A Tea Addict's Journal

Alas, I don’t have a regular supply of 1920s puerh. Today I was drinking the maocha I got a few days ago. I tried doing what the other guy did — brew it for very long, and no bitterness either. Hmmm. This makes me think. Why do some puerh have this problem of easily becoming bitter, while others don’t go bitter at all? Are they even the same thing? Did something happen in the processing? What’s going on? My 20 years old brick is fairly bitter, and can easily go bad on you if you don’t brew it right. Then you have these puerh that seemingly cannot go wrong no matter what you do. Some claim young puerh need to be powerful and nasty tasty in order for it to get better with age. Others claim this is the real deal, that the nasty tasting puerh is a product of low quality tree from the 70s. Who’s right?

On another unrelated note, I boiled the pot I recently bought today — the one I got for cheap. The result was near disaster. The tap water in Beijing is simply too hard — lots of minerals. So when I boiled the pot for about half an hour, and I went to check, I noticed one thing — there were lots of mineral deposits, everywhere. The evaporation of the water obviously kicked the water into saturation, so mineral crystals started forming…

I pulled the pot out, and it was covered in white mineral salts. I washed it and rubbed it, and got rid of the stuff, but still…. nasty experience.

I think for the tea boiling, I need to use low mineral content water to make sure that nothing forms from this mess. Otherwise, it’ll defeat the purpose entirely.

I noticed this old picture when I was flipping through my picture folder… and lo and behold, they use the same burner that I had so much trouble with!!!

I didn’t notice much of any problem with that one…. so is it just me?? There doesn’t seem to be any soot either in the bottom, hmmmm

Maybe it’s the fuel, maybe it’s the fuel.

Anyway, this was a picture taken with my girlfriend as the photographer at the Wisteria House in Taipei. There, was I brewing an (allegedly) real 1920s Tong Qing Hao.

I didn’t take notes. I just remember it being very deep in cha qi. Now you all know where I’ll be going again next year when I move to Taipei.

I brewed up some of my own tea (the new tieguanyin I bought) today using the new kettle. It’s all right. The one I have in the States is definitely better, by far. Then again, at a fraction of the cost, I really can’t complain.

I underbrewed my tieguanyin, in the sense that I didn’t add in enough leaves. The tea came out a bit lacking… not punchy enough. It could be better, I think, with more leaves, although then it might get a tad bitter. Thankfully, I brought along some stuff from Hong Kong that is very high fired. If I feel the need, I can always pull that out and drink that instead.

It’s awfully difficult to find nongxiang tieguanyin here in Beijing. People all prefer qingxiang taste, so very few vendors sell nongxiang stuff. I am going to go hit up some specialty teahouses in the next few days to see if I can find such things, but I’m not holding my breath. Basically, people here traditionally drink jasmine and green tea, so getting them to drink other things is a bit of work. Their puerh taste is cooked puerh, and their tieguanyin taste is qingxiang. Sigh.

This weekend I should get around to pot boiling. I also need to find some reasonably cheap Wuyi tea to boil my new pot with, so as to season it.

Ok, Maliandao I went again. Today, I first shopped for teaware…

I got this but not at this price. Rather, I paid around $11 USD, which is still overpaid (apparently I can get it for about $8, but I didn’t wait long enough to find that store that sold it at that price, sigh).

Then I went back to the store where I bought some tieguanyin last time I was in Beijing. I bought some more of their tieguanyin, since I’m totally out, but that’s not it…

I bought this too

For a grand price of $10 USD. It was selling for about $30 or $35 last time I was in Beijing, but in the ensuing months, it got chipped slightly in the interior of the lid. It’s a very small chip, and you can see also the lid is slightly defective in its roundness, but that knocked the price down. I thought it’s a good bargain, and I was looking for a pot for my Wuyi tea, so I bought it. It’s distinctive enough — I’ve never seen a pot shaped like this before.

Then we went shopping for teacups for my cousin, who was with me today. She ended up buying two from this store that mainly sells puerh. The owner is a very nice Fujian man who loves his pu. He apparently makes a few hundred cakes a year for his own brand, selling them at about $35 a piece (I suspect I can bargain it down). He goes to Yunnan to collect the maocha, and then presses them and ships them up. He even showed me a big picture book with him taking pics with lots of different tea trees. It’s actually kinda funny.

This is similar to a cup my cousin bought. They’re very nice. I think I might consider getting something like that too…

While we were there, we also chatted about puerh and tried one of his cakes. It’s very interesting. The tea itself is very plain tasting, but he put in tonnes of leaves — about 3/4 gaiwan full when brewed. Infusions were long, about half a minute each, or longer. The brew, as you might expect, will be bitter and nasty, but it’s not. Instead, it’s very mellow. He claims that only tea bushes (as opposed to trees) get really bitter, and only younger trees do that.

He also showed me a fake Menghai cake, among other things.

All in all, a good place that I found. I know I’ll be going back to this one for more puerh discussions.

Attempt #2 with the water boiler today. The nasty odor is more or less gone, although there’s still that ethanol lamp smell that won’t go away. I suspect that’s here to stay, so unless I want to live with it (I don’t), I guess I have to get a new burner until I go back to HK to fetch one of those electric coils for my glass kettle. I reduced the size of the flame, but that proves unworkable — takes WAY TOO LONG to get the water to boiling temp. Sigh… I was hoping to avoid metal burners, but I guess I can’t help it.

I went to check out some of the local places that sell these metal boilers today. They range from $15 USD to about $100 USD, with no obvious difference in quality. I also saw the exact same combo of glass kettle+alcohol lamp, at Ten Fu, selling for a lovely $30 USD (instead of the 10 that I paid). At least I got a good deal. I might have time tomorrow afternoon, and can head to Maliandao again to do some kettle shopping as well as a little tea buying. I realize I have very little other than puerh right now. I also need a few tea canisters (empty) so I can actually break out the few oolongs that I do have with me. Without a canister, it’s a bit of a waste to open them to air.

As for today’s teas — I first tried a new tea that my uncle gave me. He specifically told me that this can of stuff is a year old — i.e. not very good. It’s an oolong made in Yunnan. I thought maybe I can drink it casually as a tea that I can brew without too much attention. I added about 1/2 full leaves into the gaiwan, and brewed it normally…. and it’s nasty. Sour, sour, sour. That’s what happens when an oolong gets moisture in it and then ages a little. There’s precious little other than sourness. The tea flavours is mostly gone. Very little aroma. I couldn’t drink two cups before throwing the whole thing away.

So I broke out another puerh — drinking the 1999 Xizhihao sample, or what’s left of it. Somehow, this one seems a little more aged than the 1997. The 1997, however, shows more depth. Then again, I didn’t brew my tea under ideal conditions today, so all this may be off.

So far I haven’t gotten any work done since I got to Beijing…. have to start pretending to work :/

Upon furthe reflection… I don’t feel safe enough with the open flame and all that.

I think I am going to stop trying to play with fire, literally, and instead go buy a electric heating unit — one of those flat surfaces that you can use to cook. It shouldn’t cost that much, and will do the job better than this thing with less fuss.

oh well

This is my new Beijing setup. The teaware this time matches a little more — all white. They’re not of extremely high quality, but good enough, and the whole thing (tray and all) came to about $40 USD, which is not too bad all things considered.

I brewed tea today, and it works. The only problem is the flame — there’s a nasty smell when the kettle is on the black base. Upon further reflection, I think the flame, when the kettle is on, heats up the side areas enough for it to emit a gas that smells terrible, whatever it is. It’s probably not good for me either. I resorted to leaving it in the clothing-drying area of the house where there are three windows, but that’s really not good enough. When I lift the kettle off, the smell disappears, so this probably has something to do with it. Reducing the size of the flame will probably help a bit, so I’m going to try that tomorrow and see how that works out…

Other than that, it brews tea rather well (or rather, it enables me to brew tea just fine). Let’s see if I can solve the odor mystery….

Today I went to Maliandao — yes, the famous Maliandao. It’s basically a tea emporium in Beijing, and I think this is also where a lot of the small retailers from the city go to buy wholesale.

Maliandao is literally two streets full of tea stores. It is, however, also this:

Which is basically a tea mall. There’s also a smaller mall, basically across the street, that only focuses on puerh. Since my objective today was merely to buy enough teaware so I can brew tea again, I didn’t bother with looking teas very much. Yes, that’s Lu Yu in the front.

Just to give you an idea.

This is the inside of the mall, shot from the 3rd floor (the two floors above are, oddly, audio-visual equipment).

I walked around the whole thing, all three floors of it. Last time I came I only stayed on the first floor as I got sucked into a tea store and never came back out. This time I decided I’m just going to ignore all the nice looking (and smelling) stores and see what’s there first. The only stores I went in to were the ones that mainly, or only, sell teaware. Among other things, I needed a water boiling setup, a tea tray, a gaiwan, a fairness cup, and a few drinking cups. I was also on the lookout for a yixing pot, should there be any.

Most of the yixing on sale were of low quality, or just didn’t catch my eye. I was looking for something more interesting, but didn’t find any. There were some nice teaware in general, although most were of rather generic quality. At the end of the day, HK teaware is much nicer — the vendors really pick and choose what to sell, and they are usually of high quality. High quality, of course, also means high price…

I ended up buying a water boiler that uses alcohol (well, ethanol). I wanted an electric one, but Tiffany wasn’t lying when she said I won’t find an electric one in the mainland (I wanted an electric boiler with a glass kettle). Using a fire is a bit more tricky, but I think I can get it down. I also got a set of white teaware. I figured it’s better for looking at the colour of the leaves and liquor if the ware is white. I’ll snap some pictures when I have it all setup and ready to brew.

Then when the shopping was done, I tried out some tea. What caught my eye was a few buckets of maocha. I tried their best grade (hard to judge the difference, actually), and bought 100g for home consumption so I can try some more and let it age a bit. Where I tried the tea they had this behind the brewer

She walked away, although I think some of you might’ve liked to see her instead of the bings :p (ok, next time, I promise)

As I said I’ll buy some of the maocha, the girl gave me a taste of mainland tea selling — semi-bogus claims made by people who are only semi-knowledgable (real or otherwise). She said she’ll let me try something good. I was, of course, fine with that idea. Free tea, after all, is a good thing. So, she pulled out (among many, many samples) a bing of tea (she claimed she couldn’t find one that she was looking for, but this one was good enough). It looked semi-aged, about 10 years or so. She said it’s from 1975. I was a bit skeptical since it definitely did not look like 1975 tea — too compressed, colour not right, etc. When she brewed it:

It has “around 10 years old” written all over the tea. The leaves are still a dark green, while the liquor is, as you can see, brownish, but not very brown. Then she relented, a bit — saying this is a cake done with 1975 technique. I think what she means is using a 1975 recipe. Whatever…

It’s hard to blame them, I suppose, because the market is so heated right now (every store has a bunch of puerh cakes on a big display — even if that’s not their specialty). There are a lot of people who haven’t been lucky enough to try some of the older stuff, so they really don’t know. Whereas in HK there are enough old teas, in Beijing it just doesn’t exist, or they are so expensive that you can’t possibly get to try them. This particular cake, I think, could go for about $130-150 USD in Hong Kong. They were quoting $300. For that price, I can get a 1980s cake of some kind.

I also asked them if they have nongxiang tieguanyin. The only thing they could show me were qingxiang — and I think the sales girls don’t have a clue what a real nongxiang tieguanyin actually is. Some stores do sell stuff that’s more fired, but you need to find them.

Oh well, just goes to show that there’s no good, old puerh in Beijing, and roasted teas are hard to find. Next trip to Maliandao will be more tea focused and less exploratory….

I had a lull in the day today running errands before going to Beijing tomorrow, so I decided to go to Sheung Wan where a lot of old teashops exist to check them out.

I’ve never been in that particular area before. It’s very much an old street with lots of old shops — most are stores that sell various sort of Chinese medicine and supplements like deer horns, bull’s testicles, bird’s nest, etc etc. Among them are a few teashops:

This is the first one I went to, and one with the most local flavour. I’ve only been to one teashop like this before, in the Mongkok area. They mostly sell cooked puerh, with some raw puerh, but most of the raw puerh have been through wet storage.

I tried a few teas there. What’s most unique is not the tea they brewed but rather the method of brewing:

They use these big bowls to brew the tea (with a cover, much like a gaiwan, but big). Infusion time is about 5 minutes. This is somewhat similar to the test tasting method with a spoon, but with no spoon. You use it to test what Cantonese call the “tea base”. Then, they scoop the tea out

Like this. The tea is then presented to the taster on the lid

While they use a western style teacup to scoop out tea from the big bowl and pour into a small drinking cup for you to taste test.

The tea on the left is a wet storage pu. It tastes somewhat like a cooked, but with a bit more flavour and less of the nasty cooked taste. Quite mellow, as befitting of a wet storage tea. The one on the right is the only raw cake they sell. In fact, they don’t even have it in stock, but must be ordered beforehand. It wasn’t expensive, and since I felt bad for having sat there for a while, I decided to order it (minimum one tong). It was decent enough. A good bit of cha qi. I quite liked it, actually.

The last tea I tried was actually the one in the scooping picture. It’s a weird tea — some shuixian mixed with qingxiang tieguanyin. Yes, you heard me right. It’s an odd mix, but it sort of works. I think they did it mostly to cover up the strong roasted smell of their shuixian, which I think is a bit slightly overroasted. The qingxiang tieguanyin balances some of those flavours out. I bought a bit of it as a curiosity piece. At $12 USD a jin (around 600g) it’s really not very expensive. No cha qi, but hey, it’s cheap.

This store was shabby inside. As you can tell from the pics, it’s very undecorated, but had its flavours. They say they’ve been in business for 60 years.

I then went to another teashop next door. It’s owned by a man who’s now in his late 60s, early 70s. This store has also been around for about 55 years or so. His daughter now operates a teashop in Vancouver, BC. Family business, obviously. They are a bit more gentrified, and cater to more tourist business (some Japanese tourists walked in while I was tasting teas). I tasted two of their own make’s cake. One’s from 1996, another from 2004. The 1996 tasted decent, although lacking a bit of depth, but quite nice nonetheless and will probably improve. The 2004 is also nice. I bought one just to try another sample of a different cake.

Sigh, one trip, and two more purchases. I really need to clamp down on the buying in Beijing….

Sorry for the delay, two days (well, a day and half now really) until I hit the plane to go to Beijing. I’m quite dreading it. I don’t want to go, at all. Sigh.

Anyway, I thought I will show a few pics of things I bought aside from the ones I’ve already listed before.

The first is 4 bricks

The wrapper of which I’ve shown you all before

These are really not very high quality bricks. Supposedly from 1993, although who knows when it actually was made. The taste does seem like a 10+ taste. The taste is so so. Probably some wet or poor storage along the way. I’m airing it out so it won’t smell/taste like a lot of extra stuff when I eventually drink it. It’s really meant for an everyday kind of drink. Nothing fancy.

Then there’s this

Which is a cake (two actually) I bought from Jabbok. I decided to mostly buy things I know I won’t get on the mainland, and I decided that for the most part, I’m buying things that are sort of different, in small quantities, so I can test the taste and see how they develop over time. This will be more of an experiment than anything else. I might even send one of these cakes to Boston to store, while keeping the other one in HK to see how they age differently.

This cake is from 2001, but the cake was released to sell in 2005 and the wrapper was made then. You know it’s not 2005 because it doesn’t taste (or look) like a 1 year old tea.

Quite tasty right now. Not terribly cheap, but whatever. Only two cakes.

Then, of course, there’s this

This is the tong of Fuyuanchang that I bought. I’ve already shown you the cake, no need to do it again. My first tong of tea, hahaha. I’m in knee deep already.

I also bought a box of gongfu tea, a box of 30+ year old loose pu, and another ounce of another kind of 30 year loose pu. There’s the pot, and a box of loose broken bits of bricks and stuff that are from the BTH, mostly for pot warming/cooking purposes.

That’s it for this part of my journey. At this rate, I’ll have a 10 year supply of pu before December.