A Tea Addict's Journal

This is some stuff I got from Taiwan early on, when I didn’t know much about things and was just getting a bunch of random teas to try out.

Now that I tried it again, it’s revealing more things to me. It tastes medium roasted. It hasn’t been reroasted much. It’s youngish — I’d say 5-7 years. It’s starting to develop that fruity taste, but that’s still in its infancy. The tea is still astringent when overbrewed, and not as sweet as can be. However, I can see how some of my teas were, once upon a time, something like this, and how this tea, if stored for another 10 or 15 years, will turn into one of the teas I like.

It’s always interesting to see what some expeirence will tell you. Teas that seem rather unremarkable suddenly reveal information that I did not previously detect. I guess that’s part of the fun.

No, I did not drink jasmine today. I drank this

This is biyuzhu, one of those teas that I hunted in Taipei. After I finally found the right bag of tea to open, I get to drink it at least since the last time I did — which was when I had a sample from the store.

Basically, this is a high grade Taiwanese oolong, mostly buds, un-reroasted, aged probably 20 years or so. It was next to the bag of “wet stored” tieguanyin in the same big tin, and I asked for a sample of it to try before I decided it’s good and bought 600g of it. I thought 600g is enough, but I think I will need more.

It brews the same reddish colour that almost all aged oolongs will produce

Except that it has a very refine aroma, one that is more floral than fruity. This tea is probably the first one that I tried that I felt was truly un-reroasted. At that time, I didn’t know what it was, and simply marveled at its rather strong fragrance. Since then, through a number of tasting of other aged oolongs, I realized that this is the product of little to no roasting after the initial processing. The fact that it doesn’t taste sour at all is a feat in and of itself. I don’t know how they managed it, but they did. After a few strong infusions, the tea settles down to deliver a steady stream of aromatic elixirs that make me feel very happy. When I asked my fiance how she would describe the tea’s aroma, she said immediately that it tasted like jasmine. Indeed, the taste is quite similar to jasmine, excep that it lingers on and on long after it’s been swallowed, and the aftertaste, rather than simply dissipating into nothing, changes over time. Initially, you get the coolness that hits the throat, then it turns a bit sweet, and finally, a more plummy taste that only an aged oolong can deliver.

Mind you, this was achieved through the (mistaken) use of lots of leaves

One problem with this tea is that the tea expands, a lot. The plus side is that I got more than 20 infusions out of it. Most aged oolongs tend to be the less tightly rolled kind, so I sort of forgot how much tea this is once it expands…. it gave me a bit of a caffeine buzz and at one point made me slightly queasy.

But I love it.

I’ve reviewed this aged oolong before, from a sample generously provided by a tea friend from Boston. Today I am drinking another sample of the same tea provided generously by a tea friend from the San Fran area.

The first thing I noticed is that this tea isn’t as sour today, either dry or wet. There are many possibilities for this, but I think the most likely one is that the sample I tried in Boston is somewhat moist — contaminated by moisture, basically, while the one in SF is better kept. There was a little less leaves in the SF sample, so perhaps the sourness wasn’t as prominent, but I think it would still be obviously detectable should it be present. It was sort of there — but on just. It could be placebo because I might have been looking for it.

The tea is quite nice when not sour at all. I used a little less leaves this time, since the sample is a little smaller, and the tea delivered a steady stream of soft, sweet infusions that were pleasing to the mouth and hit the throat well enough. My fiance liked the tea a lot when it was past the initial few infusions of strong flavours and progressed into the sweet, mellow phase.

One of the things worth keeping in mind when brewing any aged oolong is not to give up too quickly when the tea seems to be fading. After the first five or six infusions I would often draw out the infusion time to minutes (or even half hours). By the end of that, you usually have a cup of very flavourful tea again, despite the appearance of weakness in colour. This is true for aged puerh too, when a tea could look really weak but actually still be full of flavour. That longevity is something I like a lot about things like this, and is something you don’t get with some other kinds of tea, which, when brewed out, is done.

My tea friend from Boston — you might need to think about how you store your tea, or, possibly, start drinking this stuff off?

Another sample from Northern California, this one is supposedly a 1950s shuixian from the Tea Gallery in NYC.

The dry leaves are quite broken and quite brittle, thin, light, almost paper thin. I think Toki remarked on this characteristic before. I’ve seen teas that are papery, although not quite this papery before.

The first two infusions were very dark, this is the third, and considerably lighter in colour. The taste? It is quite sweet, no bitterness, some spicy notes. I’d say it is in some ways a typical heavily roasted but properly aged oolong, in the sense that there’s no sourness and the right kind of sweetness — the kind that you only really get with time. There’s also no charcoal taste, which is nice. The tea has some longevity, although shuixians are typically not very long lasting, unfortunately, in the sense that it gave out faster than I had wished, but perhaps I am asking too much of the broken leaves (usually a result of re-roasting — every time you reroast some leaves get broken).

The tea is nice, although I do think that maybe there’s a time when aged oolongs should just be drunk, rather than left to further aging. I am guessing that after about 30 years or so the incremental change isn’t that much, and that the teas should be consumed in time. Then again, there are so many variables, such as storage conditions, reroastings, leaf condition, etc, that one cannot really generalize. Such is the mysteries of aged teas.