A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘aged puerh’

Young puerh prices (2)

February 16, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to Bonham street today and looked at, among other things, a bunch of loose puerh. That, I think, is also an important thing related to prices. Loose puerh in general do not come with packaging, at least not in the “this is vintage xxx from xxx factory” way that cakes/bricks/tuos do. So when you pay for it — you’re paying for the quality of the tea, with no reference to who made it, etc.

Unfortunately, the lack of information I talked about earlier makes it so that there is a serious hunger for any sort of information. I remember recently reading an article in the Economist, I think, that says studies show that human behaviour is easily affected by those surrounding them. A music store online that shows how often a song has been downloaded will see sales gravitate towards the few “winners”, whereas stores that don’t show such information will have a more even spread of sales. The herd instinct is alive and well.

The same is true for puerh, especially in a marketplace as crazy as puerh market is right now. Any sort of hype surrounding any sort of product will often create a buzz among puerh collectors. An article in a magazine, a good review from an “expert”, or even just a well documented thread on a place like Sanzui can create a buzz for a particular product that will drive the price up. I’ve fallen into the same trick. When BBB and I bought the Mengku stuff partly because I heard about it from online sources, etc, which in turn came from an article in a magazine. Prices for said tea shot up over the past few months, as far as I can tell, and somebody’s profitting from it.

Is that tea necessarily that good though? When we tried it, the Yuanyexiang was not that much better than the 2002 cake we also tried, but the price was much higher. The price differential is even larger now. Why did these people buy it though? Is it really because the tea is that superior? Or is it just because somebody talked about it, written a good review, and …?? I’m not so sure anymore. These products that are featured are also often used as a “guiding” product, and the prices of EVERYTHING produced by said factories will tend to go up after an episode of such a price rise. It’s unfortunate, but in an arena with such a lack of information…. price changes in one thing is often the only piece of info that is seen by the general consumer, and will affect a lot of other things and pull prices up all over.

So the loose tea offers a good lesson. Buy the tea based on how the tea is, not on what other people have to say about it. It’s extremely difficult to do that, however. Doing blind tests help. Doing head-to-head tastings help. It’s not easy to be objective when you know that one of the teas you’re brewing is going to cost you $90 and the other is $10.

The other thing is that it entirely depends on what you want to do with the tea. Are you buying it for drinking now? Drinking later? Trading for something else later? Selling? Investment? Those all affect the purchasing decision. If one were to buy something for investment, for example, you would want to buy a tea with a brand name, a pedigree. Those command a premium right now, but those will also have a more reliable future price. On the other hand, if one were to buy teas for one’s own consumption in the future, then it might be best to buy cheaper teas right now.

Are these “wild”, “old”, “arbour” teas really going to be 10x, 20x better than the plantation tea, 20 years down the road? Does anybody know? After all, most of the classic teas that are so highly valued today are plantation stuff. I personally don’t know the answer to this question, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. Those who claim they do generally have a heavy financial stake in the business, so I’m not even sure if any of those words can be trusted. The claim is that these old tea trees will yield a better product, will age with more qi, more depth, more complexity, etc. I’ve had some 10 years old “big tree” teas, and while they’re decent…. I’m not sure if the price differential now between old tree and plantation tea will really show in the future anymore.

Which is why these days I’ve been buying some cheaper stuff…. I think at this point, where I don’t know the answer to such questions, I am just going to have to apply the shotgun method and buy something of everything so that I will have something good to drink down the line, and also I will have learned something useful. It is also why I tend to buy teas that aren’t made by big factories, because they command a premium that I don’t think necessarily reflects the quality of the tea itself. Maybe 10 years from now, I will know better what will really age well, and what won’t. Right now, however, I am afraid I don’t have a good grip on such questions.

Unfortunately, nobody who knows something about this seems willing to talk about it. I have rarely, if ever, seen real recommendations on how to select tea without talking about specific products. Or, they are phrased in such vague terms that they are hardly useful. Perhaps at the end of the day, it takes experience to do such things…. I wish I could offer more, but at this point, I don’t want to mislead anybody 🙂

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Late night tea drinking

February 7, 2007 · 8 Comments

I got some tea in the mail today, which would’ve made this blog entry, but then, I got called out by ZH to go tea drinking at around 7:30, so off I went.

By the time I got there it was already 8:30pm, but that didn’t stop us from drinking lots of tea. It was quite a nice little teahouse, actually. I really liked it, and regret not bringing my camera. Nice service, allows us to brew tea freely for a nominal charge, and really just a decent place all around. If only China has less smokers….

Anyway. First tea was a fired tieguanyin, supposedly with some years of age. It was difficult to tell, because, apparently, it was very recently re-fired, as they do from time to time to keep moisture out of the tea. That, however, means that it was harder to taste the subtle aged taste of a tieguanyin, and a lot of the roasted aroma instead. Not bad, quite mellow, and pleasant. Obviously aged. It’s just a matter of how much.

Then…. we had two Yiwus, side by side. One is ZH’s stuff, supposedly something like 8 or 9 years, I can’t remember now. It’s been in Beijing for about 4-5 years, and it shows. The tea, i thought, was only 3-5 years of age, because it looked young. When tasted, it had an odd aroma… something I’ve never encountered in a Yiwu before. It has a hint of what I know as the Yiwu flavour, somewhat aged, but it’s different in that the aroma of one particular aspect (sort of a spice… not sure what) is quite distinct. I think what it is is that because aging is slower here, it takes longer for the tea to pass through each stage of aging, and therefore what might be sped by in Hong Kong storage is instead accentuated here. Different flavour, for sure. It’s a little bitter and a little astringent. I think in some ways I prefer the Hong Kong taste.

The other Yiwu is this — something I received very recently as a sample

The coin is there mainly for comparison, it’s about the size of a nickle. This is a 2006 fall Yiwu small arbor tree, made with tea that is about 20 years old, supposedly. This is stuff that many vendors try to pass off as “old tree”, “ancient arbor tree”, and stuff like that. I specifically asked for this so I could use it as a basis for comparison. Of course, if a tea tastes like this it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a small arbor tree, but what it does mean is that it is small arbor tree quality tea, so it should command a similar price…

Anyway, the tea is nice, sweet, very very mellow, and very Yiwu. It is slightly on the thin side, compared with better, old arbor tree teas from Yiwu. It’s less aromatic as well. All in all though, not a bad tea. I might even consider getting a few just to see how they taste when aged, especially in comparison with all the other Yiwu I have right now.

After we went through some rounds of the Yiwu, we moved on to a cooked brick from the 80s in ZH’s possession. Oddly enough, it tastes somewhat like the Guangyun Gong I’ve had recently, with the exception that the GYG had a lot more yun, or aftertaste, than this one. This one is sweet like the GYG, but is not as “long” as the GYG. It also doesn’t last quite as long, and by about the 10-12th infusion, it was going downhill, losing the sweetness. It will be good for some more infusions if one were to boil it. Nice tea though, and very enjoyable.

Next was the “30 years loose puerh” from Best Tea House. I am now of the opinion that this tea is probably more like 15-20 years. Not 30, but then, it doesn’t really matter. It’s quite enjoyable, and quite nice, especially for a loose raw puerh that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. As ZH mentioned, he feels indulgent when drinking stuff like his brick and this kind of tea. It’s old, and at the end of the day, the market price for this stuff is not low.

Meanwhile, we talked about teas in general, plans for Zhongcha this year, etc. The conversation is better than the tea, and that’s what really makes these gatherings.

Just when we were about done (I was all tea-ed out), we were thinking “is there anything more to drink?”. I was going through his bags of samples that he has (he has lots), and found an interesting item… Lochan Darjeeling. Hmmm, didn’t expect to see it here.

He got some through his work. Since I told him I have been chatting with the owner of the firm on the internet, he said “why not?”, and off we brewed. We didn’t use much leaves. It was a first flush taste — very light, green, almost white tea like. An unmistakable Darjeeling flavour profile. ZH comments how Indian teas in general can be so consistent, whereas Chinese teas are less so, usually. The aromas are quite pleasant, and quite strong. The liquor is light in colour. The tea is a bit on the thin side of things, and with one quite noticeable flaw — the tea, when drunk, is VERY rough. You know how some teas leave your tongue roughed up? Well, this is one of them, and quite seriously so. Part of this is a water issue, and playing with the water can help fix it. Part of it, though, I suspect is just the tea itself. This is extra apparent, probably, because we’ve been drinking a lot of very smooth teas today, so the roughness stood out.

Then again, this is not a tea that was produced for gongfu brewing, I think. Instead, it’s made for a different style of drinking, where such roughness would be much, much less apparent and tolerated. Priorities are different as well. This in some ways exemplifies very well the different preferences of Western versus Chinese tea drinking. Western tastes are very aroma focused, with typical descriptions of a tea surrounding a particular tea’s taste — it’s about how a tea literally TASTES and SMELLS. Chinese drinkers, however, don’t only go for the aroma and the taste, but also how it FEELS in one’s mouth, on one’s tongue, and down one’s throat (or even after it’s been swalloed). These are equally, if not more, important to a tea’s overall quality and appraisal. For example, in Hong Kong when drinking tea with Tiffany & Co., if a tea is rough on the tongue, no matter the aroma, they will rate it as a bad tea. That is not to say it is really that terrible, necessarily, but to them, that’s enough of a sin to make it not worthwhile to drink. The same tea, given to another group of people with entirely different tastes, will receive very different reactions.

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Cheaper traditionally stored tea

February 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Today I drank the cheaper version of yesterday’s tea. I bought these two partly because, when I was at the store, I simply could not tell the difference between the two. This one, in general, looks a little thinner and crisper when dry, but I really could not tell what the big difference was to justify the big price difference (by multiples).

Looks like loose puerh to me… just like most other loose puerh.

The tea is a little weaker than yesterdays. It’s also a little fresher in taste, in the sense that it is younger in age, it seems. In infusion 2-3 there was also a hint of sourness, but oddly enough, adding high mineral content water (no, not 5100) to the mix solved that problem, and the tea came out sweeter. The aroma is also a little less subdued and deep, but is instead a lighter fragrance, with a hint of talcum powder. The tea is a little more bitter as well than yesterday’s, and a little less sweet in general. Drinking it, the difference in price is quite obvious.

But all of this is only really apparent when it goes in your mouth!

3rd infusion

8th infusion

When you look at the brewed leaves though, the difference is clearer.

The leaves look a little greener, and a little less aged. There are three kinds of leaves…

The black stuff:

The wet stored stuff (their flexibility and softness gives its storage condition away more than their colour)

The dry stored lookalike

Overall, the proportion of black bits is lower in today’s tea, while the proportion of tea that looks drier stored is actually higher. Funny isn’t it? I think it’s just a matter of age, and since the tea isn’t as aged in its mixing recipe, it’s cheaper. This also means, I think, that I can buy some of this tea, let it sit, and expect it to turn into something better over time.

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Traditional storage can be good for you

February 5, 2007 · 4 Comments

I had some wet stored loose tea from Ying Kee in Hong Kong today.

And while drinking it, I couldn’t help but wonder what all the fuss about dry storage is. Ok, I know, good, well aged dry storage tea can be wonderful, but is it really worth the time/effort/price?? I mean… it’s fun to store tea and watch it change, and it’s great when you get to drink the finished product, but really, at the prices they command, why would anybody pay that much money for a cake of dry stored stuff that is still only ok to drink now (needing, say, 10 more years) when you can just buy stuff like this and drink away?

I’m not saying it’s fantastic, I’m not saying it’s the best thing I’ve had. Far from it. What I am saying, however, is that bang for the buck, this is quite good, and it even cleared my minor nasal congestion I’ve been having today. Two infusions down, and the congestion just disappeared. It was amazing.

No, it doesn’t cure cancer.

Infusion 3

Infusion 8

I should go buy some more of this stuff as a regular drink. So far I’ve been only drinking these as a “throw in the cup and brew” tea. Today’s actually the first time I drink this with any seriousness. It’s got pleasant aromas and a lingering sweetness. It doesn’t have any of the cooked puerh taste, which is a big plus. It is quite cheap. It is loose, making it easy to brew. If I’m not looking for the perfect cup, this is a fine tea to drink on an everyday basis.

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Jabbok loose puerh

January 31, 2007 · 3 Comments

I drank some of the Jabbok loose puerh today. The claim, when I bought it, was that it is 30 years. It didn’t really look 30 years, nor did it really taste like what I normally thought of as a 30 years tea, but since it was cheap, and it was the last little bit they had left, I snapped it up anyway.

Last time I tried it, I thought the aroma was quite impressive, even though the tea itself was not particularly stunning. This time though, I noticed something else, namely bitterness. The tea has a bitter base to it in the taste that I couldn’t quite explain and I couldn’t really get rid of despite the many infusions I had of the tea. I probably drank a total of 15-20 infusions of this thing, and the bitterness persisted to the end. It wasn’t a nasty, overwhelming bitterness, but it was there and it was obvious. At some points, I wondered if I were tasting red tea (aka black in English usage). Something in the taste and the aftertaste reminded me of that. Mostly, it tasted like puerh, but there are notes in the tea that makes me think twice.

The sheer number of infusions that the tea lasted would say that this is not a typical red tea, because otherwise it wouldn’t last so long. Then again, I did use a good amount of tea….

If you look at the wet leaves, the colour looks fine

And some of the leaves still exhibited a green tint

One possibility is that red tea was purposefully mixed in. The other is that maybe somehow the tea’s kill-green process wasn’t complete or thorough enough, and oxidation kept taking place (is this even possible?). If it were only stored poorly (say, next to a big bag of red tea) I don’t think the tea would’ve gotten the bitterness from that stuff, but it is rather bitter. Or, perhaps, the age is simply not nearly as high as claimed. I never did really believe the age anyway, especially given the light colour of the brew and the way the leaves look.

I’m not sure what to make of this tea. I still have a few samples worth of it, so I can give it a try again. Maybe next time I should brew it in a gaiwan and see what shows up. Better yet, I should probably drink a dianhong tomorrow to compare it against, and see what I can find in the taste….

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60s Guangyun Gong

January 27, 2007 · 5 Comments

On the menu today:

This is a piece of an alleged 60s Guangyun Gong from a tea friend in Hong Kong. He bought it as broken pieces, and the guy who sold it to him wasn’t sure what it was either. After some repeated tastings and research and trying to put the pieces together, he thought that this is probably a 60s GYG. As you can see, the cake is rather tightly compressed, and the edge of the cake is a bit tapered. The shape looks plausible…

The first three infusions:

It took a little while before the leaves fully opened up. The storage condition of this piece is somewhat wet, with some white stuff inside the piece as well as on the surface. The leaves are mostly buds, with some stalks and bigger leaves. The taste…. is sweet and mellow. It’s obvious and immediate, with a gentle sweetness coating my whole mouth. There’s not a hint of bitterness, but also no hint of poor storage either in a way that a poorly wet stored cake from, say, the 80s will. The tea is extremely smooth.

I added some splash of high mineral water for the 4th infusion, and the tea became rougher. I turned back the water to a lighter mineral content with a few splahes of very light mineral water (super expensive… from Japan….) and the mouthfeel immediately improved. It’s really quite interesting how water mineral content can really change the way a tea feels in the mouth.

The 15th infusion:

The tea was still going strong. It looks weak, but it doesn’t taste weak. We got more than 20 infusions out of it before I called it quits. It could keep going.

The wet leaves look a bit carbonated

Black, with some brown bits, and you can use cooked puerh to fake this tea, but not the taste…. I don’t know for sure if it’s a 60s GYG, but I’m quite sure this is a tea with at least 30-40 years of age. Younger teas just don’t taste like this.

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Another day of tea

January 20, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Another day with tea with L today.

On the plate was, first, a Mengku cake from 2000 or so that was traditionally stored.  Surprisingly, it’s really quite good.  Very aromatic, smooth, sweet, nice, and fragrant.  Not a lot of the nasty taste of a wet stored cake, and could easily masquerade as a 10 years old + tea.  I like it.

Then, we had a Menghai factory Mengsong cake (the peacock ones).  It’s quite expensive for a 2 years old tea, and really not that interesting.  It’s smokey, with some nice flavours but mostly just bitter and astrigent.  I really didn’t like it that much.  It’s got an interesting flavour profile, but I’m not sure if it’s worth all the money.  In fact, I have rarely found a Menghai factory cake that’s new that is actually worth the $$$ they want for it.  The price is simply artificially inflated….

More teas tomorrow with L, J, and Bearsbearsbears.  Busy!

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Tea tasting with a lot of people

January 19, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today was a big event…. tea tasting with L, J, and Bearsbearsbears.  We met up before lunch, had two teas (one Menghai Bada Shan, one Zhongcha Bada Shan) and then got some food, after which we headed over to L’s friend, G, to try some teas.

G is an odd person.  He lives on top of a dual use building, with a nice view.  When we got there, his wife/companion was still in her pyjamas, drinking some tea, and I think G wasn’t even really up yet.  It’s a fairly big place, with a big coffee table that is filled with teaware that dominates the room.

We sat down, and soon we were underway.  The first tea we tried was a 1980s Tongqing Hao, which was really mediocre and wet to the hilt.  It was wet, wet, wet.  This is the sort of wet stored tea that leaves a nasty feeling in your throat.

Then we had a 50 years old 1000 taels tea.  It was nice.  It was not great, but not bad.  I enjoyed it.  Nothing too much to write home about — I’ve had better.

Then it was a newer tea.  G proclaims proudly that he doesn’t own any tea that is produced after 2000.  He seems to have bought, or is about to buy, a lot of this following cake we’re going to taste.  The tea is wrapped in the Zhongcha wrapper from the old days, of the original Yellow Label design.  This is a newer tea, looks quite young, and when he asked me how old I think it is, I gave the honest answer of 3-5 years.  He said “no!” and told me how none of the teas he has is younger than 7 years old, blah blah blah… so we brewed this one up.  It was, at most, about 5 years old.  It first only tasted mildly like the Lincang stuff I’ve had before, and the first infusion was quite nice, but as we went further along the tea got worse (rougher, more bitter, etc) and less interesting, and also more and more like Lincang stuff (Mengku, Fengqing, etc).  Lincang stuff of about 5 years aging should be pretty cheap, as they are produced in large quantities and prices simply aren’t high for this area.  He said he might be buying this cake for 250 RMB a piece or so.  I think it’s a ripoff, but I had to just smile and nod and say it’s not that expensive.  The guy doesn’t like to take no for an answer.

Then it was a cooked brick from the 80s.  While it’s entirely ok and mellow, it was a cooked brick, and one should not expect too much from a cooked brick.

In between all these, we had a conversation about how I am a PhD student studying history, and he showed us a 100 years old tea, supposedly.  It looks rather unremarkable, and he wasnt’ about to let us try it.  He also showed us what looked like a real Songpin Hao, but he wasn’t going to let us try that either.  So…. all in all, we didn’t have many interesting teas today.  They were all broadly similar, and really not that exciting.

After that, we went to tea shopping at the Tianshan market.  BBB thinks he’s coming back for the teaware, while I just looked at all the puerh stores.  We tried three teas total, all at my request… the first was a Haiwan Laotongzhi, which, oddly enough, tastes much nicer than I imagined.  The second and third were both “old tree”.  The first was a “Yiwu” that didn’t really taste like Yiwu.  It was cheap too… makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  I suspect it might be summer leaves masquerading as big tree leaves…. makes the tea look nice but really not that flavourful.  It looks better than it tasted.  The second was similar… more intense, but half the price.  Still not that interesting, and I think I can find stuff that is better, even if for a higher price…

All in all, a long day of drinking tea (and which got me a little uncomfortable as I started feeling the effects of it through dinner).  We ended the day with a drink at a bar, and I tried, for the first time, a Chivas Regal Royal Salute.  I was tasting it like a tea… smooth, sweet (it’s relative), with a nice aftertaste, and really quite pleasant.  I think I like it better than the JW Blue Label.  But ok, this is a digression.

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Old teas

January 14, 2007 · 1 Comment

A pretty good day drinking tea with L and J (the reader of my blog in Shanghai) today.

We went to the home of one of L’s many, many friends.  That friend, a certain Mr. Y, is a lover of old puerh.  He has quite a bit of stuff, but not having had outside, independent verification of his collection, I am sort of brought in as someone who’s tasted a bunch of older stuff.

The first tea we had was the Red Label, ostensibly from the 50s.  It’s an iron cake — tightly compressed.  There are as far as I know many batches of the Red Label during its production run, and some are iron cakes and some aren’t.  The cake in question (he has two tongs) is starting to loosen up on the edges, but still rather tight in the center.  He opened up a new cake for us today, basically, and the wrapper and packaging look pretty prestine.

The tea looks good though.  Big tree leaves, thick, heavy veins, looking like the real deal.  We brewed it up… and it tasted like the real deal.  Not exactly the same kind of taste as I got from YP’s Red Label, nor is it the same as the one I had at Hong Zaotou, but nevertheless, the effect was immediate.  It was the first time for J to taste something like this, and she commented that the tea is more intense after you drink it than before.  Once you’ve swallowed it is when the tea gets good… you can feel the sensation of coolness/pleasantness traveling down your throat, and after about two or three infusions, the qi is hitting your whole body.  The taste is a mellow, plum like taste.  Sweet, old, and quite subtle, it is not a wow tea, but the qi and the feelings are unmistakable.

Having gone through more than 20 infusions of that, we moved on to something else.  By the way, even at around infusion 30, the tea was still tasting like tea — very subtle, very light, but it’s not plain water.

The second tea was something with a bit of a story.  Basically… it was gotten from some rural family where they have an old house that was about to be demolished.  They found, in the attic, a well wrapped paper bag, with tea in it.  The wrapping said Guangxu 7 (1882).  So the tea is probably from that year, or thereabouts.  It’s not puerh, it’s something else, most likely Huizhou tea of some kind (famous for Liu An, but this wasn’t packed in the usual Liu An packaging).

There were a few different kinds of tea in that bag, and we tried one — a mix of some old tea leaves with I think the shell of the tea fruit.  It’s something that is kinda weird — slightly bitter.  Mr Y brewed it while throwing some 1998 Menghai tuo into the mix.  The resulting tea is very interesting…. and obviously very old.  The qi was strong, and I really felt it going up and down my back.  The flavours were not remarkable, but when you drink stuff like this, it’s not about the flavour at all.

The last tea we had, after dinner, was a 7532.  It’s probably from the early 80s, I think, and slightly wet, but still, quite pleasant.  After the food though, the taste was not so obvious.  It was nice, sweet, aromatic… but since we had such superior teas early on, it was no match.

All in all, a nice and educational experience.  Mr. Y is really generous with his teas, and we spent 6 hours drinking three teas…. quite a feat in itself.

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More tea tasting with L, and funny tea storage

January 10, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to drink tea with L again today, who has a shop in Maliandao and a vast array of friends.  Everytime I go out with him I’m meeting someone new, which is quite interesting in and of itself.

When I got there they were drinking some cooked pu, with one person looking to buy stuff at the shop.  Since they were busy, I walked out with L and one of his friends, S, to look at some teapots.  While there (mostly crap) I also saw some interesting cakes…. but wow, they were expensive.

Back in the store, we started drinking tea.  I pulled out the tea that I brought along.  It was an Ying Kee Teahouse loose puerh, quite cheap (around $250-300 HKD for 600g, if I remembered correctly).  It’s wet stored stuff, but ok as a drink it now thing.  We had it… and everybody was wondering what it was, and how much it was, etc.  This is stuff that is rare in Beijing.  However, L’s business partner told me that where she used to work, they also sold a tea that was similar, for something like 1200 RMB/500g…. wow, they’re charging a lot.  In fact, I’m sure right now you could sell this tea for just as much here in Beijing.  The taste is plain, but pleasant, and easy to drink.  You can really fool a lot of people with this stuff.

Then we tried a dizzying array of raw teas as some more friends walked in (and out).  It included a Nannuo (ok, but expensive), a Yiwu (not really Yiwu, I think), a Fengqing tuo from 99 (decent).  At one point, there were 10-12 people sitting around the table drinking tea, which is rare for any store on Maliandao on any day.  None of us were actually going to buy anything, of course, and having a whole bunch of people around the table ensures that no business will be done, because nobody interested in buying tea will walk into a store full of customers already.  Nevertheless, Chinese businesses tend to think that the “qi” from people is a good thing.  There’s nothing worse than a store that is perpetually empty (which most stores on Maliandao seem to be).

We had dinner (Fujian fare), and then went to a new store that just opened that sells lots of old teas.

This is probably the weirdest store that I’ve been to on Maliandao.  It’s nicely decorated (a growing trend, it seems).  It’s got lots of old tea.  It’s expensive.  The woman who seems to own or operates the store is the polar opposite of how the store looks.  She looks like an old aunt from a rural village.  She is slightly crude in her manners, and worst of all, not too well informed about her tea.  When we commented on a few things (ZH is around) she doesn’t always seem to know what we’re referring to.  The one thing she keeps repeating is “I have lots of this tea!  I have lots of this tea!  Aren’t they all clean and in great condition?”.  She keeps telling us about her great storage facilities and how clean they are.  It’s in Xinjiang, the NW part of China that is largely arid, and she says she keeps a few workers there to clean the facilities constantly.  She basically transports teas from Hong Kong and Guangzhou to Xinjiang to let them lose the wetter storage flavour before sending them back to the equally beautifully clean storage in Beijing.  Ok, got it.

Well… we tried two things there before I left.  The first is a 99 Xiaguan iron cake.  Nice flavours, reminds me of the Fengqing tuo that we had earlier today.  Teas from that area all broadly taste similar.  Good storage condition, nothing too remarkable.  I didn’t ask how much, but it probably wasn’t going to be cheap.

The second thing…. she asked us to pick something.  Nobody wanted to, so I did the honours and picked a 80s Zhongcha Traditional Character (8653) cake.  I wanted to compare it with the sample YP gave me and see how it’s like…. Wow, what a difference.  YP’s is so, so, so much better.  The cakes look very similar in shape, compression, condition, etc.  In fact, I’d say that looking at the teas, there’s almost no difference (except that this cake is whole whereas YP’s is partially drunk).  This cake you can’t smell anything, while with YP’s you can smell some tea taste.  The liquor also looked similar — the same dark amber hue, very alluring, very nice.  Then I lifted the cup to my mouth, poured the tea in, and swished it around…. and I was very disappointed.

I couldn’t find the nice aromatic taste, the sweet, very sweet huigan, and the general smoothness that is present in YP’s tea.  Instead, this one was a bit harsh.  It’s obviously aged, about 15-20 years I think (she claims 30, but Traditional Character is no older than 1980, I think).  The tea is not that aromatic, almost a bit bland given the age, and the body, while thick enough, was not very smooth.  It roughs up your tongue, and dries out your throat.  There were lots of things that didn’t seem quite right with the tea.  I was hoping it would improve with a few more infusions, but it only got worse.  Why?

I think I have a theory…. I asked the lady if the storage facilities are well ventilated.  To her, it probably sounded like a compliment… but it’s not.  She said, proudly, that unless there was a storm, all the windows and doors of the storage are open, usually.  The Beijing facilities boast of powerful floor fans that blow a steady and strong breeze through the storage at all hours.  This all in the name of “tuicang”, or “receeding storage”, i.e. the process that you do by leaving wet-stored tea in a dry storage facility to let it lose the wet-stored taste.  It all sounds good in theory…. but I think she got it wrong.  I am by no means an expert, but from what I have gathered from reading, and from what I can imagine, a too-well-ventilated storage area for tea is actually bad for it.  The main reason is that the aromatic substances in a tea will dissipate quickly if it’s too well ventilated.  On Sanzui you sometimes hear people asking for help, because they put their tea in a breezy corridor and now they are bland.  I think this is why the Zhongcha cake is so bland in comparison — the flavours are blown away by the too-well ventilated air.

The other problem, the dryness, is probably also caused by the air movement.  Both Xinjiang and Beijing are very dry places.  While this might sound like a good idea for storing teas that have been through wet storage, if you have a constant breeze that blows through the tea, then it is constantly bringing very dry air through the tea — sucking away moisture in the tea.  Not only will it age poorly while sitting in said storage, it will dry the teas out and also cause the rough/dryness that I felt in the tea.  By trying too hard, she might be ruining a lot of good teas.

This is all mere speculation, but most of the stuff I’ve read and heard (from people with experience) all point to the same thing.  Tea is best stored in an enclosed area with little to no circulation of air, to keep in the tea’s aroma.  It doesn’t have to be extra dry or wet — just average, normal, and natural.  It’s a pity that her teas might all be messed up eternally given how they are treated.  Sure, they look great, and look like perfectly dry stored stuff, but when it hits your mouth…. it’s just not the same.  I will pay $600 for YP’s cake, I will not pay $600 for this woman’s.  Besides, her prices are easily double that of Hong Kong.  Forget it.

Wow, this was a verbose entry.

 

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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