A Tea Addict's Journal

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Reading tea leaves

December 15, 2006 · 2 Comments

Today I drank the pieces I broke off yesterday from the cheap brick that I got in Hong Kong:

The pieces in question:

I realize that now that I have a scale … I am actually using less leaves. I never realized that sometimes I was putting upwards of 10g in my teapots/gaiwans. I ended up with about 7g of tea in my puerh pot.

Anyway, so I brewed it, but this time without the two long washes that I subjected it to last few times I made this tea. I originally did it because I was worried about my health (the tea looks a little nasty, with little white bugs on it). Now that I’ve been airing them out for close to 4 months here in this rather dry weather (I’ve kept it out of the tea closet, figuring this is better to get rid of the off taste/smell), I feel more confident with the tea.

This time the off taste is basically gone. Whereas the first infusion when I first tried it was a slightly odd, and uncomfortable, aroma of something sort of medicinal, now it is a more orthodox “somewhat aged” puerh taste. There’s still something off about it though… but the tea goes down smoothly and nicely enough. It’s very soothing for the throat… doesn’t feel dry at all, and there’s a sense of coolness that I like that extends down the throat. This is mainly the reason why I bought the tea to begin with.

Looking at the leaves… I think I am learning a little more about the particular variety of tastes in this tea

Look at them…. tell me what’s wrong

Some closeups

Basically…. I think the tea is a raw/cooked mix. The picture of the pile of stuff in a corner are the big, beefy leaves that look like this when unfurled

And then you have the other stuff… skinny, black, dried up looking things, that disintegrate when touched. I don’t think it’s bad storage, but rather, I think it’s just cooked puerh. This might explain the slightly odd mix of tastes. There’s that nice sweet, mellow, smooth nature of cooked puerh in the back, coupled with the punch of the raw. The cooling sensation produced by this tea cannot be a product of cooked stuff. The leaves also are not, mostly, cooked leaves. There are, however, a scattering of the black pieces that fall apart when I try to unfold them. If the tea is uniformly like that, then I’d say it’s probably bad storage, but it’s not… some of the leaves are incredibly green (as you can see) and a lot of it are brown…. I think it’s just a mix.

It might also be the case that this tea is recompresed maocha mixed in with cooked puerh. The bad thing is that this is probably done to cheat people (i.e. saying this is well aged tea). The raw leaves have some years, as most of them are some shade of brown. But it’s not all old… but then, maybe the stuff that are more green are the ones in the middle of this very tightly compressed brick, and thus having had less aging done to them?

I really don’t know, and it’s a bit of a mystery — a mystery that I can’t pinpoint for certain beyond what I’ve just said. However, I enjoy drinking it, and I think it will get better with age. After all, one of the favourite puerhs I’ve tasted… the Zhongcha Simplified Character from YP, is a cooked/raw mix. That one is very good……

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Fall 2006 Yiwu “tea farmer’s” cake

December 14, 2006 · 2 Comments

I was originally going to brew up my wet stored bricks of some years today, and was ready to go with broken pieces and boiling water, but then my house guest came back and requested to try the cake from the Yiwu girl, since I talked about it in quite positive terms. So…. I brewed that instead.

I didn’t measure how much tea I put in, but I didn’t put in too much as my guest is sick. I brewed it up, doing it lightly this time, with quick infusions instead of those 30/60/30 types. The resulting tea… is sweet, with a hint of bitterness. The liquor is quite smooth, thick early on, but getting thinner as infusions go on. Since it wasn’t a lot of leaves (I think about 4g) the tea was rather mild, although, there was a drying note after a few infusions, leaving the throat slightly dry. It wasn’t serious, but it was there. I wonder if this has to do with the weather having been exceptionally dry the past few weeks (we haven’t had percipitation for a month now, I think). My guest also thinks it is floral, like jasmine, in some ways. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad in terms of aging… but it tastes good now.

The tea, when brewed with fewer leaves and quicker infusions, seem bland when compared with the more punchy puerhs. The age of the tea is still young. I wonder how this tea will age. I think it might develop some sort of flowy aroma, talcum powder, perhaps, and not the usual heavier taste.

You’ve all seen the cake, so nothing new to show, but I will shoot a few pictures of the leaves

Closeup:

As you can see in the closeup… the veins are popping on the leaves. The same is true for all the leaves.

However, I do wonder… it’s supposed to be a fall tea, but somehow, the variation in leaf size is quite large, with some stuff being very large, and some being very small. Do trees in the fall have such small leaves (like the one on the left)?

On a blog administration note — I’ve decided to organize my posts a little better, with titles, and also start using tags so that at the very least, if you click on one of the tags (you can find them to the left) you can see all posts related to that. I haven’t done the tagging of older posts yet — only a few. It will get done, eventually.

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2004 Yangqing Hao vs 2004 Changtai Yiwu Zhengpin

December 13, 2006 · 1 Comment

Lots of photos today — be warned

That, of course, means I’m doing a double tasting again when photos will tell more about the teas, especially since something interesting does happen… 🙂

The teas in question are:

2004 Yangqing Hao Yiwu Chawang, and 2004 Changtai Yiwu Zhengpin. Both of them are samples from Hou De. I figured it’s going to be an interesting comparison to drink these two side by side. The Yangqing Hao is made by a Taiwanese tea merchant who started pressing puerh a few years ago (as it is fashionable to do in Taiwan these days) and the Changtai cake is made by the Changtai tea factory, recently famous for their Yiwu products. The Yangqing Hao costs something like $90 a cake, while the Changtai is $29.50 (both prices from Hou De), or one third of the Yangqing Hao. Is the Yangqing Hao three times as good?

Let’s look at the dry leaves

YQH:

Changtai:

The YQH is very meaty, big, bold, while the Changtai is quite broken and thin and weak in comparison. I think this much is obvious. Both are 4g of sample (thanks to my new electric scale). I tried preserving the leaves’ completeness as much as possible by breaking up the bigger pieces by hand. You can even see very fine, small shavings of leaves in the Changtai piece that I got, whereas in the YQH piece you can tell that everything is big, whole leaves. The YQH leaves are also lighter in colour, whereas the Changtai is very dark. So in terms of dry appearance, YQH wins, hands down.

But puerh’s not for looking. Puerh’s for tasting.

My gaiwan is very small. I’m not sure exactly how many ml it is, but it must be less than 100. My guess is that it’s around 70ml or so, but I could be off. Either way, 4g of tea is not too little… as you will see in the next few infusions

Infusion 1 (30s)

Infusion 2 (60s)

Infusion 3 (30s)

Infusion 4 (30s)

The Changtai, on the right, brews up a much darker brew. The YQH, on the other hand, is lighter in colour.

In terms of aroma and taste… the overall aromatic profile of the two teas are actually similar, as they probably should, since they are both Yiwu teas. Smelling it, you can sense that the YQH is a little more refined, a little more subtle, while the Changtai is a little more aggressive. The taste… the YQH is soft, supple, aromatic, slightly bland in the first infusion, with a hint of aged Yiwu in its taste. The Changtai has some of those notes, but one thing stands out in the back to back comparison — it’s sour. It’s not terribly sour, but it’s sour. The sides of my mouth felt that astringency distinctly. Also, the tea is more bitter, and it’s less smooth than the YQH. Whereas the YQH is soft and moisturizing, the Changtai is rough and drying. The sourness persists into infusion 3, after which it disappears. This, coupled with the bitterness, must’ve been why I thought it tasted green tea like the last time I tried this Changtai cake.

I have read on Sanzui (according to someone who claims to be a puerh expert) that the sourness is a sign of higher temperature “kill green”. Whereas high temperature “kill green” plus high temperature for final drying will produce a green tea, a high temperature “kill green” with low temperature final drying (such as drying under the sun) produces a puerh tea that will be somewhat sour. Is this it? I’m not sure. But it sounds awfully like it.

Moving along…

Infusion 5 (extended infusion time)

Infusion 6

Infusion 7

The colour of these infusions show that the two teas are now brewing similar coloured teas. The taste, as well, show that they are approaching. The YQH still holds an edge in smoothness and being more moisturizing, but the difference is quite slight… it’s won’t be terribly obvious if I weren’t tasting them side by side.

Then something funny happens

Infusion 8

Infusion 9

Infusion 10

The YQH is starting to get darker than the Changtai. This is not a result of the camera doing funny things. The tea actually showed in person how the YQH was brewing a darker brew by infusion 10 or so.

The taste… as my house guest describes it, the YQH at this point (the house guest didn’t get to drink the earlier infusions) was more fruity, whereas the Changtai was more metallic, which I think also implies that the Changtai is thinner. It is definitely a little thinner. I was, by this time, a little uncomfortable with the amount of (rather strong) young raw puerh I’ve consumed by then. So I stopped.

I think part of the reason the Changtai died out faster is because of its brokenness. The tea simply infused faster and gave out more earlier, and thus couldn’t last as long. I suspect this might have some implication in future aging. The broken nature of the Changtai is more obvious when you look at the wet leaves

Small bits, shavings, incomplete leaves, broken stems… whereas the YQH is whole, looks nice, soft, etc. The YQH leaves feel strong, sturdy, while the Changtai ones, when I can find a complete one (there were only two in the whole sample I brewed) were flimsy. The two leaves I unfurled — the YQH one is clearly nicer, with an obvious sawtooth edge, while the Changtai one has a very undefined edge and is thinner. The veins are also much more obvious on the YQH.

But it was surprising to see that the aromas aren’t THAT different between the two. In fact, I might have trouble telling one or the other apart just by aroma alone — it’s the other stuff, such as mouthfeel (like me feeling the sourness, but not tasting it) and thickness of the tea that really tell them apart.

Does the similarity in aroma mean that they will age similarly in the future? If the price differential is based on aromas alone, the YQH cannot command 3x what the Changtai sells for. It’s not that different. However, how will they age?

I think judging by what people like YP has told me… it’s the mouthfeel that counts. Is this what commands 3x the price? Of course, YQH, being an operation in Taiwan and all that, is going to cost more regardless, but 3x? I’m not terribly sure myself.

But if nothing else, I think this goes further to show how important it is to look for the other signs of a puerh, and not be too carried away with just focusing on the aromas of a tea, at least if we’re talking about young puerhs meant for storage. It’s the other stuff that you can use to tell apart an average te
a from a great tea, but that is so much harder than just tasting the tea as a nice tasting drink.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Aged dancong

December 12, 2006 · 2 Comments

A few months ago I bought a very weird tea, something that I’ve never tried before. It was from a small little shop in one of the shabbiest tea malls in Maliandao — the Beijing Tea Corporation mall. It’s a husband and wife team, renting basically a corner of a much bigger store that sells mostly teaware (especially those big wooden tables). I went in there because I was looking for dancongs, and they only sell dancongs (a doomed business in Beijing, pretty much). I tried two things, neither of which I particularly liked because they were too light for my taste, but then the husband showed me one tea, brewed it up…. and it was weird enough for the weird factor for me to have bought 150g of it. The other reason I bought it is because I think they really don’t get much business and I felt a little bad.

That’s usually a recipe for disaster — it’s usually those moments when you buy the worst tea in your inventory. I left this tea on my shelf, unopened, for the past three months. After the aged Wuyi two days ago though, I thought I should try this weird tea out.

I say it is weird because it is a genre that I’ve never had before — aged dancong. I’ve seen aged Wuyis or aged tieguanyin, but never an aged dancong. I think mostly because dancongs tend to be lighter in flavour, and aging a lightly roasted tea is not a good idea — the flavours will deteriorate into nothing. When I tried it at the store though, an overwhelming sense of — get this — puerh hit me. It’s not quite puerh like, but smelling and tasting the tea, it definitely reminded me of some puerhs I’ve had.

The aroma is hard to describe. It’s… old. It smells most similar to the mixed, low grade old puerh from Best Tea House, but the old puerh has a musty old puerh smell that this dancong doesn’t. Instead, it just retains the clean, old smell. I don’t know what to call it….

I brewed it up… and the initial two infusions were rather bland. The tea is, shall we say, subtle, but not unpleasantly so. The colour is light:

I increased infusion times, and it became stronger, with more of the “chen” taste that I found in the old Wuyi I had two days ago. However, it is not sour at all, which is a testament to good storage.

There were notes of dry dates again, the taste I found in the old cooked puerh brick. It’s a very subtle note, almost a flash. In fact, drinking this tea makes you work really hard trying to find the various flavours, but it’s quite complex and changes a lot between infusions. This time I only used about 4g of tea. Next time I will add more to make it more punchy and accentuate the flavours a little more.

The wet leaves are very large….

A pretty fun tea to drink, and it’s really quite cheap…..

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Rougui

December 11, 2006 · 4 Comments

I didn’t get around to drinking tea today until about 8:30pm. Amazingly enough, no caffeine headaches, yet. I was quite surprised.

I think last week’s parade of 06 Yiwu teas really made its mark by doing some serious damage to my stomach. So I opted for a mild Wuyi again, this time the old favourite — the rougui I got when I first came to Beijing.

The lack of the “aged” flavour is obvious, as is the more up front aroma of the slight charcoal taste — from the roasting process. The tea’s still very nice and drinkable though. I sent a small sample to Phyll, who seemed to have liked it. This is not, by the way, from the usual store I’ve been going to for Wuyi teas. Rather, it’s from a store called Runhe Yancha. I should really go back there again to seek out what else they’ve got on offer. However, I’ve really got too much tea on my hands already….

Therein lies the danger of puerh. You can always justify another purchase by saying “Oh, I’ll just let it age”. You taste it once, and dump it in the corner of your storage space, and there it lies for weeks, months….. until you discover it again. Hopefully, it hasn’t gone mouldy by then, and hopefully, it has aged into something a little better. With some teas, like the Yangqing Hao 2004, you can already see promise of greatness. With others… you can tell that either nothing has happened, or in the case of some buds only tea, that it has in fact gotten worse by being simply bitter and nasty.

Just because the tea is good now doesn’t mean it will age well. But, I am increasingly thinking that a tea that isn’t good now (I do not mean taste — there are lots of other factors) is almost certainly not going to be good in the future.

Why’s puerh so hard?

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Aged Wuyi Tea

December 10, 2006 · 1 Comment

Now that we have the 10,000 hits thing out of the way… back to the teas 🙂

Yesterday, along with the scale and the bags of Wuyi tea I got, I was given a small sample of an aged Wuyi tea from the store. Since it’s a small bag, I figured I’ll brew it.

Since I got my new electric scale, I figured I’ll see how much tea they gave me.

It turns out it was 10g, almost to the dot. 10g of tea… that sounds like a lot.

So I warmed my pot, and started putting leaves in it. When I filled it to about what I normally would use… I realized that about 3/4 of the tea I got from the sample is already in the pot. What do I do with the rest? Keep it? It’s too little to do anything with it. Throw it? It’s a waste… so…. I “turned my heart sideways” (a rough translation of a Chinese phrase meaning “to do something with determination”) and threw the rest of the dry tea in there. It just fit in the pot, with a bit of space to spare… 10g of tea in this pot, and the pot is almost filled to the brim with dry leaves.

Yes, yes, tea addict.

In my excitement I forgot to take pictures of the dry leaves. I can say they are rather small and broken, and quite dark — black. It’s broken because it’s obviously been roasted fairly heavily (for storage) and perhaps re-roasted after some years of storage. Anyway, as I remaked yesterday, Wuyi teas are hard to tell apart when dry anyway.

The first infusion brewed a very promising looking liquor — doesn’t this look like aged puerh? This is what happens when you put 90% dry leaves in a pot….

The taste… overwhelmingly the first few infusions has a taste of chenpi (dried mandarin peel). This is what they would call the “chen” taste in tea, usually applying to oolong, as the “chen” taste in puerh is different. The first infusion came out a bit sour. It wasn’t terribly unpleasant in its sourness, but a little sour. Of course, with that much leaves in a small pot…. it’s hard to control. I then decided faster infusions will help, and indeed, the sourness subsided in the second infusion onwards, giving way to more of the “chen” taste. There’s a nice, soft, supple feel to the tea that is usually more obvious in aged Wuyi teas (or aged teas in general). Younger teas tend to be harsher, no matter what you do. Poorly stored aged teas, of course, can also turn bad on you.

Then after about 4-5 infusions, the chen taste subsided, giving way to a lot of sweetness. The brew also got considerably lighter. I increased the infusion time, but the chen taste didn’t come back. Instead, the sweetness persisted. I drank about 10-12 infusions of this. Needless to say, I was pretty worked up by the tea, despite its age and the fact that it’s a roasted Wuyi. It’s a comfortable feeling, not the nervous energy that you get from a young, qingxiang tieguanyin.

I might get more of this…. but I really, really have too much tea already. Then again, it’s hard to come by decent aged oolongs that are not sour or bland. This tea is neither. I should at least go back to the store and try it with less leaves.

The wet leaves…. don’t reveal much.

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Weekend Maliandao excursion

December 9, 2006 · 2 Comments

I was originally not going to go today, but then I remembered I promised a vendor there to bring her some of the old loose puerh from the Best Tea House to try, so … I went. This is the same person who sold me the Quan Ji puerh a few weeks ago. I enjoyed talking to her, and I think it’s probably rare for her to get a customer who likes the stuff she sells. A lot of times people just come in, browse, and then leave. Since none of her teas are name brand, it’s difficult business, I think (and as far as I can tell, her livelihood does not depend on it).

After drinking that supposedly 30 years old loose puerh, I tried two of her teas. One is a cake of Lincang puerh, using old maocha (2-3 years old) but pressed this year. It’s not bad, tasting like Lincang tea — a bit like the Mengku stuff, with its odd aroma that is rather unique. It’s bitter, but Lincang tea tends to be that way.

The second one is a Jingmai tea. Her store, interestingly enough, has LOTS of Jingmai teas of various kinds. She said it’s because she likes the taste and aroma of Jingmai teas, so she keeps a lot of them around, and will in fact go to Jingmai next spring to press some cakes. She has at least four or five different big tee Jingmai cakes, a few Jingmai bricks, Jingmai tuo… you name it.

The cake I tried was actually pretty good. Very nice aroma, mellow, not bitter, got some nice cooling sensation in the throat. Not bad, and I might consider it, but… the Quan Ji is better, I think. I’m still debating if I should get a second tong of them…

By then, I was feeling the tea. It’s been a long parade of young puerhs the past few days, so I think my tolerance has been lowered. Also, the Jingmai tea was brewed with an incredible tea-water ratio (i.e. very high), so …. it was strong.

I excused myself from their store, not having bought anything. I’m sure I’ll go back there again. The owner is nice (unlike the manager).

I then thought I should stop by the Wuyi rock tea store before heading home (as it was already 6pm). It’s nice, and I thought I should buy some other kinds…

I went there, and they were, just as I was walking by, ready to go out for dinner. I ended up eating with them at a local shop that specializes lamb shoulders, stewed. It’s quite good, and did a good job of restoring my stomach, although one of the guys eating with them kept pressing beer on me, which I really wasn’t in the mood of (especially just bland Tsingtao)….. but I obliged.

After dinner we went back to the teashop, and had three different teas. We also had a nice long chat about different kinds of Wuyi, how to differentiate them (basically, you can’t tell by looks unless you’re in the tea making business, and even then, it’s not easy), and some of the processes that they do to make the tea. I find my education in Wuyi tea pretty lacking. Although I can, on a whole, appreciate what is a good and what is a bad Wuyi tea, I cannot, for example, tell apart some of the more similar varietals by taste. The spectrum of possible tastes that a Wuyi tea possesses is quite wide, and I’m afraid I’ve only scratched the surface of it. Sadly, I can tell puerh apart better than I can Wuyi teas. That’s a shame.

So I need to fix that.

An interesting side note… while the first two months I was here I was always asked the “where are you from?” question, nowadays, I get more the “do you sell tea?” question. I’m not sure why it is that people started asking me this all of a sudden, but there have been at least a dozen different people who asked the same thing — if I sell tea one way or another, and when I tell them no, I only drink for myself, it’s usually met with some skepticism. I suppose someone who asks a lot of questions is going to prompt that comment….

Lastly, I got an electronic scale. No more caffeine overdose when I do a double-tasting 🙂

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Two 2006 Spring Yiwu Big Tree Teas

December 8, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Two more Yiwus today, spring 2006 production. The one on the left

Is this:

The same guy who made the fall 06 production that I tasted, also on the left, two days ago.

The other is the 12 gents Yiwu 06 that I’ve tasted before.

It will turn out that I put far too much leaves in, and it’s making me a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, some pictures of the tea, starting from infusion 1 and each subsequent one:




I think you get the idea.

The leaves on the left are quite complete — I broke them from the cake

While the ones on the right are more broken. Some, no doubt, due to poor breaking by whoever broke the sample for me. However, since I mostly broke this piece from a much bigger piece, I think as a whole the tea is also just a little more broken as the compression is harder, and perhaps during the processing more leaves were crushed.

So…. how does it taste?

You can see the tea is lighter in colour on the left. The amount of leaves are similar, so it’s not a matter of that. I think the left sample brews up a milder brew as well. It is less tannic, less bitter, less astringent, and sweeter. The right side, especially in infusion 2 (60 seconds), was VERY bitter. VERY bitter. I mean, VERY bitter. This, somehow, does not jive with the notion that it is an arbor big tree tea. The bitterness, moreover, did not really turn into a huigan/sweetness. It lingered on and on as just plain bitterness. Last time I tried this tea I thought it has green tea mixed in it. This time, I think I am maintaining the same stance — that some of the leaves (not all) of this cake were processed at a much higher temperature than normal and thus produces this bitterness that won’t go away. There is also a hint of sourness on the side of the tongue in the first 3-4 infusions for sample R, again, something that shouldn’t be present in a proper young puerh, but would happen if you have high temperature processed tea mixed in it. The broken nature of the leaves didn’t help matters, I’m sure, but it’s not the sole reason, I think.

At first I thought it was just that the quality of the leaves in sample R is less old/good compared with sample L, but I have noticed by now that among the puerhs that have suspicion of “green tea” in them, one common factor is that the bitterness lingers and will not go away (unless you wash it down with something else). While some of these initially tastes quite good — sweet, mellow, fragrant, smooth — after a while that taste will turn to bitterness, or the bitterness, at least, will increase. It’s most obvious when you brew them for a longer period, instead of very short infusions. That’s what happens with green tea too — if you overbrew a longjing, it will get very bitter on you. Same idea, and it seems to make sense.

The leaves of the L sample also generally looked better, this is one sample

Since they are about the same price, if I were to buy one, I’d buy the one on the left. No doubt about it.

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Two Dancongs from Beijing

December 7, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I thought about continuing the Yiwu parade with two 2006 spring Yiwus, but then….. my senses got the better of me. I will probably die of overdose if I tried that today.

So instead, I did two dancongs.

These are both purchased in Beijing. One’s the overpriced one, the other is the cheapo one. The price differential is about…. 5x.

As you can see, the L sample has smaller leaves. The colour is also a little more uniform. The R sample has bigger leaves, but if you look closely there are some leaves that are quite green, while others are quite dark.

The first two infusions:

L brews a slightly darker tea than R, although the difference is quite small and is a little more obvious to the naked eye than to the camera. Either way though, in effect the colours are the same.

But tea’s not for looking. Tea’s for drinking. L tastes… smooth. It’s quite fragrant, a little sweet, and not bitter. R is a little more bitter, less sweet, a little rougher. I tried long and short infusions, and the smoothness of L is always a little more evident when compared directly with R. In terms of fragrance… they are quite similar, with slight variations, but neither is exactly better. A close call, actually.

Given the price however…. it’s hard to justify buying the more expensive one (L) than the cheap one (R). The differences aren’t great enough.

The leaves, when wet, actually look quite different

L:

R:

L’s leaves unfurled easily, without any sort of human intervention, whereas R doesn’t really unfurl and is more tightly rolled. As I’ve mentioned before, I was told that this means that L was machine rolled, while R was hand rolled. I don’t know if this is true, but the guy who told me this doesn’t even sell dancong (a puerh guy), so he has no reason to lie to me. The extra rolling might also account for some of the bitterness. Extra rolling, in puerh at least, is supposed to make it a little more bitter. Maybe the same is true here.

L is still the better tea, but it is not anywhere near 5x better. Oh well. At least I only bought 50g of it.

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Two Fall 2006 Yiwu Big Tree Teas

December 6, 2006 · 6 Comments

A long entry today…. be warned.

As promised, I decided to taste two teas today using my new supplies. The two cakes are:

Both Yiwu fall production tea. The one on the left, funny enough, is the one that BBB tried to buy but had problems with. The one on the right is the one I got from the Yiwu girl, and unfortunately, I think it’s not on the market at all.

The front of the cake on the left (let’s call it the L cake) is in yesterday’s post. This is a shot of the back

And the R cake’s back — you’ve seen this before long time ago when I first tried this.

Lacking a scale, I tried to eyeball it

I brewed them with basically the same parameters — pouring water in one first, then the other, and then pouring them out in the same order. There are, of course, tiny variations, but that’s about the best you can do. The dry leaves of the L cake smell a little smokey. The R cake is more fragrant and lacking any smoke — mostly just floral notes.

This is what turned out first

The one on the right is a little darker, as you can see. It would remain darker for the rest of the brewings. At first, it’s probably because it ended up that a little more leaves were on the R cup than the L cup. I took some leaves out of the R cup after two or three infusions, but the colour differential (which isn’t going to be noticeable if I brewed them separately) remained. I think it can be partly explained by the slightly smaller and more broken leaves in the R sample — the cake is more compressed, so when I took pieces out the tea was a little more broken.

The taste…

L tastes a little smokey at first. The smoke would stay for about 7-8 infusions, under the 30/60/perpetual 30 rule (although later on I just brewed however long I wanted). It’s less sweet. The huigan is less obvious. R tastes more intense, the tea is probably a little stronger, with a sweeter taste and a much more obvious huigan. There was cooling in the throat, although since that is often a delayed reaction, I’m not sure which one was responsible.

In some ways, R is more immediately appealing, although I wonder if L might be longer lasting, and will taste just as good in the long run. It’s almost flavourless, in a way. The undertones are quite similar, both having that Yiwu taste, with R, again, being more up front about it. They are from different villages, so that might also account for some of the minor differences in taste. L is slightly more bitter. R is a little less, and the sweetness comes on almost immediately. Both are hardly bitter by normal standards.

A little later:

And even later (this one looks darker than the last because I left the water in for quite a while):

Finally:

The last picture is probably around infusion 15. Both still tastes like tea, although getting rather weak. I gave up and decided to take pics of the wet leaves.

L:

R:

L has more sticks, R has more leaves. This might also explain why L was more bitter than R, and R tasted a little more intense. R’s leaves also contained more buds, whereas L is mostly big leaves. Could this also have an effect on taste? It seems like it might. Maybe R is a mix of spring and fall leaves, instead of pure fall leaves. There are just a little too many small buds for it to be a creditable fall only cake, I think…

Some exemplary leaves — again comparing L and R:

All in all, a pretty interesting experiment. I think at least in terms of rebrewability, they are about equal. In terms of strength, intensity of flavour, and that kind of thing, R comes out a bit ahead of L. I think some of the answers might be supplied by the sort of leaves present in the sample. That, and the tiny regional variation, as well as whatever other factors (processing, etc).

Was it useful to have done this? I think so. Was it a little tough on the body? Yes. At one point, I was sweating a lot (this was after 3-4 cups). Even with the tiny gaiwan, I’m still drinking a lot of tea, and big tree tea is going to be strong.

I sort of want to get more of both, and see how they taste say 5 years down the line. It will be very valuable to have that sort of comparative experience to know exactly what sort of thing will age well. Unfortunately, it might be difficult to get my hands on more of either of them. This is intensely frustrating.

It’s sort of stiffening my resolve a bit to go to Yunnan next spring to find my own tea.

Meanwhile… I stuffed the leaves (almost all of them) back into a single gaiwan and trying to get more cups out of them. Shouldn’t let good tea go to waste. 🙂

Edit: I’m drinking some water right now, and somehow…. when I was breathing with the cup in “drinking” position, I could sort of smell the Yiwu….. ahhhhggg, I think it’s withdrawal.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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