in the 2006-2010 timeframe (or later).
Categories: Teas
Tagged: aged puerh, shopping
The world’s in a lockdown. Those of us in Hong Kong have gone through this phase already – the whole panic buying of food and toilet paper, the closing of schools (which are still closed, at least physically, and probably for the whole semester), and the avoidance of social contacts. It does work – I think people I know here generally feel fairly safe from the virus, as cases are known and isolated very quickly, and close contacts have to go through enforced quarantine, which are difficult but perhaps necessary.
I’m teaching my history of tea course this semester for the first time here in Hong Kong (I’ve taught it once in the US some years ago). It’s a real bummer – not being able to share, physically, what I’m doing when we do live demonstrations. That portion of the class has instead turned into a kind of cooking show where the students get to watch me muck around with tea and teaware, helped by my intrepid teaching assistant as a makeshift cameraman and interlocutor. Granted, there are silver linings too – there always are. Because I was doing this at home, I could actually light a real fire using charcoal instead of having to use a heat plate (which is already probably illegal to use in a classroom). Students get to see just how much hassle you have to go through to get a fire going to boil some water for tea. There’s a reason people had servants do this kind of work.
In the meantime, my daily tea consumption is mostly grandpa style brews of various aged oolongs, and the occasional puerh. As I was making myself the cup of tea yesterday, I realized that the mug I use is almost 30 years ago – time flies. In that way, time will fly for this virus too, and life will, eventually, get back to normal. In the meantime, stay safe and healthy everyone, and enjoy the little things while practicing social distancing.
Categories: Teas
I’ve never been to Hadong, Korea’s tea producing area. A couple months ago I got to go with a group of researchers as part of our collaborative research project, Making Modernity in East Asia. Our little sub-group specifically looks at food technologies and how tranformations of these basic elements of food production in the 19th and 20th centuries changed East Asia – as well as sharing commonalities through the borders of East Asian countries in traditional food-making techniques.
Tea of course is one of these elements. Going to Hadong was, well, interesting. The area is situated between Jeolla and Gyeongsangnam-do, where there were a fair number of Buddhist temples and a more mountainous area. Driving from Busan it’s a few hours, and once you arrive there you really see the sort of landscape that is typical of Korea – it’s hard to describe, but seeing the way the hills are silhouetted against the landscape, traditional Korean landscape paintings make more sense.
We visited a small local farm. The first thing interesting is that the trees are tiny – I’m used to seeing tea trees in places like Taiwan, Southern China, and Japan, and they’re all a lot bigger and taller. Perhaps this is a regional preference, but I also suspect it has to do with the climate – it’s a lot colder in Korea and plants would grow slower as a result. This is sort of like how lower elevation teas can produce more compared to higher elevation ones.
The really interesting thing about the farmer is that for his roller, he’s using Taiwanese machinery from a factory in Sanxia. Sanxia, of course, makes green tea. This makes perfect sense, really.
But the kill green is done on a wok custom made to order by the farmer
The wok is ceramic. It’s heavy, and it’s deep. You can smell a little of the tea residue while you’re near it. The farmer claims that he tried a few different shapes and settled on this one.
We, of course, had some tea. Korean green tea… well green teas in general are not really my thing. I started out drinking dragonwells back in the day but nowadays I almost never touch greens, mostly because it’s something that physically doesn’t agree with me all that well, and I also don’t find interesting. In Korea, when they brew greens, they do it in a style that is somewhat similar to Japanese brewing – low temperature, a few infusions, but the taste, because of its wok kill green process, is closer to Chinese style greens. The farmer may also have been brewing on the lighter side, but for someone like me it doesn’t hold a lot of interest.
The cardinal sin of Korean greens, though, is the cost. The teas are fine as they are – and if you’re interested in greens they can be pretty decent. However, the good stuff is quite expensive. On a per gram basis, Korean greens are really high priced, at least among all the ones I’ve encountered before. I think this is partly owing to the relative small scale of the farmers and the limited amount of production in the local area. There is also the typical preference for local tea, so they’re willing to pay more for domestically produced teas than others. What you end up having is teas that are too high priced for foreigners to consume, relatively speaking. There are, I believe, some larger scale farms that sell cheaper varieties, but those aren’t all that interesting either.
Let’s face it, a Darjeeling teabag from Dammann Freres is never going to be that great, nor is it remotely worth the price of admission. I had some Dongding in my backpack that I would infinitely prefer to drink instead, but that would be rude. Their water wasn’t really hot enough anyway, and adding Taiwanese oolong to water (instead of pouring water over the leaves) is a loser’s bet. The overly aggressive pigeons trying to eat my apple pie were also not particularly welcomed, with me having to fend off their attacks while attempting this photo three times. I gave up trying to take a better one, lest I lose my pie to the indomitable birds.
I still thoroughly enjoyed my tea. The pie was good. The tea was serviceable. The view was excellent. The weather was almost perfect, if only it were a little bit warmer. I won’t remember this tea session for the tea itself, but it’s hard to beat St. Mark’s Square for location. The where and when of a tea session is often just as important as the what.
I’m in town for a colloquium on tea, which was organized by the Ca’Foscari University and the Confucius Institute here in Venice. As an academic with a research project in tea, it is rare to actually meet others similarly interested, more so as almost everyone was coming from a different disciplinary angle. Maybe I should’ve posted about this before the colloquium actually happened. But then, if you are from the area you might’ve already heard about it, and not rely on some long dormant blog to tell you. If you’re passing through like me, don’t waste your time in this gem of a city by spending a day listening to some academics talk about tea. Besides, the Italian Association of Tea Culture’s YouTube channel has posted the 2016 and 2017 renditions of their colloquiums for all to see. So maybe if you wait two years the 2019 one will be there too.
It’s been quiet around here. Like I’ve said before – I don’t have much that’s interesting to say these days, other than random snippets from my research. Drinking has been… pedestrian. Lots of teas that are just sort of daily drinkers, and nothing too special. Granted, I say this while sipping my 30+ years old baozhong as a daily drinker… but what’s there to say? It’s a bit sweet, a bit tart, tastes like old baozhong, and getting harder to find than ever.
However, recently I went back to my hometown and received a large amount of tea there as a gift. It was a nice gift, but it’s not tea that I drink – it’s green tea from Yushan, the local mountain in the city. It’s a green tea, although they call it Yushan white tea, supposedly because the teas are on the whitish side. I had some while I was there – it’s nice, sweet, and typical greens from the region.
But, as I said, I got too much of it. I only need a can, maybe, for my own consumption needs. So here they are, I have 8 of these to give away. If you want one, email me at mail at marshaln.com. I’ll pay for shipping.
EDIT: Aaaaand they’re all gone. Thanks for the emails folks.
This shot is taken right where we got off our car as we entered the scenic park area – normal cars are not allowed to go in there now, you must take a bus. The only cars allowed in are tea producers’ with the right permit. These are guys whose job it is to haul the raw, freshly plucked leaves from the tea trees inside the scenic area to the waiting cars/trucks, and then hauling them to the factories for processing. Each of the load are 75-100kg. They’re heavy.
These are migrant labourers, mostly from neighbouring Jiangxi province, who get paid something like 200-300 RMB a day to do this work. Sure, the daily wage is fairly high, but it’s back breaking, and it’s only good for a few weeks of the year. For a good amount of the distance they have to travel, it’s on the paved walkway that you see – this was built in the 80s to accommodate tourists coming here. But then, at some point, you have to take a fork and up some dirt path along sometimes fairly steep hill, and then imagine coming back down from the hill with 100kg of tea on your back, in raining condition so that the paths are super slippery. This is not easy work at all.
The path was filled with people doing tea work that day. The teas in this area are all zhengyan, so they’re expensive and worth picking by hand. This means a lot of people are needed, and since everything is done by foot and the distance can be quite long, you need a lot of people very quickly to get things done. There are also some tourists who are just walking through the path, taking in the scenery.
Tea trees are planted all along the path wherever there’s space. Until the 90s, there were a lot of villages inside this park area. People who planted (and still own) these tea trees were all villagers here. Back then, the primary processing areas – basically a shed and a few simple tools – were all very close to the tea planting area. Then the government moved all the villages out of the scenic area for protection of the area itself, because people pollute. So nowadays, the leaves have to be carried way out to get any processing done.
We took a path up a hill towards a plot of trees owned by a tea producer friend. When you walk into this narrow valley, it looks a bit like this
The valley is quite long and narrow, with steep hills on both sides. There’s only one way in and out. There’s a little stream of water flowing in the middle. It’s really ideal ground for tea plants – damp, cool, lots of shade, etc. It’s no wonder the tea here is good. Hiking up the hill to get here takes a bit of effort if you’re not in good shape, and I can’t imagine doing it with 100kg on my back. Many of the trees here are decades old. Prices, of course, match the quality.
One thing that surprised me is that they don’t really care if it’s raining – they’ll harvest anyway. If it’s very early in the season, and the rain is projected to stop very soon after, sometimes they’ll wait, but more often than not they’ll just harvest away – because there’s a lot of tea to harvest, and there just isn’t enough manpower and time to do it all at once. If you wait too long, the leaves get old and then it’s valueless. Since they only harvest once a year, that’s a lot of lost income if you let the leaves go. So, harvest they must, even if the processing is tougher and quality perhaps less than optimal.
We entered the park around 1:30, and didn’t leave till close to 6pm when the sun was setting. All the workers were finishing up as well, waiting for trucks to pick them up to go back, only to come back early the next morning to start again. Even then, I saw a couple workers taking photos of the scenery around them – even though it’s back breaking work, the natural beauty here is impressive and perhaps makes the work just a little more pleasant.
Categories: Teas
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