A Tea Addict's Journal

I was digging up old samples today to drink, and found this

The last time I tried this tea was before I went to China, so at least a year ago. It’s been a while. Why not?

The tea is very tightly compressed. I decided to use up the remaining sample I have. I could try to split it into two sessions, but I decided not to.

The last time I tried it I didn’t say much about it. I don’t think I had enough experience with younger puerh at the time to know what I was talking about. Now I think I’m slightly better equipped to deal with this tea.

The short version is — I’m not sure if this is Yiwu, if this is 99, if this is a wild tea, or if this is a Menghai. I don’t think this is a Yiwu because it is too bitter for what it is. It also doesn’t taste very much like a Yiwu that’s aged a few years. In fact, it reminds me most of my 2002 Mengku cakes. The taste profile are very very similar — some bitterness, some astringency, chocolate like flavours, etc. I don’t think this is necessarily 99 because of some of the same reasons, but also because I don’t think I’ve encountered another 1999 Yiwu from Menghai other than Green Big Tree. I can very well be wrong on this. I don’t think this is a wild tea because the tea lacks any sort of throatiness — the flavour stays entirely on the tongue and nowhere else. Huigan is basically nonexistent, especially given the relatively high amount of leaves I’m using. As for Menghai… something about the wrapper (or the little picture of the wrapper) makes me wonder. The very large Menghai words in the bottom looks different than the versions I’ve seen, which have a small font. I’m not saying this is fake, it might not be, but it does look a little funny.

Either way, I don’t think this is a Yiwu, never mind the special reserve designation. Even if it were Yiwu, I don’t think it is a particularly good one. I’ve had better. It lacks the high perfumy notes I’ve encountered in aged-a-bit Yiwus. Instead, it tastes heavy like Mengku tea, which are way cheaper.

Not that this thing is on sale anymore, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. It’s good to know though that I didn’t miss out on a treasure.

Some pictures of the tea and the wet leaves….

The wet leaves are turning brown, but still mostly greenish tinted (not too obvious in this picture). The leaves are very heavily compressed and also quite chopped up.

After almost two weeks of traveling, finally I’m settling down, at least for a little bit before I go again to Taiwan. Now comfortably situated in rural Ohio, I can finally get back to drinking tea that isn’t “100% leaf tea”.

Before I did that though, there’s the issue of water. Ohio’s not known for great drinking water. When I went to college in northeast Ohio, I remember the first sip of water I had there on the first day of having gotten to the school was very memorable — it was nasty. It tasted like swimming pool water. Having arrived from a city where one could get crisp, great tasting water straight from the tap, it was a big change. I eventually got a Brita filter, which served the purpose of getting rid of the foul chlorine taste, but it was still bad water.

I was reminded of the water problem here when I bought a big jug of “White Oak drinking water”. I thought it would at least taste ok, but I forgot to check the source — it’s apparently from an artesian well in northeast Ohio. Drinking it… it was… salty. I got more thirsty drinking the thing. A great way to sell more water, I suppose, but probably not good for me. I eventually ran all that through my Pur filter (which, by the way, I think makes much better tasting water than Brita). It tasted much better… sweet, not salty. We’re ready to brew.

I brewed up the first maocha I bought at Maliandao when I got there last year… sometime in September. I don’t actually remember where the maocha is supposedly from.

From the looks of it, it’s a six mountains maocha, but from the taste, it is not Yiwu or Manzhuan. Whatever it is, it has been sitting in my tea storage unit in Beijing for almost a year now before I took it with me to travel. I drank it on the trains to and from Shanghai, and also on the plane back to the US, each time in a cup with some hot water. It was nice and sweet, with a minty feeling, but I haven’t had it in a gaiwan for a long, long time. It’s time to try that.

The tea, as you will notice, is of a decidedly dark hue when brewed.

Colour wise, it looks very aged. In fact, I’d say that even when drinking it, it feels a bit aged — I think it can easily fake it as a 4-5 years dry stored tea. The taste is sweet, mellow, with some throatiness and not very bitter at all. Bitterness show up if I try to overbrew the tea, but for the most part, it’s very subdued. It’s lost a lot of the very green taste that you’d expect from a very young puerh, and starting to gain something like an aged dry stored puerh. Perhaps this is proof that Beijing storage, so long as it’s not overly dry, can be quite good?

When I overbrew the tea, the colour comes out even darker, with a stronger sense of bitterness, but no roughness. In fact, the tea is smooth throughout, which is a very nice thing. It moves from being a bit minty to being somewhat fruity, but not in the same way that the mystery sample A was fruity. Here you know all along that this is a puerh of some sort, only that the fruity is there in the back when drunk. The tea has good endurance. It yielded many infusions, and when I brewed the last few as hour long brews, they still came out tasting rather good despite the abuse.

The leaves are a bit broken after all the traveling, but still keeping mostly to their original shape and not too chopped up. I must say I’m rather pleased by the tea. I know it didn’t taste like this when I bought it, although I no longer remember what it tasted like. I am now kicking myself for not buying more of it at the time… back then I think a kg of it was maybe half the price of what it would be now. Oh well….

Weather was horrible today. Or more specifically, the air was horrible today. I walked outside this morning, and what greeted me was a nasty industrial smell. The air was yellow. It smelled like sulphur or something. Pollution at its worst. My eyes could feel the sting of the bad air. It’s that bad.

So I basically holed myself up at home. I should’ve gone for something safe, something nice, to cheer myself up despite the bad air. Instead, I went for adventure…

Going through the samples again, I found a bag that was given to me many moons ago by YP, a very experienced tea friend from Hong Kong. She gave me a corner of a cake she thought was interesting and worth experimenting with. It was a silver needle cake. I’ve now come to the conclusion that silver needles generally don’t age so well, but maybe YP has a better eye for these things than I do (I’m sure she does, actually). She said she bought it because she didn’t know what to make of it, so it was an experiment. Now it’s at least two years old. Let’s see how it went.

As you can see, it’s a big piece. In case you have any doubt about the fact that this is a silver needle cake

It’s 100% pure. The tea has a reddish tint now. If it’s a little redder, it could pass as a Yunnan Gold pressed into cake.

The first infusion was great. Light, sweet, fragrant, with a slightly odd but somewhat familiar smell/taste. I couldn’t quite pinpoint it. It was interesting. The second infusion was similar, but a little roughness crept in at the end. The third:

Was a little more rough…. a little more bitter. The fourth was worse… I think I can see where this is headed now, and I stopped before the tea turned nasty on me. Four infusions in, and the first was the best.

The wet leaves really make me wonder what I was drinking. Is this puerh? I’m not sure it is. Is this green tea? Maybe… stale green tea? I don’t know. What do you think? I know YP got it at a pretty cheap price. Good thing too. I don’t think it will compare to her Traditional Character Zhongcha in 25 years.

Dissatisfied by the rather lacklustre drinking session, I opted to drink another tea. I picked up the samples from iwii. The last two had some plastic bag smell in them, so I let them air on a dish. I sniffed… seems ok. So I picked up what he labeled as sample A, and which, he told me, is a Wisteria House (of Taipei) Yiwu via M3T in Paris, sent back to me in Beijing….

I forgot to take a picture of the dry leaves, but they are not really remarkable in any way — broken loose pu, a bit black/dark, and not too distinguishable from any other puerh that’s a few years old.

I brewed it up… and realized that even though the smell of the plastic bag was gone from the dry leaves…. the tea is already deeply infused with the plastic bag smell. Uh oh. I am drinking floral tea, except that this is not jasmine.

The tea brews a deep colour

Iwii said it’s 2003. It looks a bit dark for 2003, but it was probably stored in Taiwan.

Unfortunately, because of the plastic bag smell/taste, it made it rather difficult to pass any sort of real judgement on the tea. All I can say is that the tea is a little rough for my taste, after about 3 infusions, it started getting astringent. There’s some qi, and definitely something that resembles huigan (hidden in the sea of plastic). There’s also some throatiness, or is that my throat acting up because of some chemical component doing something to me? I’m probably making it up here, but whatever it is… I don’t know what to say about it. I feel this is sort of an ok tea, but not a great tea, but I really shouldn’t say that because I’m shrouded in a sea of plastic bag smell…. I’m sorry Iwii, I should’ve waited. In fact, I should let the rest of the samples sit around for much longer than just a few weeks before trying them ever again.

I was still dissatisfied, but my body has had enough caffeine. Oh well.

The wet leaves of the sample doesn’t look all that impressive.

Some of the leaves are more yellow-leaf like, or seem a little stiff. I wonder why.

Now I’ll wake up in a few hours to catch an early morning train to Shenyang, in Liaoning province in the northeast in China, for about a week. Among other things, Shenyang was the capital for the Manchus before they conquered China (it was retained as a nominal capital after they moved to Beijing). I wonder if I can find cheap puerh there like Hobbes did recently. Somehow I don’t think that’s likely.

I thought about this tea after drinking the Yiwu Zhengpin a few days ago. As I noticed an obvious change in the Yiwu Zhengpin, I wondered if this tea I’m drinking today has changed as well since I last had it, probably sometime in December in Hong Kong with Tiffany. I got this from the Yiwu girl when I was dealing with her, trying to get the tong of tea from her that I wanted. The tong is now with me, and I still have some of this maocha left. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough for a few more sittings.

I duly measured 7g of tea.

Last time I drank it and actually posted a full set of notes, I thought it was nice, very nice, in fact. Of course, back then my experience with young teas was considerably less than what I know now, purely because I’ve had so many more teas in the past year 8 months (wow, it’s been that long). I think this tea is memorable for the fact that it was the first time when I felt all those things that people talk about but I have only seen glimpses of — the throatiness, the huigan, the qi, all mixed into one. I’ve since had other teas that are like that, but this one was the one that first allowed me to taste what I now seek in young puerhs.

I’ve really liked the results of me taking pictures of the liquor of the tea in my little clothes-drying area — the lighting in the afternoon works well to give it a consistency that I needed, and looks more natural than artificial light. Too bad I’ll be leaving Beijing soon and have to find some other way to replicate this.

The colour of the liquor, I think, is comparable to the last time I tried it. Although the dry leaves do look a touch redder than the last time, the tea doesn’t taste that way. It’s slightly bitter, sweet, an obvious Yiwu taste, and good huigan as well as qi. The tea is medium bodied. There’s some throatiness as well, more, I’m sure, if I brew it for a little longer, as I employed fairly short (5s or under) infusions until about the 7th.

The tea is smoother than last time, I think, and only displayed some minor roughness when hitting the 5th or 6th infusion, but it died soon after as the tea turned to a sweeter taste. Bitterness is more obvious if I employ longer infusions, but I’ve tried avoiding that.

A very interesting thing is the way the different teawares smell after each infusion. After I pour the tea out from the gaiwan into the fairness cup, I smell the bottom of the lid, which smells like that slightly sour, slightly off smell of young puerhs — some have called it “stinky green” in Chinese parlance. It’s not an aromatic smell. Rather, it’s more like an odor. Some have said this is the sun smell. I’m not sure, but I have taken it to be a typical young puerh smell. The leaves themselves don’t display much of a smell at all.

Then, pouring the tea from the fairness cup into my drinking cup, I smell the fairness cup, which, in this case, smells quite floral. It’s that Yiwu smell. After drinking, I smell the drinking cup, which is sweeter than the fairness cup.

It’s quite fun smelling all the different things. I think a wenxiangbei will only give you one kind of smell. I am personally not a fan of those things, as must be obvious, and it seems my preference against it is shared in some circles, more in mainland and Hong Kong. In Taiwan they seem to employ it more often.

After quite a number of infusions, I poured our the leaves

Since it’s maocha, it’s pretty.

I should note, at this point, that I no longer think thick center veins have anything to do with the age of a tea. I’ve seen plantation teas with very thick center veins. I do, however, think that if the secondary veins are obviously popping, that could be an indicator of the fact that the tea is from older trees. Don’t ask me why, and I don’t know if biologically this makes any sense, but among the teas I’ve seen, obviously popping secondary veins are pretty rare, and seem to happen most often with old tree teas. This picture might make my point clearer

In the pictures for the 6 mountain maocha series that I drank (link to the left), you can also see this in action. Although, I don’t think that is universally true and certainly shouldn’t be used as a reliable indicator. Rather, it’s more like an observation….

I actually finished a sample today — the sample of Yiwu Zhengpin that Phyll gave me back in October, when Bearsbearsbears brought it over. I had it twice, and then just let it rot in its little bag while I moved onto other things. It’s time to finish this one up.

As you can see… this is even more chopped liver than yesterday’s. Among the small compressed pieces… I also noticed that there were some very fined chopped leaves pressed into the cake, perhaps leaves that were crushed when pressing.

Since it’s so broken, I tried my infusions very very short… any shorter, and I’d have to pour the water directly into my cup.

The resulting tea though, came out pretty dark

Much, much darker than I remember them. Last time I tried it on its own I said it’s a little odd. I think I will maintain that stance, although the oddness is a little clearer this time, no doubt partly due to me having had a lot more young puerh in the past 8 months. The tea, like I said last time, came out a little rough, and drying. There’s a definite note of sourness that wouldn’t go away no matter how many infusions I brewed — up until pretty much the end. The tea was astringent, but it had decent aromas and also gave a sweet taste. It’s just that the sweet taste was accompanied by some not-so-sweet taste. It’s bitter to a point, although the bitterness fades a bit, but also never entirely going away. There’s a sharpness to the tea that is a little unpleasant. I’m sure the heroic amount of leaves for the gaiwan has something to do with it, but the fact that a lot of it got washed out in the first few infusions in the form of really tiny bits, as well as the fact that most of that flavour should’ve been brewed out in a few infusions, mean that the remaining sharpness must be from the tea itself and not from the amount of tea.

Why is the tea darker now than what I remember last time? I don’t know. Perhaps age has something to do with it. After all, it’s been sitting around for 8 months without anybody touching it. But is it enough to give it such a big change? I’m really unsure.

Phyll suggested, at one point, that I should try it out, but somehow I couldn’t find a 2004 version of this cake, having only seen mostly the 2005 ones. Perhaps it’s the 2005 one that had the big production run, whereas the 2004 was more limited. Who knows?

It was fun to drink this tea again after having tried so many other things. I guess this is one thing we can all look forwrad to — trying teas again after a long break from them, seeing what has happened to them. I noticed that I didn’t say much of anything about the sourness in the tea, but this time it came out much more pronounced… I wonder if it’s a function of me not having noticed, or it not being there…

The wet leaves were very chopped, but I did find a few that were a little more complete

Thanks again Phyll for the sample 🙂