A Tea Addict's Journal

Finally, the last of the six packs of maocha was drunk.  It was the Youle maocha, and I must say…. sometimes last really is least.

I did the same thing I did the past 5 times, warming the gaiwan, opening the bag, taking a picture:

Then taking another one when I dumped the tea into the gaiwan:

My thoughts about this is that it looked slightly greener than the other ones, and also…. it looked more like white tea than any of the other ones.  All the other teas yelled “Yunnan maocha for puerh”, but this one… if you just showed it to me, I might have mistaken it for a white tea of some unknown variety.  The smell is still very much that of a very young maocha, but the looks…. is not, not really.

I washed the leaves, brewed it up…. it was, just like the last five, a very thick tea.  The bubbles don’t burst no matter how you blow on them.  The tea looks like it has a film of stuff on top in the sense that there was a sort of tension on the surface of the tea that is visible.  It looks slightly like a runny jelly rather than a cup of tea.  All the maochas shared this, which I think is a good thing.  A thin tea is always a recipe for disaster.  Or just a bad tea.

It tasted… peachy?  A little bit.  A little less bitter than yesterday’s despite having a little more leaves in it.  There were also some notes that were similar to the Wangzhi and the Gedeng… the very tea-ish taste with clear bitterness in the back dissipating into a huigan.  The cooling effect coats more of the front of the mouth than yesterday’s, which was mostly in the back.  The “throat feel” is not as strong, but still there.

However, the tea didn’t last as many infusions as those of previous days.  Somewhere around maybe infusion 12-15, the tea started giving up on me.  I’m not exactly sure why.  Also, now, as I’m typing it, I am no longer tasting the tea.  All the previous 5, with the possible exception of the Yiwu (since I drank a few things afterwards) left me feeling the tea hours after they were downed.  This one… didn’t last as long.

I think one reason could be the tenderness of the tea.  If you look at the wet leaves… the leaves are very small.  I also wonder if it’s because this is partly tea that are of the smaller leafed variety that supposedly populate some areas of the Six Mountains.

With the ever-present toothpick, you can see that these were smaller than leaves of the previous days.  Also, these were pretty much the only really intact ones I could find today.  The rest were all more broken up, a little on the thin side, or both.  It seems like this sample just wasn’t as good and robust as those of the previous 5.

This is, of course, not to say that this was a bad tea.

The six samples have all been very enjoyable.  The contrast in their flavours have been interesting, as has the differences, however small, in how my mouth reacted to them.  I remember reading, at some point, how different area teas have different reactions in one’s mouth — if the feelings are in a certain “zone” it could be an indicator of a tea from a certain area, sort of like a signature.  I never quite believed it, and I’m still not sure I subscribe to it entirely.  However, I did notice differences in where I was feeling certain things.  More importantly, it is worth remembering that while flavours can be faked or masked, where one feel’s a sensation of coolness (if there is any at all!), the duration of such feeling, the qi, the “throat feel”, and that sort of thing are, I’d say, impossible to fake for even the best forgers.  Therefore… ultimately it is those aspects of a tea that differentiates a merely reasonable Yiwu from a great Yiwu, and ditto for all other tea areas.  I think what I have noted here is that every single one of these teas had a strong, obvious, and usually immediate huigan, with a lasting feeling in the back of the mouth or even the throat of some sort of coolness.  This is not a sensation that can be found in every tea, and I think is a must if a tea claims to be “old” or “ancient” tree (arbor, on the other hand, can be a pretty young tree with no claim to an old age).

I feel like I should give acknowledgment where it’s due.  The company that gave me these samples is:

And their website can be found here. That said, I must say that I have only tried a few cakes of theirs in Beijing.  Quality varies, and prices are not too low.  They do have pretty decent quality teas though.  Anyway, I think that’s enough publicity for the (quite instructive!) free samples they gave me.

I think I will put these reviews in the links to the left so you can come back and look at the pictures with ease.  I may also re-taste these once L gets back to Shanghai, as he has a set, and so does AC.

I was debating what to drink today.  Was my body ready for another dose of these maocha?  It’s a tempting thought.  It’s actually really nice today, sunny, with clear air.  The roses you saw a few days ago are now in full bloom:

After deliberating and looking at the unopened bag of Wangzhi maocha… I decided to give it a go.  After all, this bag looks less packed than the Gedeng.  I think I’ll be fine.

Here are some of the contents once I opened the bag… the leaves look a little thinner than the Gedeng and the Manzhuan, and on part with the Yibang and the Yiwu.  Don’t get me wrong though.  They’re still good looking leaves.

And here is a particular leaf that you’ll see again, later:

Ready to brew:

In goes the hot water, and out comes the tea…. some leaves were crushed, somehow, before I opened the bag, even.  So this time there was a little more broken bits than before.  Oh well.

The tea brews up a similarly coloured one as the Gedeng… slightly lighter, perhaps.

The colour turned out a little blue…

Wangzhi is west of Gedeng, but it isn’t showing up as strong as the Gedeng tea.  I think amount of leaves in the gaiwan has something to do with it, but also, the colour of the tea itself changes slightly from region to region, at least from what I’ve seen so far.

The taste is vegetal.  If Yiwu has some sweet honey notes, Manzhuan is a little more spicy/heavy/fruity, Yibang is almost minty, and Gedeng is just… tea like, then Wangzhi is vegetal, or at least this sample is.  There’s a slight feeling of eating some slightly dried vegetables, somehow, when drinking this tea.  It’s not unpleasant like some nasty green teas.  Rather… it’s a little refreshing that way.  The huigan is strong, although not too deep, but the whole back end of the mouth as well as the beginning of the throat is coated in that coolness that is an indication of great tea.

It didn’t last quite so long today, but it also didn’t turn astringent on me.  Astringency is the lowest so far among all the teas, and that’s quite an accomplishment.

Lots of photos of wet leaves today

That big leaf on the bottom is the same one as the one I told you to pay attention to when dry.  I’m quite certain they’re the same one, given the size and composition.  I noticed that the blacker dry teas tend to show up dark-green with red stem quite often when wet.

Veins are really popping on this one:

One left — Youle, the westernmost of the six mountains.  Hopefully I’ll have time to drink it tomorrow.

I am leaving the Wangzhi and the Youle maochas for another day, for my body can no longer handle the rather powerful teas that the last four have presented.  While it is certainly one of the most enjoyable and interesting series of tasting I’ve done so far, it seems like the cumulative effect of drinking these things has taken a toll and I should probably conserve my energy by resting for a day or two before resuming.

Since I have to buy a little cake breaking tool, and hoping to get an electric scale, I went to Tianshan today with Jackson today to get some stuff.

I did find a pick, but those small electric scales were nowhere to be found.  However, I think I have secured the good will of a teashop girl there who is willing to let me use her big scale for the purpose of dividing up the samples.  So I am going to go back there tomorrow, tea in hand, with empty bags at the ready, and parcel them out into proper sized samples so I can mail them out.  I am hoping to send them all in the mail by the end of the week.  Sorry for taking so long.

Here is a picture of the tea:

Looks like some other green substance, doesn’t it?  :>

You might wonder… why two bags?

That’s because I found another cake today that I thought would be an interesting contrast to the one I was going to send out originally, and after deliberating it with Jackson… I decided to buy an extra cake to pass around.  So everybody will be getting two samples instead of one.  I hope your stomach can handle it 🙂

Some of you have asked how you can send money to me… if you wish please paypal to the email I gave out and it will be fine, although I discovered that if you need to use credit card, I will get charged, and given the small amounts of money we’re dealing with it makes that all rather silly.  So if the only way you can use paypal is through a credit card, then don’t worry about it :)  Mailing itself should cost less than I imagined originally, and so I think even with the extra weight of the second tea, we should be fine :).

I have more or less broken up the cake, and I think I have collected everybody’s address.

I just need to find something to weigh the pieces into proper sized packs, and then send them out.

Don’t worry, I’m not soaking them in bleach, not yet anyway. 🙂

Continuing the series — maocha from Gedeng mountain, which is west of Manzhuan and Yibang.

These leaves are heavier than the Yibang ones yesterday, and I’d say more or less on par with the Manzhuan stuff two days ago.  There’s more tea in this bag than the last two days, and I foolishly thought I’ll be ok…

The tea brews a more bitter brew than anything that has come along so far.  The first three infusions have a floral note to it, although only a fleeting one.  The tea is thick, and heavy.  You can feel the bitterness going in, covering the mouth, and after swallowing… the huigan comes a little slower than the other maochas I’ve tried so far.  There’s a bit of delay for this tea, interestingly enough.  When the floral note goes, what’s replacing it is a sort of bitter “tea” taste, for lack of a better word.  I really don’t know how else to describe it other than it tastes like… tea.  Young puerh tea, sure, but tea.  It doesn’t taste like anything else that immediately comes to mind, but it is unmistakably tea.

Now… the huigan is a little more focused on this tea, mostly hitting the area at the far back of the mouth and beginning of the throat in a very small but concentrated fashion.  The feeling is long lasting, but it doesn’t extend quite as deep as the Yibang or the Manzhuan.  The cha qi is not obvious at first, but after about four or five infusions… it hit me, really, really hard.  I was getting dizzy at one point, needing to walk away from the tea and do something else before going back to it.  There was definitely a tea high there, and this is rare for just one tea.  I would normally get a bit affected by a tea after a few in a long tasting session, but the last time I had this feeling of being hit hard by one tea was … I don’t even remember.

I ended up taking out some leaves to weaken the tea, so that I can continue tasting it to see how it develops.  I didn’t last too long after that before calling it quits.  It was getting difficult to swallow — not because the tea is bad, but because I could feel myself not handling it so well at this point.

Two shots of the liquor – before and after I took leaves out

Something I have noticed that is common throughout the four teas I’ve had so far — the progress of taste.  First you get the “mountain specific” taste from the tea.  The teas, as they are spring teas, are smooth.  Then in about infusion 4-5, the tea starts getting a little astringent, partly because of the slightly longer brewing time now (depending on the case — 10-15s) and partly because the stuff comes out now no matter what, I think.  The mountain specific taste loses a bit of its luster, and slowly changes to the ubiquitous “sweet water” taste that a young puerh will typically get after around infusion 10 or so.  By that time the astringency will fade, and you return to a rather pleasant, if slightly more watery, tea.  Many younger puerhs, at this point, will be entirely boring to drink and the drinker would’ve given up by now.  A truly good one will keep delivering a strong “tea” taste, for lack of a better word, that accompanies the “sweet water”.

I personally think that part of the reason for the high amounts of tea used in such tastings and the relatively short infusion times used is to precisely test how long such teas actually last and how complex it is, without doing the otherwise undrinkable and entirely not-enjoyable 5-minute brews.  I could’ve brewed these using the 5-minute method, but it would’ve been very, very boring and a waste of otherwise very fine tea.  If I have more of the teas, then I probably could’ve done it as a basis for comparison.  Since I only have one sample of each, I wanted to make the most of it.  If you add too little leaves, the progression basically gets compressed and the infusion-by-infusion change is not nearly as obvious.  Very quickly a tea will get to the “sweet water” stage.  While a good tea will still deliver you a nice, pleasant drink, I think the question of HOW a young puerh gets to that point is in many ways more important, because at the end of the day… that’s what people enjoy drinking the most in an aged pureh, not the sweet, rather boring and mellow taste, but the many changing flavours that precede the sweet mellow water that comes at the end of a session.

Anyway… shots of the wet leaves.  Slightly different shape again, but largely keeping the same look (except one small leaf).  I took pictures of two set of leaves today, because I took some pictures of the leaves I took out the first time, and when I was done, I took more pictures….

And the final picture is of a much drier leaf — you can see the amount of hair on the back of the leaf

Continuing the parade — Yibang Maocha.

Yibang is north of Manzhuan, so it’s sort of two steps away from Yiwu.  I think from the maps I’ve seen, if you want to go from Yiwu to Yibang you pretty much must pass through Manzhuan or surrounding areas.  The dry leaves are a little skinny compared to the Manzhuan, yet a little bigger than the Yiwu.  It seems more delicate.

The tea brews up a lighter coloured liquor than yesterday’s

I did a little research, and it does seem that Manzhuan brews a deeper coloured tea than does Yiwu or Yibang.

The taste of the tea is… quite light, actually.  Light in the sense that it is delicate, just like the leaves.  Light is not the same as bland, for this is a strong tea.  Not quite as strong as the Manzhuan yesterday with the penetration that it achieved, but the huigan is still very obvious and long lasting.  If Yiwu is a little honey like, and Manzhuan a little spicy/fruity, then perhaps Yibang is a little minty, with a more up front bitterness that is not unpleasant.  Rather, the bitterness is accompanied by what one might get from eating mint.  It’s a very nice kind of bitterness and goes away quickly, leaving the aroma of the tea in your mouth.

One thing I have noticed with all three of these teas so far is that there is almost no residual aroma in the cup, the lid of the gaiwan, or in the fairness cup.  If anything, the aroma on the lid is that of what they call “qing odor”, which is that slightly off smell that one gets from many young puerhs.  This is not supposed to be taken as a sign of bad tea at all.  Rather, it is a sign that the kill-green process was done at a temperature that was not too high.  If there’s a very nice, fragrant, honey (or beans, or nutty, etc) aroma on the lid, then it could be a sign of the tea having gone through processing that are faulty in some ways — either through fermentation (oolong processing) or too high a temperature (green tea).  Neither of them is commonly considered a good thing for aging potential.  It takes a few years for a tea to clear this smell and turn it into something else, as far as I’ve seen.

The tea lasted a similarly long time as yesterday’s.  It was rainy today, so the sky was darker and I took the pictures of the wet leaves inside.  It’s too bad, but this will have to do.

The leaves are lovely.  They are small.  Yet they show strength.  So far, I think the strongest tea is the Manzhuan.  Yiwu is the easiest on the tongue for the novice, and is also the one that has the most alluring aroma, but it lacks some of the strength of the other two.  I think I brewed it with slightly less hot water, which might have been a factor.  L still has a sample of the Yiwu, as does Action Jackson.  I am hoping I can convince them to bring a sample over so I can use my same water/tools to brew the Yiwu again for a proper comparison.

I’m really enjoying drinking these maocha so far, and I really hope I can somehow find more of them, even if I have to pay.  I don’t know if they’ll sell them, but I’ve asked.  Let’s hope they do, because I want to keep some samples around for tasting a year later, 5 years later, and maybe even 10 years from now to see how they change over time.  It will be an invaluable tool.  But there’s no need to think ahead so far… tomorrow, I think I’ll go with Gedeng, which is west of Manzhuan and Yibang.

I decided to make this a series and continue the maocha tasting.  I had the Yiwu yesterday, so today we’re moving north to Manzhuan.

Two shots of dry leaves

They are bigger than the Yiwu leaves yesterday.  The Yiwu looks more delicate.  This looks more robust.

Just brewing for myself today, so I took out the smaller table with the tea setup… unfortunately, the tea tray leaks a little :(.  This is why i should never buy these dirt cheap bamboo trays.  I’ve had two now that leak on arrival.

The tea brewed up a nice liquor… I had some trouble with the colour balance again, and this one is showing up slightly yellower than the real thing.  Another picture has it coming out a little blue.  I can’t quite get it right.

The tea, however… is incredible.  The sensation of having drunk something goes all the way down to the bottom of my throat, into my neck, and at one point during the second up, I felt as if it was hitting my stomach.  The coolness and huigan lingers forever.  The chaqi is obvious.  This is a great tea.

The taste is not quite like a Yiwu, yet there are some vague similarities.  If Yiwu is a honey-like sweetness when young, then this is a more spicy/fruity taste.  I’m not good with aromas, but I think you can tell it’s different.  This tea, though, I feel is better than the Yiwu sample.  There has been talk that Yiwu is simply overharvested, and I won’t be surprised.  Sometimes I wonder if a place like Manzhuan is better because the teas are less in demand.

The tea lasted something like 20 infusions before I gave up on it.  Yes… it could still go on if I wanted it to.  It could’ve lasted 30, I think.  I had enough tea though.

Halfway through a few birds started to sing a chorus.  It was rather nice:

And the obligatory shots of the wet leaves… you can see these are larger than the ones yesterday, yet it’s not devoid of small buds.  I think this is still very much a spring tea.

It was a memorable tea.

On an entirely unrelated note….

I’ve been toying with the idea of distributing samples of a young raw puerh.  I think I can make 20 slots open by breaking up a cake.  A few are already locked up as I have been discussing this idea with a few people.  I won’t tell you what it is, as I don’t want you to have any presumption going into the tea.  I find it’s more fun that way (having been inspired by Davelcorp’s A&B).  I am thinking of sending around 12g per sample, which should be plenty.  If you think you need more, somehow, do let me know.

The only requirement would be for you to tell me what you think of the tea, and not necessarily in public.  I only want honest opinions, so if you think it tastes like dirt mixed in with bleach, I want to know that instead of “it has a perculiar aroma”.  Don’t worry, this is not a ploy to poison you all.  A few weeks from now I’ll probably post an entry here to collect all your opinions.  If you don’t want yours shared, you can just tell me in private.  No, no prize here, sorry.

I do ask that if you could…. I would appreciate a small ($1 or $2) donation to help defray the costs of sending mail.  I will figure out how much it costs to send letters from here to international destinations, but I can’t imagine it costing more than $2.  This is not essential at all to receive a sample.

Please reply to this entry if you want to join in, or you can email me at (MarshalN) at gmail.