A Tea Addict's Journal

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Two strange teas…. strangely alike

May 25, 2007 · 4 Comments

A while ago the 2001 Menghai Factory Yiwu Zhengshan cake received a lot of attention for some reason (you can find links to other reviews through Tealogic’s entry). I tried it without knowing what it was, and didn’t really like it. I also commented that it tastes like something I already know. Now back in Beijing, it was the first thing that was on my mind — to compare it with what I think tastes quite similar, at least in my memory — the cheap but slightly problematic Keyixing brick that I bought a while back.

When I bought this brick very early on, right after I got to Beijing, I thought I found something good. Then, tasting it quite a while later, I decided it’s not so good. Something was off about it, although I couldn’t quite pinpoint what. It didn’t taste right. I now regard it as tuition. I never thought there will be another use for it — as a benchmark, of sorts.

I still have some of the sample A left for a side by side comparison — turns out it was 5.5g.

I used 5.5g from my brick too in a two gaiwan tasting.

Well, what happened?

The Keyixing brick is on the left, the Menghai on the right. You can see the colour of the liquor is very different — with the Keyixing considerably darker. So they must taste really different, right?

Wrong… despite the colour differences, the teas tasted remarkably similar. I was surprised when I first took off the lid to smell after I brewed the first infusion… while the Menghai was slightly fruitier in smell, the base of the smell and the overall profile were quite like each other. I drank the two teas…. wow… they are very much alike. The Menghai was indeed lighter, and has a bit of that fruity taste in the tea as well, but the difference really isn’t huge. The Keyixing is a bit deeper, shall we say, or heavier, with a more pronounced bitterness.

Second infusion… both have taken on a slightly sour taste. It’s more like a tartness, but it’s very obvious in both teas. When I tried the Menghai the first time, I thought it was a little sour, and this time, it was no different. What surprised me most was the way the Keyixing developed the sourness in the same infusion as well.

Then the third, the fourth…

The colour of the liquor remained different, with the Keyixing brick being darker throughout, but the tastes actually approached each other as infusions went on. The Keyixing continued its slightly more bitter note, while the Menghai is a little more airy, but one can definitely imagine how the Menghai might turn a little darker in a few years like that. Two things that came to mind when I drank them. One — when I closed my eyes, they felt more like a red tea… maybe a Ceylon, with that little tartness and astringency, but not too much, and that bitterness. It’s not a very refined red tea like Darjeeling or a smooth, sweet one like a Keemun. It was a regular, run of the mill red tea taste. Actually… a bad dianhong might taste like this.

The second thought was that if I served the 6th or 7th infusion of both to somebody who was blindfolded, and who doesn’t know that much about tea… they may very well think they are drinking the exact same tea, or at least, a different infusion of the same tea. The teas were extremely similar, and I really couldn’t find a huge difference between them. From the smell, to the taste profile, to the lack of a real huigan or throat feel (I need a better term than this!)… they were, well…. too similar.

I don’t think my Keyixing is Yiwu, and nobody has ever claimed that it is Yiwu. By extension, I also don’t think the Menghai is a Yiwu. The Menghai is slightly more tasty than the Keyixing, but that is only by a matter of some small margin, not some really obvious difference. In fact, if I were tasting it blind, I’m not entirely confident I can tell them apart.

You can see that the wet leaves show some difference.

The Menghai cake is a bit harder pressed, but also, the leaves of the Menghai cake seem a bit rougher and stiffer. I tried opening some, and they felt rough and coarse, not the smooth and soft type that the Keyixing is. Some even felt like those “yellow leaves” type of leaf. I’m not sure why.

I hate to say I don’t think very highly of the Menghai cake… and definitely not for the price it was selling at recently. The Keyixing brick was about 1/10 of the price that was recently quoted for the Menghai…. and I won’t even buy THAT now.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Late night tea tasting

May 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went out for tea with L just now. He’s flying out of town tomorrow and won’t be back in Beijing for a while, so we decided to catch up over some tea.

While we talked about various things, including his very recent experiences of drinking a number of “Hao level” tea (i.e. stuff that is at least 60 years old), we drank a tea he brought over — a 1990s “Orange Label”. It’s a very strange tea. I think something was wrong with the storage, as it smells very musty, like the old books and documents that I deal with on a daily basis. The tea is reasonable… but personally, I did not like it. It didn’t have much qi, despite the liberal amount of leaves used, and it didn’t have a lot of aftertaste other than a somewhat uncomfortable astringency that is present very early on. The aroma…. is musty old books. L wants to try to sell it, but I don’t think I’d buy it if I were a customer.

Meanwhile, he was telling me some of the news from the market, including how Menghai’s 7542 is now “merely” 13000/jian, and even at that price there are very few takers. He met somebody at the recent Tea Expo in Changsha who bought 400 jian of this stuff at 18000 a piece. You can calculate his losses. New Menghai teas are still not on the market yet, and he said (don’t know if true or not) that Menghai has problems with the quality of the maocha they received and issues with their mixing of formulas, so until that got sorted out… no new teas will show up. Seems to make sense, as it’s been about two months since anything new has come out of that factory.

I guess I’ll find out all this for myself this weekend when I make my customary trip to Maliandao.

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Two cooked samples

May 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went to the tea market today, but didn’t accomplish what I wanted, and basically didn’t drink any tea.  So I got home, and decided to drink some cooked samples I got from Teacuppa thanks to their generous offer of tea that Hobbes at the Half-Dipper organized.

Since I only got two of the three samples… I am tasting only two and don’t know which particular tea I’m missing, but the three possible candidates are:

1) 2005 Menghai Factory “Tiandiren” (Shupu)
2) 2005 Luxi Tea Co. Organic 8821 (Shupu)
3) 2005 CNNP (Shupu)

Anyway, so my two samples are from these.

I tried the first one:

Smells mildly of cooked puerh.  Nothing too exciting.  When I rinsed it and smelled the lid… it smells, oddly enough, like a young raw puerh aged 3-4 years.  I think it’s because it’s been stored with a lot of that kind of tea?  When I tasted the first infusion… the overall impression was that it was fairly weak and bland.  Ok, maybe I didn’t brew it strong enough.  I let the second infusion go longer… still thin, a little stronger in taste, but doesn’t taste quite like a cooked puerh.  A bit sour…. not too exciting, and a little off-putting.  Third infusion… really, really sour now.  This is no good.  I gave up on the tea.  If a tea doesn’t show anything good to me in three infusions (and in fact, got worse because it was really quite sour) then it’s not a tea I really want to drink, and given how weak it is, I don’t think it was going to improve.

Overall impression: weak, thin, not really like a cooked, more like a screwed up raw puerh or just something very odd.  Didn’t like it at all…

The leaves don’t even look quite right

Something wasn’t quite right about this.  I was telling vl that I can make a better cooked puerh than this.

Utterly unsatisfied, I went on to the next sample.

Looks more like a normal cooked to me, actually.  The last one was a little black.

The tea tastes a little more like a normal cooked puerh.  It’s lost that nasty pondy smell, but just has the regular cooked pu taste.  A little too bitter for a cooked puerh, in my opinion, but it’s thick, at least.  An average cooked tea…

Since the colour of the actual tea is basically some variation of soy sauce… not a lot of reason to post the colour of the tea itself.

All in all… one tea that is really not good, and one that is so so.  I have a suspicion that the bad one is the CNNP, and the so so one… the Tiandiren, perhaps?

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Chenyuan Hao Yiwu

May 19, 2007 · 1 Comment

I drank a sample today sent to me from a guy in Tainan.  It’s a Chenyuan Hao Yiwu, which is one of those Taiwanese teahouses that does their own cakes.  I think this one is from 2002 or something, although I can’t quite remember exactly when.  Regardless…

You can see it’s the “aged a bit” look.  It also smells “aged a bit”, definitely dry stored.

The first picture is of the second infusion, and the second is of about… 6th?  Something like that.  The tea is surprisingly bitter for what it’s worth.  I remember I reviewed it a long time ago, pretty much when I first arrived in Beijing, and thought it to be very drying.  I thought it had to do with Beijing storage… but apparently not.  In this sample, even though stored in Tainan, definitely a wet place, the tea is STILL drying… by about the third infusion my throat was drying up, and feeling rather uncomfortable.  Even though the flavours of the tea was fine — a bit sweet, with dried plums taste, and in the third infusion, I thought for a second I was drinking a fizz-free coca-cola — the feeling of the tea was definitely unpleasant.

It did improve after about 6-7 infusions to a better taste, but given the unpleasant feeling early on, it made me think that the tea was simply not worth it, even if it’s cheap.  Especially considering that yesterday’s tea was so smooth and without any of these problems, I can’t say I enjoyed today’s sample, generous though it was from the guy who sent it out, as I think this tea is not cheap now.

Looking at the leaves… I wonder if it’s even big tree tea.  There was definitely some “throat feel” (anybody got a better name for this feeling?  I can’t think of one) it was…. too bitter and astringent.

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Tasting the new cake

May 18, 2007 · 5 Comments

As promised, I actually tried the new cake I bought today.  Since I was talking about lighting and picture taking though, I decided to take another set of pictures in daylight to compare with the ones I took last time under artificial light.  Looks different again…

I broke off a piece

And I made the tea.  Jackson joined me today for the tasting.

The tea is smooth.  It brews up an orangy-yellow colour, and the initial taste resembles a Yiwu, but I think as it went on for a bit, I discovered that it is a little darker than a Yiwu.  Maybe it’s more like a Manzhuan tea or something, I’m not sure.  That might also explain the cheaper price.  Whatever it is… it’s not pure Yiwu old tree tea.

That, however, doesn’t detract from the tea itself.  There was some smoke, which Jackson thought was a cigarette sort of taste, although I just think it’s smoke (maybe because I’ve never smoked a cigarette?).  It went away after about two to three infusions.  The tea… tastes like…. tea.  It doesn’t leave much aftertaste at the tip of the tongue, but it leaves a strong huigan at the back with a consistent feeling around the throat area.

What’s most interesting though is that even though this is more or less a fall tea, the tea is VERY smooth… which was a little surprising.  I have known fall teas as more astringent than spring teas, but this one somehow defies expectations.  It didn’t do the “astringent after five infusions” thing either.  It really only showed up around infusion 10, and even then… only a very mild sort of astringency.  Is that a good or a bad thing?

I worried a little about its processing, and wondered if they got rid of the astringency with oolong fermentation or something.  No, I don’t think so… there was very little aroma in the cup.  It’s not fragrant enough to be an oolong tea, I think, and still retains a good bit of bitterness.

A little odd, I think, but ultimately, I think I will go back and buy a few more given the price and the quality.  I don’t think I can really pick out any problems with the tea, which is sort of a rare thing.  Other than the smoke, which I’m sure will go away (the sample I tried at the store, which has been stored in the open, wasn’t really smokey at all), I don’t think there was anything else wrong with the tea.

I guess only time will tell…

Some wet leaves for you to look at

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Tea tasting update

May 16, 2007 · Leave a Comment

A few of you have started receiving the teas I sent out.

Please DO NOT post any notes anywhere, yet.

I wish everybody to have a chance to drink it before seeing other people’s comments (which can cloud their judgement).  Therefore, if you could hold off from talking about it in public, that’ll be appreciated.  Of course, I can’t stop you from talking in private.

I’ll post up an entry in about a week’s time and ask for comments on the tea then.  You can post the comments in that entry.  I think that should give everybody a chance to drink it.

Enjoy :).  No bleach was involved in the process of preparation, by the way.  Some of you have actually asked.

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Yiwu, Yiwu, Yiwu

May 16, 2007 · 5 Comments

I had dinner with a friend and his wife today.  Between library’s closing and dinner, however, there was a two hour gap.  What to do?

Ah, there is a tea store near the place where we were meeting that I’ve gone to once to look at (but not taste) some cakes.  That was a few months ago.  Maybe I can go again and get some free tea out of them to cure my budding tea headache.  The cakes also looked nice too.

So I went there.  I think it’s a pretty upscale tea store, with a second floor that serves as a teahouse for people to drink tea there.  The cakes I looked at last time were some Yiwu pressed by themselves, supposedly, although some cakes obviously had the neifei ripped out of the cakes.  That, to me, indicates that somebody is being dishonest and selling something at an inflated price without wanting you to know where they got it from.  That’s usually the only reason why you’d do such a thing.  I didn’t feel like pointing it out, but I’m sure they have an elaborate reason, anywhere from “oh, the neifeis were mistakenly put in because they mixed up the two batches” to “we had agreed to sell these cakes to another tea house, using their neifei, but they reneged on the order”.  Whatever it is… it’s just a story.

The ripped out neifei is in special contrast with the neifeis for their 07 cakes, which are definitely their own and deeply embedded in the cake.  Why the contrast?  Even more suspect.

But anyway, when I saw the 07 cakes, I decided I want to give them a taste.  I haven’t really tried many new cakes yet, this year’s production being very slow and new teas are still not arriving on the markets in bulk (many are only getting to Kunming now, I heard).  Prices being astronomical, it also gives me less incentive to try new stuff.  But I figured… what the hell.

I asked to try the Yiwu Zhengshan.  There were four new 07 cakes on the shelf.  One is called Yiwu Zhengshan.  The other three are Mahei, Luoshuidong, and Daqishu, three smaller sub-areas of Yiwu.  The Yiwu Zhengshan is 600 RMB, Mahei is 1800, and the other two are similarly high priced (1000+).  1800 is something like… 250 USD.  Extremely high for one 357g cake, considering that maocha this year in this region costs something around 500 RMB/kg, max.  Divide it up to 357g, it means a raw cost of…. 180 RMB.  Add in overhead, rent, labour, transportation… 400 RMB would already net them a reasonable profit.  600 a good one, and 1800….. an exorbitant one.  Their 05 and 06 teas are even more expensive, with 05 Yiwus being something like 3000 a cake.  Considering that is almost two months’ salary for a storekeep… it’s quite crazy.

Anyway, so I tried the “cheapest” tea there.  It looks quite good, actually, small buds, hairy, robust.  The tea is good, tastes nice, with depth and qi, and a nice huigan.  Can’t complain too much other than tasting a little green and a little rougher on the tongue than I’d expect from a buddy spring tea.  Definitely an old tree as advertised.  Is it worth 600?  No way.

Meanwhile, I think I have impressed the owner with enough of my knowledge of Yiwu area that she thinks I’m some sort of expert.  When I’m in a tea store, I don’t mind masquerading as an expert as you get better treatment, instant discount, and nicer teas.  One of the things you can do to pretend to be an expert is actually very simple — just being able to rewrap a cake nicely gains instant credit.  When they see you can rewrap a cake beautifully, with no extra paper sticking out and no wrinkles on the front (oftentimes better than they can rewrap it themselves) then they will automatically respect you.  Try it next time you’re in a teastore — make sure you insist on rewrapping it yourself and proceed to do it right away.

Anyway… what I was getting at was that the owner wanted me to try the Mahei.  I said it’s ok, but she insisted.  Sure… I’m not going to pass up the change to drink this rather exorbitantly priced tea.  I know I won’t buy it even if it’s really good.  It’s simply too expensive for what it is.

The Mahei definitely has energy, and is also definitely old tree.  It is, however, also definitely overpriced.  In my opinion, it’s not even as good as the 600 kuai one, since it gave out quite quickly into a rather bland tea.  I’m not exactly sure why… but I’ve always found Mahei to be a bit weak, and this one’s no exception.  I have a feeling that Mahei teas, on their own, don’t do so well in aging.  I could be wrong, but I’ve had 2-3 years old Mahei tea stored in Guangzhou that didn’t impress me.  This one definitely didn’t impress me.

They tried to hardsell me, asking me which one I want and how amazing they are.  I equivocated, and eventually fled the scene.  I think I need to walk around the corner next time instead of right in front of their store.

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New cake

May 15, 2007 · 7 Comments

I bought a new cake today, haven’t done that for a while other than that one extra cake I sent out for tasting.

I went to Tianshan Tea City today after going to a talk by some professor.  It was held in the vicinity of the tea city, so I figured I’ll stop by there before eating dinner.

I wandered a bit, and ended up in a puerh store I’ve never really looked at before.  I unwrapped all their cakes and decided to taste the one Yiwu they had.  I think it’s good… definitely has notes that I’d recognize as old tree, although perhaps a little less powerful than I wanted.  But then I inquired about the price… and it was a very attractive price.  Too attractive, almost.  I tasted another tea, a Nannuo, and it was almost double the price of the Yiwu, yet not really quite as good, in my opinion.  So I ended up taking two of the Yiwus home.  I might go back and buy a whole tong… still giving it some thought.  There’s a possibility that this tea is not pure old tree, but has some younger stuff mixed in, but the taste is quite right — unmistakable Yiwu.

So here’s some pictures for you to look at.

The neipiao doesn’t say anything about curing cancer!!!

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Fannings

May 14, 2007 · 1 Comment

Back in Shanghai, and what do I drink?  Fannings.  These are little pieces of tea that are, essentially, the bottom of the pile stuff — leftover from a puerh sample.  I threw them into a cup, poured hot water, and drank (after they sank to the bottom, of course).  Surprisingly, it wasn’t that bitter, and was not that rough.  I’m not sure why, but it actually worked rather well.  I didn’t really want any of the other teas I have that can be used for the grandpa method, so I decided to do this.  I must say I’m rather happy with the results.

I still have some more fannings, maybe I should drink them all this way.

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A change of pace

May 9, 2007 · 4 Comments

I drank a dahongpao today, to help me recover from the many maochas I’ve had recently.  It certainly makes you feel different when drinking it.  I brewed it strong today, using a full 80% of dry leaves in the gaiwan.  The first infusion was a little sour, but the sourness went away by the second.  The rock aftertaste was strong, and the remaining infusions sweet.  A very welcomed change from young raw maochas.

Although, I might have to live with drinking some Qimen Hongcha the next few days, and perhaps a few cups of green teas here and there.  That’s because I’m going to go to Changshu in Jiangsu province, about an hour and half away from Shanghai by car.  As some of you have already discovered, if you ask me where I’m from I might give you different answers on different days.  If you insist on where I’m really from, however, I will tell you my family’s from Changshu.  It’s the place where my family has resided for the past 800 years.  It was only my grandfather’s generation when people dispersed a little more, and he himself left the place when he was young.  Before that, my family has spent 25 generations staying there.  So that is, in many ways, my hometown.  I’m there primarily to visit family tombs and to do some research, and perhaps, to visit a tea farm if I get the chance.

I might not get access to Xanga in the next few days, or even internet.  I will, however, try to take lots of pictures.  If you don’t hear from me for a few days, don’t worry, there was no earthquake :).

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