A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

Bad tea

September 29, 2010 · 3 Comments

Drinking bad teas is a very, very unsatisfying experience.  Now there are a few different ways of “bad” that I can think of.

1) Plain bad — it’s insipid, boring, bland, just not very good tea

2) Badly processed/stored — usually with this kind of thing you can pinpoint something wrong with it, either in the processing or the storage, or both.  Poorly stored puerh (too dry or too wet) can fall into this category.  Teas that are made with wrong or bad processing methods can also fall into this category.

3) Spoiled — stuff is growing, or green tea has turned yellow.  Things like that

4) Bad value — this is usually a tea that is on the margins, but the price did it in.  An ok tea at $10/lb might be perfectly fine, but if it’s $100/lb, or, for example, a lao chatou selling for an egregious $150CDN, then it can be downright criminal.

Usually with 3, you can spot it without drinking it.  Even 2 is sometimes obvious.  1 is harder to tell — the tea can often look quite ok, but a few cups in, I would want to bail on the tea.  I want to stop, and start again with something I know is good, something I like, something that will make me feel like it’s worthwhile to drink.  Most of the time, bad tea is not a problem that I have, but sometimes when I sample, it happens.  Today’s one of those days, and the tea, unfortunately, falls into the 1 category.

I tried the YSLLC 2010 Yiwu.  Now, knowing the price of good raw materials from Yiwu this year, I know this price of $16 for a cake is really in the “too good to be real” category.  But then, since YSLLC probably cuts out quite a few middlemen, I figured it’s worth giving it a shot.

Unlike the Gedeng, which is fine, the Yiwu is not anything I’d recognize as Yiwu at all.  The tea has signs of poor processing, but also doesn’t seem to be from the Yiwu region — it certainly doesn’t taste like anything I’d recognize from Mahei, or at least anything decent coming from Mahei.  What I find is a rather odd tasting tea with some strange flavours, and a fair amount of smoke.  Not impressed.

Then again, I do, sometimes, change my mind, so might give this another go some other time, to see if my initial impressions are right.  But as it is, there are better bets than this tea.

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Yunnan Sourcing Gedeng 2010

September 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought a bunch of samples from YSLLC recently, with the intention of trying out some of the lesser known cakes, some of which are of the YSLLC label.  The first I tried among these is the Gedeng, which is one of the six famous tea mountains in Yunnan, but one which has almost no tea trees left because they were decimated over the years (mostly growing rubber trees now).  Gedeng, like some other mountains (such as Youle) have generally small leaf tress.  This is in contrast with Yiwu and Manzhuan, for example, which have large leaf trees.  The teas behave somewhat differently because of that.

Initial impressions of this tea is that it’s quite decent.  It’s got some strength, but not overly so, and lasts a while.  It seems to be processed decently, and the price is not terrible.  However, I find myself not used to drinking fresh puerh anymore.  I much prefer the taste of something a little older, preferably stored in somewhere desirable.

Tomorrow maybe I’ll give the Yiwu a spin.

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The value of samples

September 21, 2010 · 2 Comments

I just got a shipment from Yunnan Sourcing, full of samples and a cake.  I remember a long time ago, I advocated that a newcomer to puerh should sample lots — it’ll eventually get you to where you want to go, wherever that may be.  I think I still stand by that, with a caveat – even after you drink lots of samples, you may or may not know more about teas.  You really have to think about what you’re drinking to learn something from them.  Sampling, I think, is useful for two purposes:

1) To determine whether or buy something or not.  This one’s pretty obvious.  It is also always useful.

2) To broaden your sense of taste.  This is why I buy most of my samples.

A lot of the samples I bought this time are from YSLLC itself — the cakes that Scott pressed in the past two or three years of various mountains.  First of all, I’ve never tried any of his pressing, so I’m curious to see what they are like.  I also bought a cake of Bulang from a no-name factory (in fact, the paper is white).  I find that these are often more interesting than big factory stuff.  When I get a cake of Shuangjiang Mengku Ronshi tea, for example, or a cake from Menghai factory, you more or less have an idea what it’s going to be like, how it’s going to be processed, and roughly how it’s going to go down.  There are usually very few surprises, and what surprises there are, they are often because the tea was stored strangely, or fake.  With the smaller factory stuff, however, that is not true.  You often get a lot of teas that are pretty strange, or interestingly processed.  They could be good or they could be bad, but they are almost always a learning experience.

So for today’s tea, which is the said Bulang, I brewed it in my usual pot.  I find it to be quite green, still, even though it’s 2006.  I’m sure Kunming storage has something to do with that.  It does have a few years in that the taste is starting to turn, ever so slightly, but it is a long way from mature.  I can guess that it was, when made, quite a green affair, and pretty bitter.  What is really interesting for me though, is that it is very different from what I normally drink these days.  The first taste of the tea brought me back to when I was in Beijing in 2006 and tasting my way through hundreds of cakes.  I noticed that these days, my standard fare is usually something pre 2007, or aged, or aged oolong, or wuyi.  There just isn’t room for some of these younger drain cleaners.  I should probably make a little room for them and to evaluate how the newer crops of tea are doing.

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What it is…..

September 14, 2010 · 2 Comments

is the Mengku Yuanyexiang (YYX), thick paper, I believe.  A friend of mine gave me half a cake, which by today’s price is probably worth a few million.   YYX leaves on the left, cheap, cheap Chinatown cooked puerh on the right.

The reason I thought it was interesting was because within that tea, you can taste, very distinctly, the wet storage that went on.  It has that musty smell and taste that’s only attainable through that kind of storage.  Some people hate it, but others think that true puerh should only taste like that.

The difference between it and the thin paper, supposedly dry stored (in actuality less-wet stored), is not all that great.  I find the thin paper, which I tried multiple times and I own a few of, to be harsher.  It’s not the best tea — it’s merely good.

The problem with this kind of tea is that it’s very much a “brand name” tea.  It’s famous because of various types of promotional things that have been done to it — magazines, word of mouth, etc.  Hou De sold out both pretty much the instant he put them up.  It’s really quite amazing.  The fact is though that teas like this are not that great — you can probably find, after some searching, some tea on taobao that costs only a fraction but taste just as good.

However, what’s missing is the “celebrity” factor.  When you drink the YYX you know it’s good — because so and so expert said so.  When you drink this other stuff that costs only a fraction, you don’t know that it’s good…. because, well, nobody told you that.  What’s in the price is that stamp of approval.  As we all know, such stamps of approval tend to be abused, because there’s real money to be made there.

That’s why I normally don’t go for teas like this, and only drink things that I myself find pleasing.  I also tend not to talk about them all that much, male urine aside.  I know what I like, which may not be what you like.  What’s important is developing your own sense of what you find to be good taste, rather than to follow what other teach you to be great.

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What tea is this?

September 12, 2010 · 6 Comments

What’s in this cup?

Hint: Something purchasable at one point but is no longer available.

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Jiangcheng “1997” puerh

September 7, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been buying some random teas on Taobao, just to try them out, hopefully hitting a home run.  Sometimes, they’re base hits.  Other times, they’re strikeouts.  This one’s probably a bunt.

I haven’t been posting many pictures, because my schedule usually means I drink tea late in the afternoon.  Living in this part of the world, it means it’s already quite dark outside.  Coupled with an older house that has tiny windows facing anything but west (rather, the west is blocked by a mass of trees) my house is exceptionally dark.  Therefore, it’s been hard taking pictures, and what you see in pictures tend to be somewhat doctored.

This thing is really a bit of a gamble.  Will of teadrunk and I decided to buy one cake each and to test it out, since he’s tried a similar cake that turned out to be ok.  I’ve seen this one around enough times to want to give it a shot.  The cake itself, as you may be able to discern from the pictures, is wet stored, although not terribly so.  There’s that telltale smell, and the slight white frosting.  I don’t think it’s anywhere near the 1997 age claimed by the seller — 2003/4, maybe.

The tea, I think, is quite drinkable.  It has some off flavours, owing to its storage condition, but those get washed away in the first few infusions.  What you have left is a slightly wet stored, 7 years old puerh that is slightly acidic and has some bite.  What the problem is, and it is a problem, is that it is not supposed to be that way — it should be a decent, 13 years old tea, which it manifestly is not.  If I want something of this kind of age and taste, I have far better options, not least the male urine cake.  Why buy this, which is more expensive, when there are better teas?

So, thumbs down on the price/quality ratio.  Boo.

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Incense and tea

August 28, 2010 · 7 Comments

Some people like burning incense while drinking tea.  I must say I’m not a fan, although aesthetically it can be a nice thing to see/have.  Some would argue that incense makes the room more pleasant and calming, and that a certain amount of nice, understated aroma is great for dispelling any kind of stress that one may have from the vagaries of modern life.  The picture above is a line of just-finished agarwood.  It was, certainly, very nice to have a little aroma in the room, but at the same time, it means that it interfered with the proceedings of drinking and tasting tea.  Moreover, in a case where the incense is so prominently displayed, it actually got in the way of the tea preparation.  Our host was more concerned with not breaking the incense than in pouring a good cup.  The tea suffered.

This brings me to a larger point, which is that oftentimes we put the emphasis on the wrong things when making tea.  Teaware, preparation procedures, setting, temperature….. all these things can get in the way of making tea.  I believe human attention is finite, and what is spent on one thing must be taken away from something else.  Someone who is spending a lot of time watching the clock to make sure the infusion is exactly 20 seconds is inevitably taking something away from some other part of the tea preparation process.  Someone who is too preoccupied with the beautification of the pot with a brush is probably not paying enough attention to the tea inside the pot.

Practice will alleviate a lot of these problems, but I think more important is an acceptance that no cup is “perfect”.  There’s always a better cup somehow, somewhere.  Focusing too much on form and the peripheral things will only detract appreciation of what’s really important.

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News from Beijing

August 26, 2010 · 1 Comment

Behind the Great Firewall of China, there’s not much you can do, blogging wise, unless you happen to use Sina.net as your platform or you find a proxy.  So now, jet lagged and hovering somewhere (time wise) in the middle of the Pacific, I am writing this of my two day trip to Beijing, a week after the fact.

All my friends in Beijing seem to be better off now than they were last time I was there in 2007, which is heartening.  I don’t mean that only in terms of material wealth or some such, but also in terms of their tea philosophy, if I may use such a term.  Everyone seems to have found their own preferences and tastes, and are pursuing them actively with more involvement on the production end of things.  People who used to be mere merchants are now makers, or at least closer to a maker now than they were a few years ago.  It’s always nice to talk to folks who are passionate about what they’re doing.

Which brings me to the tea that I’ve had — too much tea in the span of a few days to really discuss in detail, but a few things jumped out as interesting.  One of my friends is now a part owner of a teahouse, and he also goes to Fujian every year to source stuff on his own farm for his shop.  Among the things he’s doing is making white tea.  It’s not just any ordinary white tea though — he roasts them ever so slightly, and then ages them.  Here’s a comparison of a 2006 yinzhen vs a 2010 one.  You can figure out which is which.

The aging gives the tea a bit more sweetness and mellows out the flavours, although it also means the tea loses some of the fragrance, as is normally the case with aged teas.  Four years is not a long time, and I’d imagine the tea can change a little more.  White teas are always ageable, but it’s nice to see that he’s producing them specifically for the purpose of aging (thus the roasting).

I also tried some puerh while there.  Beijing stored puerh really isn’t ideal, but if done carefully with a lot of water containers boosting the humidity of the storage unit, it is possible to produce nice, round tasting tea that doesn’t have that typical dryness one might associate with overly-dry storage conditions.  I think that’s actually quite important, as dry tea makes for bad tasting tea.  My friend L is now storing tea in bags, all within a big cooler (think camping) and slightly moistened.  He found a guy in Kunming who goes up to the mountains all the time and spends a lot of time thinking about how to make good tea, and the results show — soft, supple tea that tastes good.  I wonder how they’ll age in a decade, but so far it’s promising.

On the other hand, I visited Maliandao again and it seems like things have normalized a little there.  While two more tea malls have opened up since I was there, for the most part business seems to be down.  Granted, I was there on a rainy day, which most definitely put a damper on traffic, but I think a lot of stores aren’t doing as much business as they used to.  Xiaomei’s store is still there, but now the clientele is mostly of a wholesale nature, with very little retail sales going on.  As I predicted long ago, everyone who wanted to build a tea collection has one already, so there’s very little impetus to buy more.  I certainly felt that way — walking around the shops, I had very little interest in trying or buying tea.  I’m sure there are hidden gems here and there, but I don’t have the time to go through them one by one and try them all out.

The best part of the trip was simply seeing everyone again, and having tea with them.  Tea is ultimately a social drink — while it can be great alone, it’s better with friends.  Too bad that part of tea drinking is often what’s missing in the Western experience.

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Storage checkup

August 16, 2010 · 4 Comments

I first put tea in my parents’ place in Hong Kong in 2006, and have been adding to it ever since.  This is the first time I am checking on the tea since I started storing tea there.  I took everything out and cleaned the shelves on which they’re placed, checked a number of cakes, and then put them all back in.

Honestly, I was a little worried.  Hong Kong is, after all, quite humid.  I put the cakes on the top shelves on a bookcase that is partially covered, so it was the maximum protection I could find in the entire apartment from light while avoiding the problem of smelly wood.  Air condition is often on during the summer months, so it probably helps alleviate terribly soaked cakes, but I remember coming home one spring and could feel that some cakes were somewhat wet.

Thankfully, when I opened the cakes, none of them were moldy in any way, shape, or form.  In fact, they all seem to have aged somewhat, with the silvery tips now gaining a somewhat brownish tint, and the leaves turning dark instead of staying green.  Stuff in a tong are greener than stuff outside of the tong, as one would expect, but in general there’s aging going on here.

I tried some of the tea too — by taking the shavings from a number of cakes, I’m essentially doing an “average” taste test.  Results are encouraging, with the tea tasting strong and smooth(er).  So far, so good.

So, I put them back where they belong, and hope that next time I check them, a few years from now, they would have aged even more.

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Korean and New Zealand teas

August 14, 2010 · 5 Comments

I just went to the Hong Kong International Tea Fair yesterday.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a tea expo, and this one was a bit different from when I went to the one in Shanghai during the height of the puerh boom.  Partly perhaps also because it’s Hong Kong, the kind of tea merchants who were here were much more international, and also quite diverse in their offerings.  Most of the sellers were, of course, from China, but very often from provinces that are lesser known, such as Guizhou or Hunan.  The selection of green tea was very diverse, whereas the more popular things, such as various types of oolong from Fujian, were fewer.  As for puerh, there were a smattering of makers there from the big factories, such as Menghai or Haiwan, but even Xiaguan was not there.  There were some producers from Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and other places as well.

I think much of this was a product of the fact that many of the better known companies or types of tea simply don’t need the exposure at a tea fair, so they’re better off not coming and paying the expo fees instead of actually showing up.  For the lesser known, this is a great way to get some exposure that they otherwise won’t have.

I saw a few things that I know relatively little about.  The first is a company called Zealong, which makes oolong in New Zealand in the Taiwanese style.  The taste of the tea is very clean and crisp, and reminds me of decent Taiwanese high mountain oolong.  The company, according to their reps, was started by someone from Taiwan, and now has a few different teas.  It was interesting, although not terribly cheap.  I can imagine some place like New Zealand growing some interesting teas though.

I also met two Korean tea makers, and bought some of their products.  Korean tea tends to be green tea of various types, but one of them also made a white tea that had higher levels of oxidation, much akin to something like a baimudan with some age.  I bought some for personal consumption.  More on those later.

Another stop in Beijing before heading home on this trip.  Seeing some old tea friends from up north should be pretty interesting.  Stay tuned.

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