A Tea Addict's Journal

Continuing the experiment today, I used Fiji water to make my daily qingxiang tieguanyin.

And what a brew… it came out shockingly good, for some reason. I don’t think I handled the tea particularly better than the last two days, but somehow, the tea brewed a nice, even cup, with decent body and still many of the fragrant notes that were missing in the Volvic brew. The water was slightly sweet, and over all, it was very satisfying.

An interesting thing is that on the fourth infusion, the tea again changed drastically — with that same shift that took place during the Volvic cup, except that Fiji was much better before the cup. I’m not sure what exactly the transformation is, but somehow it happens. This is definitely something I don’t get from my usual filtered tap water, and is an interesting phenomenon. I’m not sure why it happens.

Tomorrow I’m going to procure more waters… we’ll see what happens then.

So for the past two days I’ve been doing an experiment — using different waters to brew the same tea. I’ve done this before, but it’s been a while, and it was done with longjing last time. This time, I decided I’m going to cast a wide net with the waters, trying everything from Dasani to nice bottled waters from Europe somewhere that costs 10x the price of gasoline, and I am going to try it with my Fook Ming Tong qingxiang tieguanyin in my pot. It’s not the best tea around, but I have lots of it and I need a way to get rid of it. This will be a good excuse.

Yesterday I did it with Volvic, a pretty common French water. French waters tend to be heavy in minerals and full bodied, and Volvic is no exception. When I brewed the tea, the liquor came out a slightly dark yellow. I drank the first cup… and noticed that the fragrant notes of the tieguanyin is pretty much missing. The aftertaste, which is the hallmark of a good tieguanyin, is gone. I don’t know where it is, but it’s gone. The tea itself is full bodied — reflecting the character of the water. There’s a decent amount of chi in it. It’s very strange to taste something like that.

The next two infusions tasted similar. Then, on the fourth infusion, the taste suddenly changed to be much more clear and crisp, but still without the lasting aftertaste. I still don’t know what happened, but over all, it was not a very satisfying brew.

Today, I changed water to Iceland Spring and tried again. Iceland Spring, in contrast to Volvic, has an extremely low mineral content. The water, by itself, is crisp, clear, a little cool, and slightly sweet. It is almost like a distilled water in that it has a bit of that cutting note to it, but not quite, because it’s still got some minerals in it.

The tea this time came out rather interesting. It definitely has the fragrant notes and the aftertaste, which is made conspicuous because of its absence yesterday. The tea itself tastes crisp — just like the water, and there’s a certain coolness to it, even given the temperature of the tea. It is certainly thinner than the Volvic tea, but it is not inferior. In fact, in terms of fragrance, it is much better. The taste of crispness lasts throughout the infusions, and there’s no midway shift like with the Volvic.

I don’t know what water I’ll use tomorrow, but it’ll be something different. This is already rather interesting, and will only get more so when I have more waters under my belt. Maybe I’ll even give Evian a go. I’ve never used it to make tea before.

This is kind of funny

Now, if you read Chinese, you can see it says “Puerh tea brick, 1978” on the thing.

Except that the guy selling it claims it’s from 1949.

Hmmmm, duped, anyone? Or you’re showing the wrong pictures.

Either way, they need to fix the problem.

Well, I went to another tea store today — Itoen, the Japanese tea store. They are huge, and they make lots of (fairly reliable, in a pinch) bottled teas. I figured, why not, even though I’m no great fan of Japanese tea, I’ll go check it out.

Well, the experience was rather disappointing. I guess I’m picky, but when I go to a tea store, I expect some service, since you can’t see the tea unless they show it to you (and seeing age old, bland smelling tea samples in glass containers isn’t the same as seeing the real thing). Despite the fact that the store was not very big, that there was only one other customer than me and my friend, and that they had three people working, nobody bothered to come up and ask if I wanted anything. Perhaps they’re trained to be cool and non-intrusive, but I thought at least an acknowledgement that I existed would’ve been nice (something along the lines of “if you need any help…”). Since I was walking around their store, looking around, had eye contact with more than one sales person, and reading their menu rather closely, them not even nodding in my direction was rather rude.

Since I didn’t see anything in particular that looked interesting anyway, and since nobody bothered to ask what I wanted, I didn’t feel like asking them and just left. I guess I’m snobby that way, but I don’t like being treated poorly in teashops.

But the whole day is not completely lost. I went to East Village for dinner, and in the market there when I was buying my drinking water, I saw this bottle called Jana. Since I’m a sucker for trying new waters, and this wasn’t too exorbitant ($2.48 for a 1.5L), I bought it. They claim, on their label, that they are the Aqua-Expo, Paris 2005, 1st place winner, and the taste shows. The water is soft, with no obvious, overpowering mineral taste (hello Evian) and a little cool to taste. It would seem to be able to add a great deal of body to a tea, and give it a nice taste to it. I will need to try this water out in brewing tea.

The mineral contents state that it’s mostly bicarbontes, some Calcium, and some Magnesium. The water’s slightly alkaline. Unless the Iceland Springs, which is just cool and crisp (thanks to its low mineral content) this one has a lot of stuff in it, but the bicarbonates, I think, gives it the soft taste without a strong mineral tone. I think I will keep enough of it so I can make some tea with it when I get home tomorrow.

Well, I got off the Chinatown bus from Boston to NYC yesterday, and what did I do? I went to a teashop. This place, called the Tea Gallery (Map) is run by a young couple who were students of Mr. Chan of the Best Tea House in Hong Kong. Mr. Chan told me about them before, but I forgot about it (since I don’t live in the city) until a tea friend reminded me of them this time I’m coming down. So I got their contact info and went (apparently it’s best to make an appointment).

I was feeling slightly under the weather, thanks to a small cold I caught and the copious amounts of tea I drank the night before. I told the store owner that, and decided that we should drink some rock tea (Wuyi oolong). Well, long story short, I ended up trying 4 different kinds (and the tea friend came halfway). Some were better than others, and when you drink a few back to back you can really tell the difference. I wasn’t quite 100% in my tasting abilities, since my nose was stuffed, but still I could manage to get some notes out of it.

We also tasted a big brick that said tea friend stores at the teashop. It was a flavourful brick, quite interesting. It was supposed to be dry-storage only, 1980s tea, but seems like it wasn’t stored quite as well as they claimed (or maybe wet storage, I’m not 100% sure myself — they think it went into wet storage at some point).

I ended up buying one kind of dahongpao. It wasn’t the cheapest thing on earth, but then, I got a free, small cake of puerh out of it. More importantly though, I got to meet a few new tea friends (the tea friend from NYC has, until yesterday, been an internet friend). In many ways the company of tea drinking is as good as the tea itself — sometimes :).

End of the day…

You can see how big my usual gongfu cup is. For these two pots, they only make about one cup with tea inside.

Well, I have one more pot that I haven’t talked about — my nongxiang tieguanyin pot. I haven’t been using it as often, primarily because I ran out of nongxiang tieguanyin, and didn’t open a new pack for the longest time.

So here are the pics:

The words on the pot says “Able to drive away my (feeling of) heat, and able to expand my chest”. Obviously, it’s talking about tea, but unfortunately some of the words, like the word “xiong (the final word) doesn’t translate so well into English.’

The pot hasn’t been progressing as well as it could, but then again, I don’t drink nongxiang as much as the other things.

Since I decided to drink two teas today — a Taiwan oolong and the Taiwan nongxiang tieguanyin, I’m a little caffeine buzzed… ugh, shouldn’t drink two teas again. Gotta restrain myself.

I’ve been on a dancong binge lately, drinking it at least every other day at home. I think I haven’t had it for so long, I’m a little deprived. Everything else is being put to the back burner.

I am trying hard to stave myself off from drinking two rounds of tea these days. My dancong pot is fairly small, and I don’t put that much leaves in there when I brew it, which means not much tea at all, at the end of the day. I suppose there’s a slight low in terms of caffeine when compared with drinking a, say, gongfu tea or a rolled oolong. It is always so temping to make a round of green or something (god knows I need to finish off some of my 2005 green teas) and to supplement my dancong with that. However, I should be good……

Well, after yesterday’s caffeine extravaganza, I decided to take it easy and went with a light tieguanyin from a tea friend of mine. It is supposed to be the 2006 pick, fresh from China.

The tea comes wrapped individually, so I opened the pack and emptied the contents into the pot. The tea itself looks remarkably like the other ones I’ve had recently — at least the greener ones. The tea leaves are small, green, and buttery smelling.

When I brewed it it comes out rather light, fragrant, with a good aftertaste. The “cha chi” is not terribly strong though. It seems to tastes fresher than my 2005 stuff, but it is really difficult for me to tell partly because I cannot compare them directly. The amount of tea I’ve used are different because of these annoying individual packs. While they are great for preserving the tea’s integrity over time, it does make tasting a bit more of a guessing game.

I think I need to try another tieguanyin again to compare…. hmmm

I brought this teabox today to my tea tasting thing in Quincy House. My girlfriend bought me this while I was in Beijing (yes, it seems like she buys all my tea addiction stuff). It ended up working rather well, with the gaiwan and cups fitting in one slot, and the fairness cup in the other. The smaller box then fits into the tea sea (the thing that holds water) and the cover then covers it all up.
We saw a few different ones in Beijing, but she ended up getting this one. Another one was different in design — three layers, with one on top of another. The problem with this particular one is that the tea sea becomes rather tall and I was always a little worried about the way the gaiwan was perched on top of the tea sea, but then again, it means it has enough space to fit all the stuff in. Otherwise, it might not be tall enough to fit a large gaiwan.

A total of… 8 people showed up, which was more than I expected (I thought maybe 4-5). I decided to do three teas, since more teas would mean an overdose of caffeine. I started off with a longjing, then moved on to the Fook Ming Tong qingxiang tieguanyin, and finally the Kung Fung Yung nongxiang tieguanyin. For water, I used Iceland Spring for the first two, and Volvic for the last. I would like to use Vittel, but of course, Vittel is almost impossible to find around here. They need a supplier.

The green turned out rather well, although slightly weak. I think I could’ve added a little bit more leaves, and for one or two of the infusions the water could’ve been a tad hotter. I was being too cautious, trying to avoid a bitter or rough tea. The longjing definitely had strong “cha chi” though, since I was breaking a little sweat as I was drinking this lukewarm tea. A good mingqian longjing’s power is unmistakable.

The first tieguanyin turned out to be what everyone enjoyed. We brewed it 5 times, and I know I could’ve gone at least one or two more. The Iceland Springs water I think enhances it a little, giving it a crisper taste and a little more sweetness that it wouldn’t have if I were just using regular water. Since I was brewing for others, I tried to be more patient/careful in how I make the tea, and I am rather pleased with how it turned out, especially the way different infusions each had a distinctive taste. I originally thought about bringing my pot over, but I decided it would be too small for anything more than 3 people, and I didn’t want to have different people drinking different infusions or mixing infusions, so I just used the big gaiwan I have. Oh well.

By the time we got to the last tea, everyone was comfortably buzzed by the caffeine. I had wanted to show the contrast between a light and heavy fire oolong, and the Kung Fung Yung tea serves that purpose rather well. Instead of adding a lot of leaves though, this particular tea needs to be brewed with at most 1/3 tea leaves. Anything more, and you can get a sour taste from it. I tried it with about 1/2 leaves before with a big sour aftertaste as a result — so not every heavy fire is the same. The reaction to the tea ranged from “this tastes kinda like coffee” to “tastes a little like straw”. I think because it is rather robust in flavour, it is a little harder to take, although among heavy fire ones it is already one that is more fragrant and less intense.

All in all, I think it was a success, especially compared to the last time when only a few people showed up, and all except one bowed out by the end of the second tea. Maybe it’s the longjing that kept them around :).