A Tea Addict's Journal

Who said tea’s not as strong as coffee?

Today I made this

As is usually the case, I overdosed myself because this is the remainder of the bag — the awkward amount that is a little much for one pot, but not enough for two. I threw it all in. Water goes in one end, tea comes out the other…

The tea came out very thick and strong. It was punchy. This tea is usually quite delicate, with lots of good plummy notes. Today it bulldozed over me with a strong, strong note of roasted baozhong, even though when brewed normally, there isn’t any roasted notes left. It didn’t help, of course, that bottom of the bag means lots of fannings that have been sinking to the bottom since I first got this tea. I was getting a headache drinking this thing.

The best infusion was probably the 10th, or was it the 12th? Nice plum notes, still quite strong. Whoever says coffee is stronger should try making teas like this. I remember once I was treated to the “VIP method” by Rosa of Best Tea House. “VIP method” means using a small Yixing pot, fill it up with Chaozhou gongfu heavily roasted oolong (when I say fill it up I mean fill it up…) and then brewing it with one drinking cup worth of water. The liquor that comes out is almost sticky. The tea is strong, and it knocks you right out. Quite a ride.

I could probably drink this again tomorrow, but I think I should go easy on myself with something simple and easy going. This was a little much…

This is a tea I picked up in Beijing way back. I was told it’s an aged dancong, but having had it a few times, some with friends, we’ve decided that it’s probably an aged shuixian — but probably of the Phoenix Mountain (fenghuang shan) variety, rather than the Wuyi ones. The size of the leaves are big, as they generally are from that area, and there’s a bitterness to it that a Wuyi doesn’t usually have. Reminds me of that fairly fickle Fenghuang Shuixian I tasted a little while ago. Maybe if I leave that around for 10 or 15 years, it’ll be like this one.

Otherwise, there’s a plummy sweetness that I think is a classical “aged oolong” taste. There’s a bit of a spicy finish to this one, somehow. I don’t think it’s been stored too carefully, so it might have picked up some random notes. There’s also a little sour early on, but just a little and not enough to detract from the overall experience.

What does detract from the overall experience though, and what is so commonly going through my mind these days, is “why the hell did I not buy more of this when I had the chance?”. Oh well, I will just have to worry about that until next time I go to Taiwan or China.

One of my boxes from Taiwan arrived with a bunch of tea in it. I couldn’t wait to pull out the bag of that tieguanyin that I felt reminded me of how tea used to taste… and taste it.

The dry leaves of the tea is unremarkable. It looks more or less like a roasted tea, but you can see how the rolling of the leaves was light — it was done in the old style when leaves were much less tightly rolled than today’s teas, which are so tightly rolled into a ball that you can actually throw them around. I’m not sure of the exact time when the switch happened, but I think this is at least 10 years ago when the mainland started switching to the more tightly rolled teas.

The liquor also looked like roasted oolong

But there’s very little roasted taste, in my opinion, in this tea. I’ve sent it to people who thought it tasted more roasted, so perhaps it’s because I’ve tasted stuff that have been very roasted that I don’t feel it. To me, it doesn’t really have any charcoal taste, and it also doesn’t have much of that “fire” taste in roasted teas. It’s mostly just sweet…. quite sweet with a soft aftertaste that lingers in the mouth, a sort of plummy taste. I don’t know what it is, exactly. Maybe somebody with a better range of taste-related vocab can do a better job.

The leaves are, as you can see, rather green. I was a little surprised myself, as I never brewed this tea in Taiwan after buying it from the store. There isn’t really that scaly, “toad” surface of highly roasted teas. Instead, it unfurls to something that looks more like what nowadays is a green tieguanyin. Mystery.

What I like about this tea is still the aftertaste and the sweetness. I think this tea is something that everybody can easily enjoy — there’s nothing that needs to be “acquired” for somebody to like this tea. There’s, of course, more to get from it if you’ve had more experience, but I think anybody who isn’t offended by tea can probably appreciate it. It makes me wonder why I didn’t buy more of it.

One of the joys of drinking these older oolongs that I’ve been drinking is the freedom from any sort of label, hype, or influence from others, really. When a tea that I buy has no label at all, or at best a suggestive “this is an old baozhong” to go by, I can drink and appreciate the tea on its own merit, rather than thinking about what reputation it stands up to, whether it’s really worth the exorbitant price, etc, that are often thought processes that go through one’s mind when drinking an older puerh. For me, at least, it reminds me of the simple pleasures of simply enjoying a cup of tea and not worry about the things that really don’t have a lot to do with the tea itself.

The easy going prices of most of these teas also allow me to experiment and sample in a way that isn’t possible with older puerhs. Today I drank a tea that I picked up on the way to the candy store one weekend. It’s an oldish baozhong that looks a little odd

It might not be obvious in this photo, but the leaves are an orangy-green colour, and the stems are exceedingly long and obvious. I didn’t get to try it when I bought it, and so I only got a small amount. I was guessing it’s about maybe 10-15 years old or so, unroasted since it was first processed, and therefore quite rare in that sense. I figured a little of this, if it turns out to be a decent tea, will help me get a fuller picture of what an old, not so old, and youngish baozhong taste like in their various stages of aging.

When I opened the bag today I smelled a whiff of sourness, which worried me. I remember smelling it at the store too, which was one reason why I didn’t buy too much of it — I didn’t know how the sourness would manifest itself in the cup. Then things got hectic and I didn’t even get a chance to try this tea out before I left Taiwan. Now’s my chance to redeem myself.

The colour of the tea is a pleasant orange, just like the leaves. I didn’t use much leaves since I worried about sourness, but it turned out to be not a problem at all – there was not even a hint of sourness in the tea itself, which I found strange, given the smell. Mind you, maybe my black pot helped, I don’t know. Since I probably will use the black pot from now on to brew this tea, it probably doesn’t matter…

It is an interesting tea, tasting more honey like than anything else, and has a hint of that aged taste that I am now quite familiar with in older baozhongs. It hasn’t quite turned fruity yet though, and retains a bit of that young baozhong aroma. What is interesting about this tea is that it is very minty down the throat — I could feel it going down, as if I had just swallowed a mint. It was really obvious for two cups before that effect died down. Interesting.

There was also no hint of bitterness to be detected, no matter how hard I tried to overbrew the tea. I think next time, I ought to use a little more leaves, but at the moment, I’m wondering why I didn’t pick up more of this tea.

The wet leaves are also an interesting bunch — note the size of the leaves. They are certainly above average in size, with the stems being a prominent feature. Haven’t really had a baozhong that looked like this. Then again, provenance doesn’t really matter as long as the tea stands up, and this one certainly does.

I sat down yesterday to drink the competition tea that I got from the candy store right before I left. I only have a small bag of this stuff, so I suppose I shouldn’t drink it all too quickly, but it’s tempting.

This tea is supposedly around 25 years old, and entered some competition back then. I am not sure if it won anything, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this tea is very well stored, and display no sourness or really anything that is undesirable.

The colour of the tea is a pleasant orange. I think aged oolongs that have this sort of colour are generally of the unroasted (or rather, un-reroated) kind. The ones that develop a darker colour often have been reroasted at some point. That’s not to say they’re bad, just different. For teas that haven’t been re-roasted, I find that they develop a fruity perfume, and tend to die a little faster than the reroasted teas.

This competition tea is the same — it starts out with an intense peachy aroma, gradually giving way to a more “tea” like flavour, but never really gaining any sort of bitterness or roughness. It’s smooth and sweet. What I like about it is the good qi that comes from it — an obvious sense of energy that only really show up with better teas. Different teas have different ways of displaying their qi. There are those that knock you over the head, and those that only slowly makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Not surprisingly, I like the latter kind.

The tea gets more subdued after 5-6 infusions but lasts quite a while. I’ve been using my new black pot to brew, and I find that even teas that had a little sourness in them no longer display that quality. The aroma also has gained a little more focus, for some reason. I’ve also used relatively less leaves than I would with a gaiwan.

I need to keep experimenting with my new pots…. I think today I’ll try the zhuni one to compare how they do for aged oolongs.

Much like holiday shoppers everywhere, I was busy today doing some last minute shopping, although these are not gifts for other, but just things I can’t buy back in the States.

I thought I would go take a look at stores that I haven’t frequented, so I first ended up at two other oldish stores in the same area as the candy store. The question asked, of course, is always the same one — “do you have old oolong?” The first store had a very talkative owner who went on and on about how drinking puerh is dangerous for you (too much flourine that will weaken your bones?), and how he only sells Taiwanese tea in his store (when a cake of puerh is clearly visible on a shelf — granted, there was only one kind). He showed me a few teas, all packed in those vacuum bags, which I dislike for the purpose of shopping for aged oolongs. They don’t really age much in those things, and you have to ask them to open the bags, which is more of a pain. I looked at two. One’s an unroasted baozhong that is clearly a decade or more old (the leaves are turning orange) and the other is a roasted tea that smells aged. Not too bad, but I only opted for the baozhong, as the roasted stuff I can get elsewhere.

The second store only had one kind of aged oolong — even though they look really big and probably have a huge warehouse of tea. I guess they only sell this one kind regularly? Some aged baozhong… don’t look too good.

So it’s back to the candy store… and the other place that sold me that wonderful tieguanyin. I went to the tieguanyin place first, as I wanted to get a little more of that. I also asked to try their old shuixian. It smells old enough. The tea is nice — a bit bland, as all shuixians tend to be, but there’s qi in this tea — a very obvious and pleasant qi too. It’s a tea that makes me comfortable all over. Cheap too. Then I asked for some old Taiwanese oolongs, to see what they’ve got… and what I saw was distinctly inferior. It’s odd how this store has such nice aged Fujianese teas, but such bad aged Taiwanese teas. I wonder why.

Then I went to the candy store. I just picked up a little of the aged tieguanyin that I like there. I also tried to rummage through some stuff. In that same canister, I found this bag of tea — a small bag, only about 2kg. It looked pretty good, and smelled pretty good. The label says it’s a 1983 winter competition tea… 6000 NT. She would sell it to me for half the price. I only got a bit of it, to see what it tastes like, but oh, the temptation to just buy the whole bag….

I did ask her for contact info, in case I want to do mail order. I wonder if I’ll fall prey to temptation.

Today’s tea is a little odd

This is one of the teas I exchanged at the old lady’s store when I went back to fix the problem order. I tasted this at the store and it seemed fine, so I brought some home. It looks ok here right?

Well, when I examined the leaves, I could see some whitish stuff on the tea… I think it’s mould. The same stuff you see on a wet stored cake. Yup…. I guess technically this is spoiled tea.

But white ones don’t faze me. If it’s yellow, black, or red, then I’ll be scared.

The tea brews a deepish coloured liquor in the first infusion, and it tastes a bit sharp. Sharp in the sense that a sharp cheddar is sharp. It’s not 100% pleasant, but it’s definitely distinctive. The sharpness decreased by infusion 3, and the tea turns to a very sweet aged oolong that is actually rather pleasant. I have a feeling that the sharpness might lose its edge a bit if I let the bags air out. Right now they’re pretty tightly packed and probably doesn’t help the flavours. If I let the air circulate a little — much like the “tuicang” process of a wet stored puerh — it might make the tea better.

Leaves are a bit blackish…. but still quite soft and flexible. I think this tea might actually surprise me if I give it a little time.