A Tea Addict's Journal

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Cheaper aged oolong

October 16, 2007 · 4 Comments

One problem with these teas is that they have no names — and most of the time, there isn’t even a region name to go by, so unfortunately, price is the only real distinction 🙂

This is a tea that I got along with the more expensive, but sour, tea. I got this one because it’s cheap… it’s under $50 for 600g (600g is a jin, or Chinese pound with 16 taels, and prices are often quoted in these, but do not confuse this with a mainland jin, which is 500g and has 10 taels).

The leaves are a bit mixed looking when you inspect them closely, and has a few shades — darker and lighter brown. Sniffing it, it smells a little aged, and roasty.

The tea looks very roasty

And tastes so too. There’s definitely some aged-ness to it, but the aged character is not particularly obvious. The roasted flavour is more prominent, and probably needs a bit of time for that to go away. The first few infusions are actually quite good — with a solid coating of aroma in the back of the mouth. There’s a slight sourness in there, but it’s not obvious enough to be unpleasant. When they sold it to me they said this is 10 years. Is it? I don’t know, I’m not sure. It’s probably a few years old, but there’s really no telling exactly how old. One of the problems is that the aged-ness of an oolong can vary very greatly. If aged in a sealed package, the aging can progress very slowly, whereas sometimes they’re aged in more open air, and the aged character show up much faster, but I think at higher risk of sourness and that sort of thing. Almost every time I go to a tea shop around here I ask if they have aged oolongs, and they really run the gamut, both in quality and price.

Would I drink this again? Sure, it’s not offensive, and the first few cups are nice. Again, if brewed a little lighter, there should be no sourness and perhaps even a bit more aromatic.

I really need to use a pot for this sort of tea. Brewing them in a gaiwan is almost a waste.

The wet leaves show this tea to be more broken in nature — not too obvious when dry, but really obvious when wet

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My tongue needs a holiday

October 15, 2007 · 2 Comments

My tongue got bored of the aged oolongs — it needs something totally different. I still have a few more to go, so I’m taking a break and drank a bit of the Fuxing Youle cake instead 🙂

This time I used my pot, and the tea seems to come out similar, but perhaps slightly rounder, than from the gaiwan. I think the leaves to pot ratio is a little lower when I use the pot, which might be the reason why I achieved the results I did. The tea tastes like a good old tree puerh, at least I think it is anyway… flavourful, strong in the throat department, and clearly has energy. Compared with an aged oolong, the energy is a slightly nervous one. Instead of making you calm, it works you up. It’s a stimulant. Young puerh tend to be like that; it’s as if I were spending time with an energetic kid, rather than an old man who is sipping tea peacefully. The tea, even when it’s almost brewed out after 10+ infusions, still exhibits strong activity in the mouth. I have high hopes for this one. I even wonder if I should go get some more, haha.

I think I broke the cake up better this time, and got more complete leaves in. It’s difficult to convey this through words, but the leaves seem well rolled — they’re slightly on the mushy side, not always unfurlable, and are mostly bud-leaf systems. I have heard complaints that some cakes these days are not completely processed — wholeness and sturdiness of leaves are sought after qualities for reasons that have little to do with aging, and so sometimes the makers deliberately roll them very lightly to preserve the leaves in order to make them unfurl easily on their own when brewed. I don’t know if this has any grounding in the actual process behind aging, but perhaps that makes sense — little rolling would mean less breaking of the cell structure, and thus, perhaps, slower or incomplete aging. Again, I don’t know the answer to this, and I suppose I will find out in 20 years.

Meanwhile, I marvel at the beauty of these leaves. There’s something about young puerh leaves that are particularly attractive, especially when they feel meaty when handled…

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60s baozhong

October 14, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I went back to the Fuxing store today. It’s hard to resist a store that’s only 10 minutes walk away.

I was looking more at pots today, and nothing too interesting happened. I did, however, ask them how they season their pots — since they do it. The answer was “nothing special”. In fact, they don’t do anything other than just clean it of the debris that’s left in the pot, and after that, they just brew tea in them. The pots clean themselves out, basically. Obviously they rub the pots dry afterwards, but that’s really about it. As I was there, she was filling out the pot with some leaves, pouring water into it, and just letting the tea sit in the pot (with the leaves) to stew…. and the leaves were still in it as I left. I guess that works. I also suppose it’s because they have so many pots, it’s impossible to do anything else with them.

While there, I drank an aged oolong from 1983. Pretty interesting stuff, although much weaker than the one I had yesterday. The tea is, as she said, slightly sour if brewed too strongly (due to poor storage), so she deliberately made it slightly weaker. It does, however, have pretty decent qi, and I felt very relaxed after drinking it. Compared to younger teas, such as young oolongs or puerh….

Anyway, that’s all for today.

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A failure

October 13, 2007 · 9 Comments

This is a purported 60s baozhong

The dry leaves smell faintly of agedness, but as I sniffed it hard, comparing it with the tea yesterday, I noticed that there’s a sour note in the smell in yesterday’s that is absent in today’s. Hmmm. Food for thought.

It brews a dark tea

And tastes wonderfully aged, full bodied, good qi, huigan, etc. There’s a hint of sourness in the first three infusions or so, but it doesn’t cross the line into the “unpleasant” category. This is what somebody might call a “fruity tartness”. The tea’s plummy, and very enjoyable. No bitterness at all, but it numbs the tongue a little — I actually enjoy that in these teas. Interestingly, there are some aftertastes in this tea that reminds me of some aged puerhs I’ve had. It obviously doesn’t share the earthy or woody taste of an aged puerh, nor the spicy notes that someitmes you get from them, but the aftertaste — it definitely reminds me of some puerh I’ve tried, mostly drier stored stuff. What’s better yet — these teas are impossible to exhaust. About 25 cups later

It still goes. Aged teas (oolongs, puerh, you name it) has one common characteristic — the longer they’re aged (presumably no serious wet storage in the case of the puerh) the longer they last in a drinking session. Even when the colour of the tea fades while brewing, the taste continues. Now I’m drinking probably the 35th or even 40th cup of this tea, and the colour of the tea is very faintly yellow, but when I drink it — it still tastes like tea, not water, and it still stimulates the senses in a positive way. That is not something you can fake, no matter what you do.

It’s still brewing as I type

Yum. I like this tea.

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Beer substitute

October 9, 2007 · 3 Comments

It’s baseball season here, and the fans are all eagerly watching every game by the hometown team, the New York Yankees. As you can imagine, their (yet again) early postseason exit has been met with some grief.

I’m not joking when I say hometown team being the Yankees. See, Wang Chien-ming, one of the Yankees’ starting pitcher, is a Taiwanese, so they have adopted the Yankees as a sort of hometeam. The Yankees are covered here with zeal, and the game commentators have the obvious Yankees bias that one cannot miss. Every game they play is newsworthy. In fact, I suspect the coverage of the Yankees here is probably even better than in New York itself. Games are played live in the morning (night in New York) and replayed at prime time the same night. When I come home, sometimes I turn on the TV while getting ready to brew tea, and more often than not, I stumble upon the baseball game on the tube and stay there. That, and the news shows are the only things really worth watching in Taiwan.

As I watched the Yankees get kicked out of this year’s postseason with glee, I was brewing the 2006 fall Bangwei tea that I got last year in Beijing. I’ve mentioned this tea a few times before, so I won’t bother again. It’s a solid tea and I wonder why I didn’t get more of it, since it was only something like $12 a cake for what is obviously a good old tree tea. Now you can’t even get maocha at these prices. Sigh. I should’ve bought a tong, or three.

Drinking tea while watching baseball though made me think that I probably wasn’t the only person in Taipei doing the same thing today. In fact, I’m quite sure there are others out there who were probably drinking some tea, perhaps some Taiwanese oolong, with a few friends while watching the game together in agony as the Yankees simply couldn’t hit and Wang pitched a disastrous inning before getting chased off the mound. In the US, it would’ve probably been some nasty macrobrew. Here, it’s a brew, but not that kind. This isn’t to say beer isn’t consumed — I’m sure it’s consumed in large amounts, but I think alternatives are entirely acceptable too.

I remember YP telling me she used to drink Red Label with her husband while watching the World Cup on TV. This was in 1990, I think, when that wasn’t such a ridiculous proposition. Then, the tea got more expensive and it seemed unwise to drink something like that while just watching a game, so she switched to a Yellow Label. Obviously, that’s a little too rich now as well. I’m sure she’s moved on to some 80s tea. While what I was drinking tonight was much, much more humble… I couldn’t help but feel the same. If only….

Oh well, at least I have two cakes of this.

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Some sort of wuyi yancha

October 8, 2007 · 3 Comments

Yeah, I don’t really know what I drank today. More precisely, I can’t remember, as is so often the case, what it is that I drank today.

This is a sample from Aaron Fisher when I visited. He gave this to me, along with a few other things. I know this tea is a Wuyi tea of some sort, fired quite high by an old (since 1890) Taiwan shop. But I can’t for the life of me remember what it is exactly. Since I am not good enough to tell all the varietals apart, I will rather not guess. I don’t think it’s a shuixian though, nor is it a rougui. A dahongpao? Maybe a beidou? Not entirely sure.

He did give me a lot of it though, so I used up a good bit

On second thoughts, I should’ve used less, because the tea is rather broken up. Wuyi teas get broken up when they roast it and re-roast it — naturally, obviously, as they have to move the tea around while roasting. This is probably also remains of a much larger bag, and as usual, the stuff nearer the bottom will be more broken.

The resulting tea was therefore strong

It was by no means nasty, although a bit of sourness came through, probably because I haven’t stored it very carefully since I got it (and weather was very humid with typhoon and rain). It tastes like a dahongpao. Solid, roasted flavour, some age, not a lot though, and some sweetness. The tea turns more mellow after a few infusions, and becomes nicer and sweeter. Sourness also toned down. The broken nature of the leaves probably contributed to the very strong first few cups.

I’ve been meaning to go visit some older shops, but on the weekends when I have lots of time to go, the weather inevitably turns nasty, and many such places don’t open on Sunday (in fact, many places in general don’t open on Sunday). That complicates things. I’ll have to find a weekend to head out and look.

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Menghai 1998 tuo

October 7, 2007 · Leave a Comment

This is a tuo I got at a local tea shop when buying stuff with Action Jackson while she was visiting town. We went to this place and tasted a few things, and she bought one of these. I helped her get a few more, as she is obviously no longer in town, and got one for myself, which I broke up…

The shop owner says this is from 1998, and compared to the 2000 Xiaguan tuo that she also sells, this tuo obviously tasted more aged. It also has a darker hue. There’s this little piece of paper that comes along with the wrapper that has 1998 stamped on it, but as any puerh collector knows…. these things aren’t very trustworthy and are very, very easily faked.

The tea looks like what it was in the store

Somehow though, it tastes a little different. I seem to remember in the store it tasted a bit more aged — there’s a little more of the “aged” taste of a puerh that showed through. It does still taste like that, but somehow not quite as obvious as I remember. It was, after all, almost two months ago. It was also right after we drank some pretty young stuff, so perhaps my tongue was picking up more on the aged notes of the tea. There’s also water and other things to consider. Who knows, but it’s always a little frustrating when a tea tastes a bit different at home. It’s also a bit on the rough side — considering that it supposedly has 10 years of aging in it, the tea was still rough. Roughness, after all, doesn’t go away very fast, and perhaps in a tuo it’s even worse.

If this is what a tuo tastes like in dry storage after 10 years in Taiwan…. one really wonders if there’s a point in dry storing a tuo at all. I’ve never been sure, so I have never been a big buyer of tuo, opting only for a few pieces here and there as a sort of curiosity more than anything else. Action Jackson, though, said she went for the tuo during her recent bout of sickness, which is how she decided she wanted more. Maybe it’s just this particular one that I’m drinking? Maybe I’m brewing it all wrong?

It’s probably worth revisiting this one.

The leaves are… like leaves in a tuo

I played with the white balance a little…. but I’m not sure whether this is a little too red. Digital cameras can really lie sometimes.

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Chenguanghe Tang 2006 Spring Yiwu Chawang

October 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

There was a very strong typhoon that hit Taiwan today, so the whole day was spent indoors since going out was a real hazard. There were at one point debris that were flying and hitting the wall/window of my apartment…. and I live on the 8th floor. My friend’s house got part of its roof ripped open. So yeah, it was strong.

Perfect day to sit home and drink tea though.

So I pulled out one of the samples I got from Fuxing recently — the spring 2006 production of Chen Guang He Tang’s Yiwu Chawang.

Yeah, it’s a big piece I got. No, I’m not crazy enough to use it all in one session.

This tea, in the words of the store owner, is “two times better than the fall 2006”, and it’s the same price. There’s also a cheaper version of Yiwu tea from spring 06 as well. There are also a number of other CGHT cakes on sale there too — some looking quite fine. I wonder why Hou De didn’t get a hold of them to sell. They seem to sell out within hours these days.

The tea brews a medium coloured, medium bodied liquor

It is actually not THAT similar to the fall. The taste is actually lighter, although I do remember the fall Chawang having a slightly unusually heavy/dark taste to it. There’s a good huigan to the tea and it does give you a “throat feel”, but somehow I feel the qi of the tea is a little lacking. The body is good, and the tea, generally speaking, is really quite pleasant.

There’s one problem though. The tea came out quite rough after a few infusions, and the roughness was quite up front and obvious, which I found was rather distracting to the whole tasting process.

Tea Nerd has a post about astringency that includes roughness, and a brief explanation of what it’s about. I find roughness to be the most annoying of all these things, and generally speaking, a tea that is really rough can take a long time in dry storage aging before the roughness goes down to an acceptable level. I’m not sure if this tea is too rough or not — that probably depends on individual taste and all that, but I did find it to be a prominent feature of this tea.

It’s not bad, it’s just rough. It left the mouth dry. It had all the right makings of a good puerh, I think, especially if the roughness is a bit more subdued. I’m not sure what’s causing it — if it’s the tea itself, if it’s the mix of leaves, the storage condition, or what, but it didn’t produce the most favourable impression that way. I don’t seem to remember the fall version of this tea to be as rough, although I do remember it having some roughness. I know some Hong Kong tea friends will just frown upon this immediately and say this is making their tongue hurt — and will wait years before drinking this. Maybe it’s like bitterness — it’s good to have some to show strength in a tea that will age. But how long will this take? I’ve had 10 years old teas that can still be quite rough. So that’s obviously not enough. In fact, it’s probably the single most distracting thing, I think, in a tea. I still remember trying that tea in Beijing that made me gulp down a whole bottle of water right after tasting it… it was rough and drying to the extreme. It’s funny when teas do that to you. This isn’t nearly that bad, but it did leave a rough taste in the mouth.

The leaves are quite pretty though — and very long stems

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Random sample

October 5, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I drank a sample that was in some brown paper bag today. I don’t know for sure where it’s from. The brown paper bag suggests my friend YP, but then… I don’t remember getting something like this from her.

The colour didn’t come out right

But the leaves are actually relatively green, with some redness. The tea’s obviously been dry stored. There’s no hint of wetness in there, but there’s a beginning hint of age. It’s very broken up, made up of mostly small leaves.

It brews a decently dark brew

My guess is it’s about 7 years or so. It actually reminded me a little of the 2000 Xiaguan tuo I had recently, but this one lacks a bit of that greenness that one gets from Xiaguan products. There’s something Menghai-ish about this tea, although with zero labeling and zero memory…. I honestly have no idea what it is. It’s a little rough on the tongue, and the way it behaves suggests it’s probably mostly plantation leaves. Not much qi or anything too exciting going on… an entirely average tea, I think.

The leaves, as you can see, are quite chopped up

I can’t remember for the life of me what this is. It could actually be a sample of something else that I just stuck in the bag. Oh well… I should really be better about labeling things.

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Tea purchase

October 1, 2007 · 4 Comments

I bought some tea today, specifically, I bought a few tongs of the Fuxing cakes….

I decided I didn’t want to wait around for three reasons

1) I didn’t want a repeat of the Quanji Bulang experience, where they didn’t have the cake anymore. Fuxing only has less than a jian, total, of the two teas left, so I didn’t want to run the risk of one or two people cleaning it up and buying everything remaining. Good thing they’re still there.

2) I didn’t want a repeat of the Quanji Bulang experience before they discovered they didn’t have it anymore — where I had to haggle down the price to what I paid for originally only a few weeks before. I don’t think this is the kind of shop that will pull such a nasty trick on me, but you never know for sure.

3) Most of the younger puerh I’ve seen around Taipei are either high priced, fancy maker stuff (doesn’t actually mean higher quality, mind you), or run of the mill, big factories stuff where they’re often cheaper in China. Older stuff, I decided, are too expensive for what they’re worth. I think I need more 90s tea together in order to store them well — one or two cakes just won’t cut it, storage wise. Given that, I’m not sure if it’s better to buy those now than to wait, say, 10 more years till they’re well aged, and just buy them for drink it now (or, perhaps, at that point some of my current teas will be drinkable)

So, I went there and got some stuff. While there, we had a few aged oolongs, variously of 15 years to something like maybe 25-30 years. I like this stuff, and I got a bag of the 15 years old tea for free as part of my purchase. I didn’t get a discount, but I guess this was sort of a discount.

I also got two free samples. One’s a Chen Guang He Tang 06 Spring Yiwu Chawang…. which the owner said in her opinion is way better than the fall production. Then there’s a 2007 cake made by another Taiwanese tea guy, which is outrageously expensive but which she said is quite good. Well, so those are the freebies I got to take home to play with.

Meanwhile… I am looking at my tea, thinking what I should do with them here until I take them back to Hong Kong with me. I wonder how the cakes in Hong Kong are doing…

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