A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

Two Baozhongs

August 24, 2007 · 5 Comments

Since I bought two packs of different grades of baozhongs last weekend… I should actually try them.

Generally speaking, I’m not a big baozhong drinker. Nor, for the matter, am I a big Taiwan oolong drinker in general. That’s largely because my body doesn’t take it too well. A lot of Taiwan oolongs are really green these days with low oxidation and little to no roasting. It’s a bit much for me sometimes. But when in Rome… act like the Romans do, I guess.

The teas are actually almost indistinguishable in dry form.

Or, for that matter, in the brewed form

Any differences in colour you see is mostly due to the slight difference in positioning relative to the light source. I’d say that if I had given one of these to you and asked you to guess, your chance of getting it right would not be much higher than 50%.

There is a bit of a difference in the dry leaves — the aroma coming from the tea when it hits the warmed gaiwan. The cheaper one (left) has a slight smell of something grainy — a little like some kind of lightly toasted grains. The right one is more floral — smelling like a gaoshan oolong.

The same is largely reflected in the taste. The left one is clearly the weaker tea, tasting a bit more watery, while the right one is more full bodied, with a deeper and more complex flavour. The teas are hard to tell apart when dry, but when in tea form and drunk, anybody with a tongue can probably tell which one is better. I used the same amount of tea in both gaiwan, measured by my scale, and the difference in taste is obvious. The better one also lasted longer — about 5 infusions, whereas the weaker one was tasting watery earlier. You might even say it tasted watery right away.

Then again, the better one is double the price of the cheap one. So you do pay for what you get.

The wet leaves…. look similar, although I feel that the expensive one is a little more sturdy than the cheap one. It’s quite subtle though, the differences.

This is the cheap one

And the better one

So, the difference is really pretty much all in the taste (and smell). It was interesting, if nothing else. I still prefer them roasted.

P.S. I really need to fix the lighting situation for picture taking. It’s horrible 🙁

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Jingmai Fall 2006

August 23, 2007 · Leave a Comment

When I was organizing things in my apartment today I found a sample bag of puerh from last year, a fall 2006 Jingmai that I got from this guy who operates a shop in Kunming and who sells through Sanzui. I bought a few cakes from him, and he always gave generous amounts of sample with the cakes purchased.

The cakes this guy makes are all very pretty. He claims they’re all “pure material”, i.e. single mountain, and all using big old trees. For the most part, I find that bang for the buck, his teas are really quite decent. This Jingmai actually happens to be one of the lesser teas both in terms of quality, and especially in the price/quality ratio.

What’s wrong with this tea is that it is very rough on the tongue and the mouth. After about 3 infusions the tea turns extremely rough, and never really recovers. Unlike yesterday, this has nothing to do with water becuase I’ve tried it a few times before with different water and brewing methods, and none of them have gotten rid of this roughness. Today’s no exception. The flavours are actually quite decent, and one can feel a good bit of qi from this tea. If you’re going to store this thing in a regular home storage though, the roughness is not giong to go away given its prominence. Funny enough, the spring production does not have this problem at all. There, the roughness is very subdued and the tea is quite lovely. Since they’re about the same price (although now sold out, I’m sure) there’s almost no reason to buy the fall. This, I think, is one of those cases where one problem in the tea completely destroys it. Drier storage will never remove roughenss entirely — that requires more moisture and microbial action. Given that… it’s a no go.

The tea looks quite nice when dry, and wet

Notice the colour difference

I probably need to get a desk lamp. The lighting in this apartment is not quite ideal for tea picture taking….

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Water troubles

August 22, 2007 · 1 Comment

Everybody knows that only two things go into making tea — the leaves, and the water. We talk about tea often enough. Despite the attention paid to it from time to time, however, water is still a rarely discussed subject. My drinking today is a good reminder of why we should always be mindful.

I pulled out an old sample that I haven’t tried for a long time — the 2nd puerh trade fair cake from Houde. I got what appears to be the center piece

So I broke off a chunk, about 7g in all, into my young puerh pot and brewed.

The first two infusions were fine


(this, by the way, is white adjusted, while the other one was not)

It was crisp, a little sweet, somewhat bitter, and had a decent finish. You can taste the Menghai area characteristics in this cake. Nothing too fancy, but a solid performer.

Then… as I added water to my kettle to reheat, I poured in some of the mineral water I bought recently from the local supermarket. It’s a water from France, of a lesser known brand, and quite heavy in minerals. I usually only add a splash of this sort of thing to my regular source of filtered tap water. That’s what I did today, although I may have added a little more than just a splash or two.

I reboiled the new water, and brewed…. and something seriously wrong happened. The tea became quite bland, rough, and generally less pleasant to drink. I don’t think it has to do with just the temperature. I brewed another infusion…. same thing. I can’t believe a tea will turn on me this fast. I tried some of the water on its own… hmm, tastes a little different than usual, no doubt because of the few splashes of the mineral water I used. I then poured all of it out into a glass and refilled the kettle with filtered tap water, boiled it, and brewed again… and the tea returned on the trajectory it was going on before I switched water on it, skipping two infusions. It was still a bit rougher than earlier, but that’s often to be expected. It also brewed up slightly weaker, which is definitely expected.

The lesson here, though, is not that tap water can be better than mineral water in a bottle. That I think everybody already knows. What I have noticed over time is that different teas require different water. That might seem an obvious point, but what I have found is that even different kinds of the same tea can often have completely different water requirements.

I have brewed young puerh that want opposite kinds of water. Using two kinds of water with two kinds of young puerh, they will behave in opposite directions with the two waters used. I’ve done this side by side with Tiffany before, so I don’t think it’s just placebo because you would at first expect most young puerhs to behave similarly. The difficulty is to know what it needs, and that, I am afraid, will only come with experimentation with each particular kind of tea in hand. If you want to get really technical, perhaps weather, air temperature, humidity, and all those other things also affect the water requirements, but since we can’t really control all of that, it’s almost not worth our time and effort to do so.

I don’t think there’s one or two kinds of water that’s universally good for all teas. There is, of course, cost and practical considerations involved in this. The carbon footprint of a bottle of water traveling all the way across the globe from some pristine location to your home in the middle of a metropolis is huge. The price is often high. The differences often subtle. Whereas ages ago people can write that “spring water is the best, and do not use well water” or some such absolute statements when talking about water to make tea, they can do it because I think the variety of teas they had was much smaller than our current day market. They could not possibly have had access to many more than a few kinds of tea, and the means of production were also more similar than it is today. Nowadays teas are made using a wide variety of methods, many of which are quite new. How that changes the way the tea reacts to the minerals in the water is going to involve a lot more complications. That’s not even counting the fact that there’s spring water, and then there’s spring water….

I like having a few bottles of different kinds of water around, and usually only add a little bit of one or the other to my kettle while brewing tea to experiment with such changes. For teas that I drink often, I sometimes try to figure out better what best to use for it in particular. At some point, though, it becomes too much work and detracts from the enjoyment of the drink itself. As long as one is satisfied, perhaps it doesn’t matter at all.

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Searching for good tea

August 21, 2007 · 2 Comments

Action Jackson has been in town for a few days, but it was only yesterday that we finally met, mostly thanks to the wonderful typhoon. We agreed that today we’ll go tea shopping, as she will be leaving tomorrow.

Since I don’t know where we might find decent tea shops, I decided to take my chances with the Yongkang area, since Corax said on Chadao that it has quite a few teashops. I figured it won’t hurt to try.

After having a vegetarian lunch, we eventually made our way to a shop that looked interesting enough. We ended up spending the rest of the afternoon there, not having found time to go anywhere else.

After browsing around a little, we settled down for some tea tasting. The first we tried was a 2000 Xiaguan tuo. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but it looks dry stored. It turned out quite decent — much mellower than a new Xiaguan tea, sweet, fragrant, still youngish and not much like an older puerh. 6-7 years isn’t that much for a small tuo, and it shows. Not too expensive either, so perhaps it’s worth an investment.

After going through 10+ infusions, which still hasn’t exhausted the tea, we went on to a Mengku “Pristine Forest” cake from 2005. Special order, so the storekeep says. It was one of those “wild wild” teas, darker in colour and …. weird in taste. I don’t find those teas very attractive, preferring more orthodox tastes. We had a few infusions of this when some Japanese tourists came in and interrupted proceedings.

After the tourists came and went (they bought a bunch of Taiwan oolong) we had a 1998 Menghai tuo. This one’s obviously weaker than the Xiaguan, but the flavours are of deeper tones — two years of storage, as well as differences in material and worksmanship, has done something to the tea. It brews a darker liquor, a little rougher on the tongue, but it didn’t last as long as the Xiaguan. I think the Xiaguan is a superior tea, quality wise, but which one you prefer depends greatly on what you’re looking for.

We then had a 80s 7542, which was quite delightful. I should figure out how much it costs, because if it’s not too pricey, I might look to buy a few for future consumption. It was beautifully stored — certainly some “wet” storage at some point, but it has the nice, sweet taste of the Traditional Character Zhongcha cake sample that YP gave me, and which I dearly love. Slight differences, as they’re from different factories, but overall the general characteristics are quite similar. The liquor is a gorgeous amber, clear, robust, and flavourful. If I can afford it, I will definitely get it.

She gave us a few cups of a 70s tea that she brewed yesterday, and which is still a bit sweet and mellow to drink. By this time, however, we were really quite full with tea, and with her next appointment due, Action Jackson had to go, so off we went, with two tuos in hand for her to bring back to Shanghai. It was a pretty good day.

Categories: Misc · Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Back to tea shopping!

August 19, 2007 · 1 Comment

Well, it’s a Sunday. It’s before my work starts in earnest here in Taiwan…. so I figured, why not, let’s go tea hunting.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a Maliandao here in Taipei, as far as I’m aware. There’s an area with more older teashops, but for the most part, they’re scattered around the city. Searching around, I found a few places near me, so I tried those first.

I first went to a place that sells only Wenshan baozhongs. I was pretty quick there — bought a few things and moved on. Basically, one ounce of a good grade, one of a bad one, and two of a high roasted variety. I look forward to the high roasted stuff the most, as it looks positively cooked. It might be a bit on the charcoal tasting side of things, but we’ll find out. It was in such small quantities (and thus relatively low prices) I didn’t even bother to taste — it’ll be weird to taste them and only buy one ounce.

Then I walked along the street — which was eerily quiet, because most stores are closed on Sunday — to the next destination. This place sells mostly puerh, but as I discovered, they also deal in Taiwanese teaware. There are some pretty interesting looking cups there, fired by their own kiln. Some of the ones look very metallic-ish, and not very cheap, but might be quite nice to drink large cups of tea from. Interesting, regardless.

I only tried one raw puerh there, since we then proceeded to drink some cooked stuff as a friend of the owner arrived. I was informed that they normally close on Sundays, and it is only because yesterday was a typhoon day that the owner was there today — he was there to check on the store.

I ended up taking that one cake with me home. It was an interesting specimen, claiming to be Menghai but I think it’s not. The owner said it’s a “special order”, which I think is a euphemism for “fake” in this particular instance. Menghai cakes just don’t look like this. Whatever it is though, the tea itself is fine — a bit bitter, but the bitterness goes away pretty quickly, and there’s definitely strength in the tea. Aged a few years already — 5-7, I’d guess.

What’s most interesting about the whole thing was the way the owner made this tea for me. It started out quite normal — leaves in gaiwan, water in gaiwan, dump water, water in gaiwan again…. and then…. he poured about 1/10 of the liquid into my cup, and maybe another 1/10 into his. The rest were left stewing in the gaiwan as I drank my first cup. He then repeated… so the liquid got progressively stronger. It was quite strong in the end, bitter, a hint of sour (keep in mind this is very concentrated tea!), but still quite drinkable. Good consistency. It was certainly not an enjoyable drink anymore, but it was not too bad. Interesting way to test it — slightly like a 5-minute standard brew, but not really. This was even more concentrated because usually for those 5-minute tests you don’t use a lot of leaves. This one, though, he used a “normal” amount of leaves but brewed it long.

Needless to say… the caffeine buzz was obvious.

It was an interesting first trip to teashop on this visit to Taipei. I’ve been here before, but not that long, and the teashops I went to were mostly Taiwan oolong shops. I probably won’t go back to these for a while, and search out for other places to buy tea… it should be an interesting few months.

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Wuyi shuixian

August 18, 2007 · 2 Comments

I had some Wuyi shuixian today that I got from Beijing. This is from a guy who claims to have opened the first civilian (as opposed to state-owned) tea factory in Wuyi mountains. He recently opened a store in Beijing, and I got this from him since…. well, since I walked by his store when he was standing out front, and I already knew him and pretty much were obligated to go in and drink something.

Shuixians are good for two things. The first is that it’s quite easy to handle – as long as it’s a properly made and stored shuixian, it can hardly go wrong. You can overbrew it and still get something quite decent out of it. The same is true for most Wuyi teas that are of the roasted variety — really light Wuyi can be quite nasty if overbrewed, at least in my experience anyway. The second good thing about shuixians is that it’s usually really cheap.

The price differential comes from somewhere, obviously. Oftentimes the qi of shuixian is lacking, and the robustness and depth of flavour also don’t necessarily compare with a top notch dahongpao or some such, but as an everyday drink, it beats almost anything. I’ll be happy to drink shuixian till the day I die without too much complaining…

The tea today is somewhat aged. Precisely how long, I don’t know, and I don’t know if the guy who sold it to me knows. I think he muttered something around 10 years. I’m not sure if it’s that old, but it’s probably been a few years. Wuyi teas in general develop a rather distinctive taste after a few years of aging — a taste that I don’t really know how to describe, but is unmistakable once you’ve tried it. This tea actually isn’t too heavily fired

But there’s still a bit of a charcoal roasted taste to it. It is generally sweet, mellow, quite warm, and quite relaxing. This is why I say it’s a good everyday tea – it’s unoffensive and very pleasant. Can’t say the same of things like younger puerhs, light Taiwan oolongs, or greens…

The leaves didn’t really unfurl despite repeated and long brewings.

Somebody told me at one point that leaves that don’t unfurl were rolled by hand, while machine rolled teas tend to unfurl easily. I would think that repeated roastings might also have done something to it. I’m not sure, actually, if any of these are true. Even when I tried to pry the leaves open though

You can see the wrinkles.

I’m wondering why I didn’t buy more of this. Then again, I remembered why as the third typhoon in two weeks raged outside — these things don’t behave when it’s moist outside. They can get sour, and I don’t like sour tea.

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“Impressions”

August 17, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Today I went out for tea with Y, who’s my friend L’s business partner. Y’s from Taiwan, so he has some friends here. I went to where one such friend opens a (non-tea related) store and had some tea with them.

We didn’t stay for long, as the threat of the third typhoon since I arrived kept our session short. We only had two teas. The first was rather interesting — it was a new cake made by Zhongcha, for which L/Y is a primary distributor. The cake is called “Yiwu Impressions”. Now…. it’s a fancy name, but really, what it means is that it is sort of Yiwu-ish, but with no claims by the maker to be selling a tea that is old tree or anything like that. The overwhelming impression I got was mediocrity — the tea is thin, bland, and not very interesting. It’s unoffensive, but also unpromising as something for aging. Is it Yiwu-ish? I suppose, but only barely. It also turns rough on you rather quickly.

The tea used is supposedly just plantation tea, yet a cake at wholesale prices is around 100 RMB, and more if you buy retail. Prices are ridiculously high, and quality is just not there. I don’t think I’ll ever pay that much for this tea.

Y did give me a free cake though. I can’t complain about that. It’ll be interesting to compare notes a few years down the line to see how this tea aged relative to others.

Sorry for the inconsistent colours and the poor quality of the photos — I’m still trying things out with the lighting here, and it’s proving more difficult than I thought.

We only got a few cups of a second tea before we split. It was a yinhao tuo, cooked, and somewhat aged. Quite nice and mellow, and very enjoyable. The provenance of this tuo is a little suspect, but whatever it is… it’s fine as a drink. As something that’s worth a lot of money? That, I’m not so sure.

I have a feeling tomorrow I won’t be going anywhere while this typhoon hits. It’s supposed to be quite strong and I’m already hearing the wind howling outside my window.

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Loose puerh

August 10, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Since I don’t really have my full complement of teaware and I don’t really have much tea here, consumption is going to be simple and limited until I get home to Hong Kong and ship the stuff over. One of the few things I do have with me is one of those bags of loose puerh I’ve purchased in Hong Kong. I got this bag, I think, a year ago. It’s been traveling with me to various places, since it’s a pretty good tea to just throw in a cup and make. Over the year though, it’s taken on a softer, rounder taste — a little more like cooked stuff, actually. I think it’s lost that slightly rough edge from the wet storage, and has acquired a little more aged feel to it while actually enhancing the mouthfeel. I got a few different grades, and it’s obvious that they differ in taste when I tried them side by side. The cheapest one was a little sour. This one doesn’t have a sourness, but is thinner than the most expensive version. The liquor of the teas, interestingly enough, reflect that in how dark the tea is. With that comparison (I meant to post it, but I think it got derailed with the earthquake around December that knocked the internet out), you can really tell the differences between different blends and how the feel and taste different in the mouth.

This is all stuff that one can call “cooked”, and the different grades are almost denoting different cookedness. The cooking was not done by the fermentation piles on the floor, but rather in bags in wet storage facilities in Hong Kong. Some would even say that only stuff like this is real puerh — dry stored tea is not technically right if the humidity never got high enough for it to acquire that distinctive puerh taste. Indeed, drinking a 5 year old, real dry stored tea that was in Beijing all 5 years can be a pretty unsatisfactory experience. I wonder though, has anybody actually figured out exactly what kind of microbe is the one that is responsible for the creation of our drink? Somebody should figure it out.

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Taiwan miscellany

August 9, 2007 · 7 Comments

I’m quite jet-lagged, so I’ll keep this one simple.

In the 48 hours since I got here, Taiwan has had two typhoons pass through it. This morning when I was brewing the Meghma oolong again after reading Mary R’s notes on it, using lower temperature, I felt the earth shake a little. No, it wasn’t the tea. It’s a reminder for somebody like me, whose last experience with tectonic plates moving was more than a decade ago, that I live in an area where this sort of thing happens.

Unfortunately, lowering the temperature of the water did not significantly change the tea. It did lower the bitterness, but I still feel it’s mostly Yunnan gold like taste to me. Maybe it wasn’t low enough? But I already left the water out for a good bit and the cup certainly wasn’t blisteringly hot.

I have a feeling that until I get my teaware back from Hong Kong, I’ll be stuck with drinking random things in a cup for the next few days…

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T Ching samples revisited

August 8, 2007 · 1 Comment

I brewed the T Ching samples I drank a few days ago again. The oolong I brewed on the plane. The white tea I brewed here at home. Both were made in the “grandpa” style.

The oolong tastes, again, remarkably similar to a Yunnan black tea. Undertones of darjeeling-esque taste still there, but really, I can get something very similar by drinking a Yunnan tea, and perhaps a little less bitter when overbrewed (as this was, by accident). When brewed in a cup like this the initial sweetness is less obvious. On the other hand, the aftertaste is more present.

The white tea tastes more like a white this time with a little more oxidation note, which is a good thing for me. The tea is still a bit rough on the tongue though, for reasons unknown (I find buds to be generally less rough) since I used cooler water this time. There’s also a bit of bitterness that’s just slightly too much, and this one I didn’t overbrew. I wonder if this is a varietal issue — and what can be done to reduce the level of bitterness in these tea. Higher oxidation? But then you quickly leave the white tea territory that way.

I think these are probably good examples of these teas as they are made in the Indian subcontinent. However, I’m not sure if given a choice I’ll prefer either of these over selections from China. The price of the white tea is also a factor in this case, as it’s on the pricey side of things. The oolong is more reasonable, and its high oxidation is interesting — curiously, more interesting in a gongfu setting. I can’t complain about that 🙂

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