A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries categorized as ‘Teas’

Jabbok loose puerh revisited

March 8, 2007 · 1 Comment

Now that I am back in Boston, I went and pulled up one of the teas I left behind, the Jabbok loose puerh, that I haven’t had since I left.

The tea… is quite nice in a way. It’s got some nice camphor aromas up front, pretty intense aroma, and it’s got a bit of depth in the way of an aftertaste. However, the tea seems thin, and it’s not very rebrewable.

Third infusion

Seventh infusion

With truly good old teas, the tea will lose the colour but still has a taste — or an aftertaste. In this case, I find this tea dying fairly quickly. You can still let it sit with water and brew an infusion given long enough brewing time, but it’s not quite the same.

The leaves though tell me that these are definitely aged raw puerh. I would think this is at least 20 years old — otherwise it won’t taste the way it does

I still regret not having bought more when I had the chance. Now it’s gone forever. Oh well. I guess I have other things to drink.

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Reading leaves again

March 6, 2007 · 7 Comments

I’m bored, sitting here in EWR (Newark Liberty International Airpot) after what is probably the worst flight I’ve ever had in terms of service, and waiting now for my weather delayed connection to get into town so I can take it and then go back to Boston. I hate flying. You can guess what airline I’m flying by deduction.

So while I’m sitting here, bored, I figured I might as well blog, especially since I have pictures to show you. Thank god for Wifi in the airport (too bad you have to pay here — in HKG the Wifi at the airport is free!).

On the plane I’ve developed the habit of drinking the Yiwu maocha I have if I happen to be carrying it around, and this time on my lovely 14.5 hours flight it was no exception. I was finally starting to feel a bit of the caffeine headache at around 11pm Hong Kong time, after not having had tea for a whole day and some, so I took out my bag, brought it to the galley where the lazy flight attendants were sitting around reading Star!, and I asked for some hot water and put my tea in it.

The tea itself I won’t describe, as there is not much to say — it’s mild, sweet, kinda nice, kinda bland. The water is never hot enough for tea on the plane, so it’s really not a great way to drink tea. Oh well, it still beats the whatever mystery tea they are serving (I think it’s some really bad, overbrewed jasmine — didn’t try it this time).

Anyway, after drinking the tea, I laid out all the tea leaves I used and took some pictures, as it was a good way to kill time, among other things.

Some comparative pics — comments after

For the first two pictures in the above three… you can see two similarly sized leaves that are shaped quite differently. The ones on the left, with the thin, elongated shape and the pointy tip, is what I understand as a typical Yiwu leaf. The ones on the right, with the more rounded shape and no pointy tip, is what I understand to be NOT Yiwu like. I think that sort of shape is much more common in Menghai area leaves… nannuo, banzhang, jingmai, that sort of thing.

The third pic in the above three has a few broken leaves. The one on the top left is really pointy, and is only a tip of what looks to be a very large leaf. The two in the middle… the left one looks more like a Menghai type leaf, while the one on the right looks more like a Yiwu area type leaf. I’m not sure if this is really sceintific to any degree, and supposedly, with older trees, all the leaves look different because they are not planted by human intervention (i.e. not transplanted with branches from older trees). Instead, they were planted long ago using seeds. This means that the teas can have different genetic makeup. However, it does seem that different areas do have different kinds of teas, and so looking at the shape of the leaves can say something about where the teas came from. If I am not mistaken in this case… then I was probably right when I said, long time ago, that I thought this particular maocha tastes slightly confused with a few different kinds of teas mixed in, and not tasting quite like pure Yiwu.

I would really encourage everybody to take pictures of brewed leaves, and post them up. It is especially instructive when in a particular cake that is advertised as “xxx” that you find different kinds of leaves that look drastically different. It might be a sign of blending.

Lastly… a picture of a very nice, very furry bud. This is what I guess you can call “two spears, one flag”. Too bad the flag is slightly broken. I had to unpeel the bud myself to reveal the smaller bud in the middle, so perhaps this is really a “one spear, one flag”. I could sort of see a even smaller bud in there, but couldn’t quite get it out.

Back to waiting…

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Rougui

March 4, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I stayed at home today, and had a rougui given to me free by one of the tea vendors on Maliandao.

The leaves are a little green, and indeed, this is a relatively light roasted rougui.

The tea is…. quite nice. Thick, with a deep aftertaste, and a nice up front aroma. The tea is not particularly complex, but it lasts many infusions. Then again, I’m not a huge fan of lightly roasted oolongs. Even though the tea is still relatively pleasant to drink, it doesn’t really cut it for me. I think for Wuyi teas, I still prefer stronger stuff that is more heavily roasted. It got slightly boring at the end.

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Old teashops

March 1, 2007 · 12 Comments

I went to Saiwan with B, a HK tea friend, today, to find teas, old teas.

Saiwan is even further West than Sheung Wan, where Bonham Strand is, and is home to many, many, many stores that sell various kinds of Chinese delicacy, dried seafood, medicine, and that kind of thing. There are basically lots of old stores in that area. I’ve never been there until yesterday. It’s a very very interesting area to visit.

The teashop in question looks rather old. There are more in that area, many of them are “upstairs” teashops that only cater to wholesale businesses. In fact, right above this teashop is one such wholesale store, and according to the guy at the teashop downstairs, those wholesalers do big business. Each order is something like 100 jian of tea or more, and their annual business, per wholesaler, can be something like $3 million USD. Not a small sum at all.

The teas we ended up buying were of the broken cakes variety. I got some broken GYGs, vintage unknown. They tasted good enough, and similar to the one sample I tried in Beijing. I think the guy who gave me that bit also got it from these people. It’s quite a bargain and I’m really quite happy with it.

More interestingly, we also tried a poo-poo puerh. This is tea that is, basically, the feces of bugs that eat teas. In fact, the name of the tea given by this teashop is exactly that — “bug shit tea”. Not exactly an elegant name, by any stretch of imagination. Yet, this is really quite a novelty item.

The bug shit tea is basically collected as a by-product of regular storage of tea in large quantities in a wetter storage facility. Wet-storage facility is generally located on a mountain slope in a basement or some such, which means greater level of natural moisture and probably better retention of such moisture. The bugs, I guess, grow naturally in such an environment. When they take out the tongs of tea to sell, they take apart the packaging for the tong of tea, and brush off all the dust and what not. When they do that, however, in the bottom of the tong there will be collected some bug droppings. This is what they collect for this tea. They are really tiny pellets, each about… half an mm in diameter? Black, smelling like old puerh, and unremarkable. When you brew it, you do it using about half a teaspoon of tea, put it in one of those mesh filters that you use to filter your tea, and pour water. The water will drip through the filter very very slowly…. eventually going through.

The liquor is VERY thick. It’s quite strong in taste initially, yielding a rather aromatic tea with smooth texture. The taste is clean. It doesn’t last too many infusions. No, I don’t have any stomach problems right now, many hours after the fact. The tea is really quite interesting. The mom of the family that owns this shop is now 87, and she drinks this everyday. These are truly old tea hands…. with experience that none of us can ever match.

Sorry, no pictures. I wasn’t prepared with a camera.

We ended up with a good bounty of loose puerh of various kinds, and B also bought a few oz of the poo-poo tea. We then went to the BTH to sit and chat for a little more. It was, all in all, quite a fun day.

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Back to the regularly scheduled programme

February 28, 2007 · 2 Comments

Of course I didn’t live in a tea vacuum in the past three days. One can hardly avoid tea in Hong Kong, especially for a tea fanatic like me.

Aside from the restaurant teas I’ve had the past few days, I’ve had a long (and I mean long) list of teas from various places.

Of most interest was a Yiwu cake I had at one of the Sheung Wan teahouses. It was very, very good. It was also very expensive for what it is (3 years old). I’m debating whether to get a few cakes of it or not. The good thing is, it displays similar characteristics as the tong of tea I bought recently, so I think I am in the right territory in terms of finding really good Yiwu. The downside is I’m not sure if I can find such good tea again even if I go to Yiwu, and I am not sure given the way the market operates there, if I can actually find the teas I want.

I also had some other interesting stuff. Some of it is loose aged stuff… one of which was quite decent, and which I might stock up a bit on for personal consumption. Others were so so, or downright poor.

Among the bad stuff I’ve had was a cake of puerh, allegedly from the early 1980s, that is on sale at the BTH for what seems to be a ridiculously cheap sum of $200 USD. Now, early 80s tea for $200 is, I assure you, very very cheap.

Let me show you some pictures

Looks good enough, right? I think it’s a 7542 type of tea. Not entirely sure. It’s wet stored all right, since it’s got the signature wet stored look — a slight coating of white stuff on the tea.

Well…. the first infusion had an odd taste in it, and was somewhat rough and bitter. It was thin. Yet…. the colour looks great

Yet…. something was wrong with the tea. After another 4 infusions, we stopped. It was just…. not good. It was bitter, thin, and had some weird tastes. There’s a reason why it’s cheap….

Even the wet leaves look good

This is definitely stuff that can fool a beginner.

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Disneyland with niece and dad

February 23, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Which means no tea… until 7pm. I was, needless to say, having a bit of a caffeine withdrawal headache, since 4pm, in fact.

I came back and drank some of the Ying Kee puerh in a cup… it serves the purpose. It’s mostly cooked stuff, I think, with some raw mixed in, and just… well…. it downs well, if nothing else. The other great alternative is drinking some Wuyi tea, with a low amount of leaves in the cup. That also works well.

My girlfriend, who’s Korean, tells me that Koreans don’t have the ability to drink tea with leaves in the cup — apparently to lots of people it’s quite a difficult thing to do. In Hong Kong at least, and definitely in China as well, you learn how to use your teeth to filter out the leaves while getting the liquor into your mouth. With some teas, like biluochun, it’s quite difficult. With others, like Wuyi or puerh, it’s also doable.

At the end of the day…. that’s how most people in China drink their tea.

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A rather eventful day, tea or otherwise

February 22, 2007 · 4 Comments

I started my day early with a breakfast at Lin Heung Lau in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. One of the old style Hong Kong “Teahouses”, it’s a place where you go very early in the morning, sit there for a few hours while reading the paper, order a few dim sums and eating them at a leisurely pace (very very slow — you do not order a whole bunch and chow them down and head out. That’s not the point). You meet people you know and talk to them. You chat with the waiters. You enjoy the tea while you’re there.

This is our remnants (the steamers were taken away by the time I took the picture). Yes, the things on the dish are remains of what were chicken feet. The tea is wet stored puerh. The other people at the table we do not know, but some of the met up with each other, evidently friends of some sort, and were chatting, but they didn’t come together and it was obvious that they didn’t plan on meeting at the place. It’s really a neighbourhood place where people just go and meet others who they know anyway. We saw lots of “Gong Hey Fat Choy” greetings from various people to one another. It was very interesting to go today, and I think I will go again, although I might bring my own tea next time. By the way, the little card on the table says “Table reserved for staff meal — 10:45am”

(Not tea related, but interesting nonetheless) Then after lunch, in a mall, there were teams of lion-dancing people who came to the mall to perform. There’s a website that explains all this in more detail than I should post here, and you can look at it here. There are links at the bottom of the page (don’t ask me about the website’s design) that will lead to more information on this subject. You can, of course, also read the wikipedia article here.

I did take a video of the dancing being performed. Basically, stores put up a bundle of vegetables and a red envelope (with money inside) and hang it somewhere from their door. The lion will stop at every door where such a bundle is hanged, and will do more or less the following in the video that I took:

This wasn’t a particularly energetic version of a lion dance, but it serves the purpose of showing you sort of what you can see. It’s better live, and it’s also better if there are two lions (or even more). This is in the Southern Lion style (explained in more detail in the website I linked to). Quite an unexpected surprise and I spent some time watching them before moving on.

Moving on to tea tasting with K, a friend I met last time when I was in Hong Kong. He had some Zhongcha brand Traditional Character cake, and he wanted to compare it to the samples I had (from YP)… and we did.

YP:

K:

YP left, K right

The verdict is that YP’s is a little better in terms of aroma…. and K’s is slightly smoother. His was probably a little wetter stored, while YP’s was probably stored a little better. They were both quite good, and very, very nice to drink. It just goes down so smooth and sweet. The difference, if drunk separately, wouldn’t be very obvious. His was also compressed a little more (mine has been separated into pieces through traveling). I think it made somewhat of a difference. The colour of the liquor, however, is quite different, and the difference stayed throughout. The darker didn’t necessarily mean it was more flavourful, however. It was just darker. It was really interesting to see how the colour was so different yet the taste was not.

We also had some other stuff, but relatively unremarkable. There was some 15 years old liu an… barely drinkable. I don’t know if I should buy any liu an given the long aging you need before the tea is anywhere near good.

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Back to the BTH

February 21, 2007 · 1 Comment

Yeah, I know, it’s not very exciting when I’m in Hong Kong, because I just keep going back to the Best Tea House for drinks.

I tried a bunch of stuff there, as usual. I finally got to try the Best Tea House version of the Yuanyexiang, which tastes almost exactly the same as the one I got in Beijing. This is quite reassuring, as I bought it for a fraction of the price they charge in Hong Kong.

Another noteworthy tasting today was another sample cake of the Zhenchunya Hao. This particular one is a little poorly stored — probably got wet at some point, somehow. It looks like a slightly wet stored cake, and it tastes like it too. Funny enough, it also tastes a bit like the Yuanyexiang… I think this is what some might call the “storage” taste. The tea itself, after washing itself off the storage taste, is a little on the fruity side, but it’s not as good as other examples I’ve tried before. Price rise since July 2006 — 60%

I also tried a few different high fire oolongs/tieguanyins. It was interesting to taste them back to back.

As I was contemplating leaving, sjschen came back, and so we proceeded to drink one of the cakes I recommended him to try but didn’t get to last time. I bought a few of these last time I was in Hong Kong, and thought it was good enough for the price. To show you how weird young puerh pricing is, this cake is selling for less in Hong Kong than in mainland (in the only place I’ve seen). Granted, it wasn’t on Maliandao, so the markup is high, but higher than the Best Tea House? It’s odd.

I still think it wasn’t a bad purchase. I won’t say it’s the greatest thing ever, but it’s not too bad. I like the fact that the feeling of drinking this tea lingers on long after you’ve swalloed the tea, and it extends quite far down the throat.

Anyway, some pictures

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Cooked loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen

February 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

When I went to Bonham Strand a few days ago I bought a little loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen. The owner of the place, who is a very kind old gentleman with a lot of knowledge of the tea business, described this tea as having been through “swimming” storage. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’d imagine it’s a little wet.

I should note here, by the way, that the term in Chinese that describes dry or wet storage is “shicang 濕倉” (wet) and “gancang 乾倉” (dry). The word “cang” in this case is better translated as “storage” as in “storage condition”, but the word literally means “warehouse”. So you can also translate those terms as “wet warehoused” and “dry warehoused”, or some such. When talking about a tea that has been wet stored, it is usually only referred to, in Chinese, as “this tea has been through storage”. This issue led Mr. Lam to quip “people have been asking me a lot lately whether this or that tea has been in storage. What kind of a dumb question is that? Where am I supposed to store my tea if not in my warehouse? Under my bed??”

Anyway, Chinese lesson over. The tea, when dry, looks like any other loose puerh…

Almost impossible to tell what it is. All I know is that the grade of the tea is fairly high.

The liquor is a dark matter…. slightly opaque. It’s got none of the “fermentation” taste of a young cooked tea. Instead, it’s just …. old, kinda sweet, and somewhat bland in a way. Smooth, although not 100% smooth. There was a slight unpleasantness in the back of the throat… very slight, but detectable. This is supposedly a by product of wet storage that hasn’t been fully aired-out, so to speak.

The wet leaves are…. not too remarkable

But the fairness cup, after using it, shows how much stuff was dissolved into the tea liquor… and the viscosity of the tea.

The reason I’m drinking this at all (I’m sure some of you are wondering why) is that ZH from Beijing wants me to look for some cooked puerh for him, preferably aged. This is supposedly about 10 years old. He wants to try putting ginseng with the tea in a sealed jar to let the tea be infused with ginseng smell, sort of as an experiment. I’m going to send him a sample of this and see if it meets his approval.

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Passing the year

February 17, 2007 · 3 Comments

Today’s the final day of the year of the dog, and tomorrow (in about an hour) we usher in the year of the pig. In China people would be lighting firecrackers like crazy at midnight, and sleeping might be difficult for a few hours. In Hong Kong, no such things are allowed (all firecrackers/fireworks are outlawed — too dangerous in a place with such a high concentration of population). Nevertheless, people celebrate, mostly by eating dinner at home or outside, but definitely with family. This is about the equivilent of the Thanksgiving Dinner in the US, where families try their best to gather together and have a long dinner. We just finished ours.

During the day today, as you can imagine, it was rather quiet outside, but a little gathering was going on in the Best Tea House. It was, surprisingly, an exceptionally busy day for them. I stopped there earlier with my cousin, but it was so crowded with (mostly Japanese) tourists that we had to take a walk. When we came back, I saw somebody unexpected — sjschen of the LJ Community. He is in town visiting, and by chance found the Best Tea House a few days ago. We ended up chatting a good bit about the teas they had, and started brewing some.

Among the teas we drank was a somewhat wet stored cake, which tasted like a 10-15 years old tea and was still a little sour/green in the undertones, but generally starting to taste like aged teas. Then it was a loose tea from, supposedly, the Menghai area. It’s starting to taste like a real old tea, with a shadow of the Red Labels I’ve had. It’s not quite as strong in the qi, but the taste is very similar. It’s sometimes quite interesting to see these changes in puerh.

Then we tried the puerh I bought for Rosa, which I personally now think is good value for the money. It’s not a great tea now, but it has some signs of a good one to come. The chaqi is strong and the tea is generally good. Rosa was happy with the purchase.

We finished with a high fired tieguanyin. Always nice to drink such things after a bunch of puerh. We didn’t get to the one cake I recommended sjschen to try, but oh well, what can you do. Maybe they went back to the store after dinner? I’m not sure. Either way, we had to leave and so we all left. It was nice meeting another tea friend in person, and it reminds me again of the real benefits I get from this blog — I get to meet all sorts of people from all over the world, people who I would have never met otherwise, all because we share one common interest.

I wish you all xinnian kuaile (Happy New Year), gongxi facai (wishing you to be prosperous – standard Cantonese new year’s greeting), and most importantly, xinnian he haocha (drink good tea in the New Year!)

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