A Tea Addict's Journal

I had some white tea today. Nowadays it is almost a fad — “white tea is great for you!”. People all talk about it and how it has all these antioxidants, and how it is even better than green tea, blah blah… well, it is indeed rather nice and warm, but it lacks variety.

So what exactly is white tea? From what I know, it is basically unprocessed tea leaves, dried. It is not fired like green tea is, but instead dried either in a dry room or under the sun or through some other means. A lot of times you can see how the tea is basically withered leaves, keeping more or less its original shape. It does, however, often have MORE fermentation than green tea. I suppose that’s because whereas green tea is quickly dried over heat and thus formed into shape immediately and thus fixed, white tea is allowed to dry over slightly longer period of time, and between the time it was picked and the time it actually is fixed, the tea ferments a bit. That’s why if you brew white tea the liquor is actually a little darker than the brew from green tea.

The one I got is from my usual supplier in Hong Kong, called “The Best Tea House” (yes, terrible name!). They have a good supply of different kinds of tea, and are very generous in letting you sample the stuff, which is a must. They also have a nice sales staff that is rather friendly, and more importantly, does not discriminate young people, as a lot of places tend to do. This white tea is one of their better ones, although by no means the best. Although white teas don’t taste that different from good to bad quality — they are all similar in taste.

I’ve been told that when going to a Chinese restaurant that lets you pick your own tea (as a place should) you should always order white teas, which is usually Shou Mei. The reason for that is because white teas need to be kept well or they become tasteless very quickly — because of the way the tea is processed (or lack thereof) you have to seal it well for the flavour to be preserved. That means that a big restaurant needs to keep it in some container and not leave it out. On the other hand, Puerh is often just left out in some dirty storage, and will taste ok anyway. You can have rat droppings on it and you won’t know the difference.

Like green tea, white tea needs to be brewed at a lower temperature too, since the leaves are tender, although in my experience they actually take a little more abuse than green tea can. Anyway, it is a nice, warm tea that isn’t too heavy for the days when you are tired of drinking the more strongly flavoured stuff, like today :).

Well, I am trying the tea that I bought from Athélier. Yes, that “Monkey Picked Oolong”. I tried it out there in a paper cup, but as you probably know, what it tastes like in paper cup is nothing like what it actually comes out as when you brew the tea properly.

The tea is a medium-fire oolong, so it is somewhere between qingxiang (or literally, clear fragrance) and nongxiang (dense fragrance). Qingxiang leaves are generally very green, and the liquor will come out a nice greenish yellow. The tea itself has flowery taste (but should NOT have flowers) and is somewhat light and crisp. Nongxiang, on the other hand, is heavy, the brew will be a darker brown, the tea may be slightly bitter, and if it’s not very good, a little sour. Really good nongxiang or qingxiang are both hard to get. The problem is that oftentimes they are somewhere in between. This is probably mostly because the general public like something that’s in between — not too heavy, not too light. There are merits to that too, and sometimes it is very nice. It’s just not all the time, and when you want to search out for a truly exception qingxiang tieguanyin, for example, it is extremely difficult.

Hopefully, with my upcoming trip to Beijing, I can do that and find some nice tea to bring back with me. Ahhhh…

Green tea is hard to brew. When you go out and buy tea, the better places always tell you to make it with water that’s at about 180F. That’s true, but it’s hard to get water to 180F. How do you do it? You can boil it then reduce, but it’s always a guessing game unless you have a thermometer. As much of a tea nerd as I am, I don’t have one with me when I brew green tea. Thus, it becomes a bit of a hit or miss when making green tea, and adds a lot of guesswork to the process.

The reason you have to keep the water lukewarm (after the initial washing) is that if water is too hot they bruise the leaves. What you end up is a tea that looks great (colour of the liquor is quite nice) but is virtually tasteless or has strange tastes in it. The results vary, but in general, when water’s too hot bad things happen to good green tea.

Today I had a Dragonwell (Longjing/Lungching). It’s probably one of those China teas that most people have at least heard of, if not tried. It is the quintessential green tea, in some ways, and well respected everywhere for its fragrance and flavour (unlike gunpowder, which nobody drinks and actually tastes rather nasty).

A problem with Dragonwell though is that the number of grades of tea leaves is endless. You have the superior grade, you have first grade, second grade, special grade, pre-qingming pick, pre-rain pick, Lion Mountain Dragonwell, etc etc etc. The list is endless. Worse, the grades that whoever is selling you the tea uses is not necessarily the same as what they’re supposed to be. How do you pick?

I used to drink a lot of Dragonwell, so I can say that the first thing you should do is just look at the leaves. If the leaves are light green, they’re almost always better than the ones that are dark green. In fact, the darker the leaves are, chances are the worse it is. Smell is not a particularly good indicator, as even low quality Dragonwell can smell pretty nice, especially in their dried form. When taste-testing, the better quality leaves tend to brew a lighter brew… with mild bean like taste, rather than really astringent/heavy taste. That, of course, is dependent on the drinker, and people can prefer the lower grades because of their more pronounced flavour.

The prices of this tea also varies a great deal. You can pay $10 USD a pound, or you can pay $10 USD for 10 grams. Whether it is worth it or not is up to you, but when brewed properly (and I mess up often) it is one of the most exquisite teas.

Haven’t had proper tea for a few days. It’s been mostly rushed and more of the same — nothing interesting to write about.

But, that is not true today. Along with the oolong form Taiwan, my girlfriend also got me some Puerh. These are some rather funny looking Puerh by normal standards — they are probably broken from a cake, and the leaves are very big.

To give you some scale, the round container is about 2 inches wide, so the leaves are considerably larger than most leaves you tend to see for Puerh (often in small broken pieces). This tea has a slight medicinal smell. There wasn’t enough to brew a full pot using my Puerh pot, so I had to reduce the amount of water I use in the pot in order to make it so that it’s not too watery.

Warmed the pot, washed the leaves, and the brewed the first brew… hmmm interesting. The leaves are fairly brown in colour, but when brewed, they came out rather black, which often means they are “cooked” Puerh. The taste is also closer to a “cooked” Puerh, although unlike usual “cooked” Puerh, it does have some complexity in its taste. Most of the time “cooked” Puerh just taste mildly sweet and generally uninspiring, but this one is a bit different. It has a depth that normal “cooked” Puerh doesn’t have, but I think it is still largely consisted of those leaves since the smell, the looks, and the taste generally conform to “cooked” leaves.

This is not to say it’s bad — it’s probably one of the best “cooked” type Puerh I’ve had. I think one key to learning how to drink tea is to just try all sorts of different things — without that, one never learns.

A trip to New York and a few days without proper tea. It’s rather brutal, but what can you do. I saw a friend whom I haven’t seen in a while, and we ate at a restaurant in Soho. Afterwards, while walking around, I found this place called Athélier that sells some reasonable teas. They are located inside the DKNY boutique. While they have some ok tea, they do, however, mislabel Biluochun as a white tea, and have the ever-annoying “Monkey Picked Oolong”, perpetuating the myth that it somehow is picked by monkey in their description. I ended up buying some, just for the hell of it and because I want some variety, but my place is really overflowing with tea and I ought to stop. Their specialty seems to be maté, as they have lots of variety of it, although that stuff is never fragrant like tea is.

We came back on Sunday when it was snowing like crazy. We were lucky we booked train tickets to come up, and so it worked out perfectly since we didn’t have to try to scramble for one last minute (as most flights and buses were cancelled). It’s a shame though that in the whole of Penn station the only place that sells teabags that is slightly better than Lipton is a café that’s attached to the LIRR station, selling Seattle’s Best coffee and Tazo teabags. Now, while Tazo is not exactly Earth shattering stuff, it’s way better than Lipton, which is positively nasty. I had a cup of their Awake (aka black tea blend that can be made at the cheapest cost while tasting generically black). It served its caffeine pumping purpose.

Monday was a busy day with a full schedule, and I didn’t get a chance to drink anything until I got home at 6, at which point I promptly made the Tieguanyin I got from Sunsing. It’s a semi-heavy fire Tieguanyin, but not so heavy as to make it only strong and bitter. In fact, it’s quite nice and does a good job of balancing the fragrance and the flavour. It’s not a qingxiang like a light, green Tieguanyin, but it is not so strong either. I really like it the more I drink it, and I should’ve bought a lot more — like triple what I got. It’s too bad. Incidentally, they also call it a “Monkey Picked” tea, but the thing is, they at least won’t tell you it’s actually (or even was once upon a time) picked by monkeys.

Today is another long day…. but ended with nice tea. It’s a Taiwan oolong, one that my girlfriend got from me from a place in Taipei called Wisteria House (where they filmed a scene for Eat Drink Man Woman). I think this is aged oolong, because you can’t smell anything and it tastes more mature than a fresh, “usual” Taiwanese oolong. It is still thin like they always are, and have no real aftertaste, but it is rather interesting. The tea leaves are darker than your usual Taiwanese oolong as well, reflecting the aged character of the tea. It’s fun to try new things 🙂

Another day of take-out tea, great. Today’s tea is from Toscanini, which gets its tea supply from this company called Mem Tea. They are basically a wholesaler/supplier and doesn’t have their own storefront. Instead, they supply a wide array of teas to local cafes and also sell some packaged teas to other stores, like Cardullo’s. It’s nice in that they offer a wide variety of teas, and enables a lot of local shops that will otherwise sell you teabags from Twinnings or Stash much better, loose leaf teas. For that, I have to say that they do a good job.

I had the Puerh from Mem tea today, and their Puerh is very typical of ones you get in the States — earthy, mellow, slightly sweet, and virtually tasteless despite its very strong colour. There’s only the very slightest hint of Puerh taste. In general, these are “cooked” teas that have had their fermentation process accelerated through storage in “wet warehouses” or, basically, very damp environments.

In the old days, Puerh are all made “raw” and left to ferment (yes, like wine in this sense) for years before they are ready for consumption. In order to speed up the process, however, instead of waiting for 30 years before selling the tea, they have generally tried to mix in “cooked” tea with “raw” tea. It does make the thing more drinkable, but “cooked” tea loses all the potential changes that you get from the fermentation process.

Are they the same kind of fermentation? No, not really. Coooked tea have fermentation that comes out mellow, sweet, and relatively tasteless. It’s not a complex flavour, just an acceptable, mellow tea. Raw tea, on the other hand, when properly aged, has a strong bite (that will mellow out over time) but also very, very, very complex. You have all sorts of varieties, with teas ranging from tasting very spicy, to very fragrant, to… well, just about everything. That’s why people pay the big bucks for quality raw tea, and that’s why people prefer it. I know some who will never ever drink cooked tea.

How do you tell the difference? I am by no means able to tell it with 100% accuracy, but generally speaking, proper raw tea, when brewed, should have brown leaves. The colours vary considerably depending on how long the tea’s been in storage, but it should be some shade of brown. Cooked tea, on the other hand, comes out pitch black, basically. The colour of the liquor brewed is the same — usually some shade of brown for raw tea, and black for cooked tea. The taste is as I already described. Sometimes poorly stored raw tea will taste like cooked tea, for obvious reasons, and sometimes a really “good” cooked tea can also taste quite nice. That’s, however, hard to distinguish. For the most part, these are just useful rule-of-thumbs and certainly not a strict guide.

The most important thing is to be able to taste the tea. A tea can look and smell great, but it can taste like shit. It’s very difficult to tell, for example, what grade a Dragonwell is just by looking at it, but as soon as you brew it and taste it, everything comes out and you can tell right away (if you know what to look for). That’s why I never buy tea from a place that refuses to let me try it out, and if I really want to and they wouldn’t let me taste test, I buy the smallest possible portion. Sometimes they come out awful (as it turned out with a Tieguanyin I got in NYC) but sometimes they can be great. Taste, in Chinese tea drinking anyway, is everything.

Tea can be sour.

Yes, some teas turn out sour. They are usually the heavily fired kind, in this case, a tieguanyin from Taiwan.

As I’ve said a few days ago, teas from Taiwan tend to be thin. Tieguanyin made in Taiwan also tend to be heavily fired. My suspicion is that they simply can’t get it to taste nearly as good as the Fujian tieguanyin when they do it qingxiang (which literally means “clear fragrance”) so instead they fire it heavily, making the tea leaves exhibit a reddish brown colour, and the tea will come out tasting very strong, often a bit bitter, and in some cases, sour.

It’s not really supposed to be sour. Generally speaking, a sour tea is not a good tea. This somewhat sour tea that I drank today really ought to be brewed with less leaves, but it was the leftover bits (the last batch) which means that it’s not enough for two sittings, but too much for one. I’d rather have too much for one than not enough (i.e. weak tea) for two. And it came out sour.

A tea fanatic I’ve met at a teashop in Hong Kong has told me that one reason why the Taiwan teas are sour when they are heavily fired is that because Taiwan teas, unlike mainland ones, are rolled more tightly. When they are rolled tightly, and fired, the uneveness of the firing and the difficulty to penetrate the center of the leaves makes it sour because of the temperature differences. I’m not sure if she’s right, but she does know her tea really well and is very generous with sharing. I suppose I wouldn’t find out if it’s true or not easily, if ever, but I tend to trust her on these things. Of course, it helps that she’s let me tried some of her awesome Puerh that are now something along the lines of $1,000+ per cake (330g a cake, you do the math).

Yum, the mediocrity of Tealuxe tea (Puttabong 1st flush Darjeeling).

Tealuxe used to be a great joint, providing a fabulous array of teas for your consumption. At a time when you can barely find a place that serves anything other than Twinings teabags, it was a real blessing. I remember the first time I went in, I was rather impressed. They had many varieties of teas available, including some stuff that you’ll never find in the States. I remember they had a Biluochun. Not necessarily the best Biluochun, but a good one nontheless. Their loose-leaf tea was always a bit pricey, and I mainly just bought their to-go tea when I needed a fix on the go. It serves its purpose.

Alas, those days are gone.

At one point they had quite a few branches, even one in NYC near Columbia. I think they probably overexpanded and their cost structure was out of whack with the revenue they were pulling in. Since then they have obviously tried to cut cost by slashing the varieties of tea that they sell, as well as the branches they have. No more free cups of tea when you’ve bought ten, and no more lots-of-variety either. It is also obvious that for the teas that they do sell, quality has gone down a little. I remember their 165 (Competition Tieguanyin) used to be ok, but now it’s, well, neither here nor there. The price is still the sakme, but the stuff you get isn’t as good.

I still go, mostly because of caffeine need more than anything else. Despite my tag line, I am also addicted to caffeine. Having to be away from tea for a whole day means a nasty headache at 3am. I’m not gona subject myself to that again, ugh.

Today I decided to go with the tieguanyin from Upton again. Last time I felt that I didn’t get a good taste out of it because one of the packs were unsealed, so perhaps the tea got compromised. I used two packs again (at this rate it’ll be gone pretty fast!), and I used my pot this time instead of the gaiwan.

The tea tastes good!! Although it’s not the best tieguanyin I’ve had, it’s really rather good for what it’s worth. The aftertaste is strong, and this time less bitter than last. The signature tieguanyin taste is very present and up front, and it envelopes your mouth after you’ve gulped it down. The tea is “thick” and coats the cup well. I’m really quite liking it. In case you’re wondering, they call it the Floral Tieguanyin, but as far as I can tell, no funny business with flowers in the tea.

Maybe it also helped that I changed the core of my water filter. I use a PUR filter, which so far has served me pretty well. I used to use a Brita, but I’ve found the PUR has water coming out tasting better, with a sweet taste to it. I think it does filter better than your regular Brita. Maybe that has something to do with the tea tasting good, hmmm.

Either way though, I’d heartily recommend it for someone who wants to try a decent tieguanyin. It’s not that cheap, but it’s not bad either (at Tealuxe prices, this is still cheaper than their exotic grade — and this is far better than Tealuxe tieguanyin!).

Today was another nasty day, with heavy rain in the late afternoon. I got home early, and decided to drink some oolong I got from Taiwan during the summer.

Taiwanese oolong is an interesting tea. First of all, they are usually very specific as to where the tea is produced. This one I am drinking today is from Lishan (or Pear Mountain, literally). For the most part, it is a good thing that they identify the tea very specifically by where it was produced. It makes it possible to sort of know beforehand what kind of tea it is.

Taiwanese oolong, in general, is very fragrant, rather vegetal in taste, and brews lightly with a green/yellow liquor. Now, different mountains do have different tastes, and Lishan, for example, tends to be even lighter and more fragrant than your usual Taiwanese oolong. Unfortunately, of course, not every tea labeled from a certain place is going to be exactly from there — there are variations too, since something planted at the foot of the mountain and at the top of the mountain can all be called Lishan tea (or Dong Ding, or whatever). For that, you have to have had some good/bad ones before and have some basis for comparison. That’s not always possible.

Taiwanese oolong sold in the States generally are very stereotypically Taiwanese — fragrant but light. Sometimes though I’ve had some pretty dubious ones that are stronger in taste, although sometimes that’s due to poor storage (or just long term storage) rather than the tea itself being problematic. It is a great tea to introduce someone to finer teas, since it smells really nice, looks really nice, and initially, tastes really nice.

One problem with Taiwanese oolongs in general, however, is that since they are light, the body of the tea is very “thin” and there is scarcely any aftertaste. As soon as you gulp it down, the taste starts disappearing and it goes away pretty quickly. I know some people who don’t drink any Taiwan tea precisely because of this — there’s no follow up to the initial fragrance, which makes the tea a bit of a let down. I can sympathize, but at the same time, it is a great tea to have around for guests and if it is a good one, it can always impress people.

When I first started drinking tea it was difficult to tell the real difference between qingxiang tieguanyin and Taiwan oolong, simply because they look so similar and are both high in fragrance. The main way I use to tell is the body/aftertaste. A good tieguanyin should be very strong in those areas, whereas the Taiwanese tea is not. After a while, I also remembered what kind of taste each particular type of tea is, but once in a while, you have mainland tea farms producing tieguanyin using a somewhat Taiwan style method, which can really mess up your identification. Those are when the experts are needed and I’m not always good about telling them apart. Sigh, lots to learn.

I really should buy a oolong teapot though. Next year when I (hopefully) go to Taiwan to do research, I’ll be drinking it day in, day out (ugh) and I should really put all that tea to good use by dunking it all in a teapot instead of wasting it.