A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘aged puerh’

Water issues again

September 6, 2007 · 6 Comments

Before I get on to the topic of water… some unfinished business from yesterday.

This is what yesterday’s tea looked like when I brewed it this morning

This is what it looked like late afternoon

The top cup is yesterday’s tea. The bottom is today’s Wuyi…

And this is how the leaves look when I finally cleaned the teapot

So, yes, suspicions of cooked tea still remains, but the longeivity of the tea itself, and the fact that he has really no good reason to lie to me, makes me think that he’s not lying. It doesn’t matter much, because the tea tastes a bit cooked. I can probably boil it with water and get a few more cups of rather tasty tea out of it, actually.

Anyway, water. I’ve been fiddling with my water here, since I am starting with a new supply and not the steady Nestle water I used in Beijing. I have noticed over time that filtered tap water here is slightly acidic… just a hint of acidity. I don’t know why that is the case, but it is. The building is new. Will new pipes lead to a slightly acidic water?

The effect on tea, however, hasn’t been really obvious until today when I brewed the Wuyi that I thought was slightly sour. I thought I should drink it up, so I made the tea again. Only today, because of a water supply problem (something broke in the building so they shut down water for a few hours) I bought a big bottle of water from the convenience store across the street. The water is light in minerals and quite sweet in its taste. Not a bad water. I used about half tap water (I still had some left in my filter) and half of this bottled water. The effect is dramatic… the Wuyi tastes better than last time, and the sourness? Gone. Absolutely gone. There was perhaps a tinge of it somewhere in the first infusion, but it is so faint that it could very well be placebo.

This of course reinforces the well known fact that water is very important, but since the water itself doesn’t taste sour when drunk, I was surprised that the tap water did that much damage to the taste of the tea and the manifestation of sourness. I always knew that water will do a lot of things to the body of the tea and the way it acts in the mouth, but I didn’t think something like whether or not an oolong will turn sour is so affected as well by what must be a small shift in the ph of the water.

Well, lesson learned. One of these days, I should re-do my water experiment from way back…. when I first started the blog, I drank the same tea for four or five days in a row, each day using a different kind of water. I remember the differences were big, but these days, I think I can probably better discern and describe the differences.

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Zhengshan

September 5, 2007 · 4 Comments

I buy samples sized things a lot because it’s fun, and because it exposes me to different kinds of tastes. Oftentimes they are educational in one way or another, while other times they’re just…. bland and boring. That, and all the things people end up sending me, means a lot of oddities and small bags of tea that are left around to drink. It’s part of the fun.

Today’s another one of those “leftover bag of samples” day. This is a tea that is sold at an old tea store in Hong Kong, labelled simply as “Zhengshan”. It’s basically a very (and I do mean very) wet stored cake that was supposedly raw puerh when it was first made. It’s hard to tell for sure given the way the leaves are

These are some pretty hard little nuggets of tea. They’re not cha tou though.

I used up the remaining bag, maybe about 10g or so. The first infusion was particularly interesting — it had a very strong taste of Chinese almonds (which are apparently apricot seeds). I don’t know how a tea can acquire the taste of almonds… but here it is in unadulterated form. That in itself is quite interesting.

The tea, however, will probably scare any novice tea drinker by the way it looks

Yum. Some of you are probably thinking “you sure this is not cooked tea?”. I’m not 100% sure, to be honest, but the owner has no good reason to lie to me, since it’s not expensive at all. Other stuff that is priced higher he tells me are cooked, so it would be odd for him to try to lie to me about this particular tea. I do think, however, that this is tea so wet stored that it is effectively cooked over the years that it’s been in the storage (I think he said 10+).

After the almonds went away in 2 infusions, the rest of the tea tastes like very sweet, mellow, and rich puerh, but not really like a cooked tea. It doesn’t have that nasty cooked taste, and it also lasts much longer — this is what it looks like in maybe 12 infusions

It’s not a particularly lively tea. It doesn’t have a lot of qi. It doesn’t have that exciting factor that a well stored raw tea will have. But as a drink, I’d take this over any regular cooked puerh any day.

There are better offerings at that store, such as the broken Jiangcheng bricks, so there’s no good reason to buy this tea again. But for what it’s worth… it’s kinda fun. I think I’ll drink some more tomorrow morning when I get up, since I definitely haven’t exhausted it yet, so it’s being left alone in the pot for now.

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1995 Shuilan yin

August 28, 2007 · 3 Comments

Before I start babbling today — congrats to Lew Perin, whose Babelcarp is now 2000 phrases strong. It’s a wonderful tool for those of you who don’t know Chinese and are (rightly) confused by all those funny phrases that annoying people like me sometimes throw out, or the strange spellings of teas you don’t recognize on some vendors’ sites… so if you haven’t yet, go take a look there and play around with it.

I went out for stinky tofu today for dinner, and after coming home, I wanted some tea, not having had any today (apart from some sweetened instant tea type thing with my lunch). As usual, I was looking through my tea cupboard and noticed a bag — a really flat bag. It was the sample bag of the 1995 Shuilan Yin from Hou De that I bought …. more than a year and half ago now, or thereabouts. There’s still a little left in there… 3.5g. Enough for a drink for post-dinner in my small gaiwan. Why not?

The dry leaves were mostly very very broken little bits. It’s not terribly interesting. It is, after all, the remains of what used to be solid chunks of tea. When I made it… this is what came out

Looks good to me.

I remember thinking this tea being a bit sharp, thin, and metallic in its aftertaste. Oddly enough, I didn’t find much of that this time. It tasted fuller than I remember the past two attempts. I also noticed that it has mellowed — less bitter than before. I think the fact that it’s been so broken up and sat around in a bag might have aired it out a bit? The taste is that of a tea that has at least been through some wet storage. Dry stored teas don’t taste/feel like this, I think. Not a problem though. Given its slightly bitter nature (there’s still a bit there — as well as a bit of roughness on the tongue) a pure dry stored tea might be rather harsh.

There’s not a lot to say about a really broken sample. It didn’t last too long — 6-7 infusions and the tea was getting pretty weak. The broken nature of the leaves, again, definitely has something to do with that. You can see it for yourself…. another 1/3 of the leaves were stuck to the bottom of the gaiwan, since they were all little fannings that don’t come off easily

It served its purpose. The thing is no longer available in any form anymore anyway. Anybody still has some? How does it taste now?

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Jiangcheng brick, age unknown

August 26, 2007 · 2 Comments

Today I had some broken pieces of a Jiangcheng brick that is supposedly 10+ years old. This was purchased from one of those older Hong Kong shops. General consumers who are not tea fanatics like you or me generally don’t buy whole bricks or cakes. They buy broken pieces that were blended by the tea shops. Each shop will tend to have their own blends and different tastes, but generally speaking, they served their local neighbourhood. This is probably something in between — an unblended but nonetheless broken brick (actually, lots of bricks). The target audience is still the general drinking public. If you want to collect, you can probably ask them for the full brick, although I don’t remember them actually selling it.

The sample today is what’s left of what I bought (about 1 Chinese ounce… or almost 40g).

There’s about 10g left, not really enough for two satisfying servings, so I threw everything into the pot.

I remember last time trying this, basically when I first bought it, and thought it was a little too harsh — that’s strong words coming from me, I think. It was on the bitter side of things.

This time the tea is darker than I remembered

And the taste is similar — but somehow softer. I think brewing it in a pot (last time was gaiwan) helped. The tea is noticeably mellower. It’s sweet, but with an initial bitterness that is still there. It was entirely tolerable though, and not too nasty. In fact, the first two infusions made me think of dark chocolate — there are some aromas that smelled like chocolate, and combined with the bitter+sweet mix and the slight roughing of the tongue, it resembled a darker chocolate quite well, actually. Not the same, of course, but as far as teas go, this is pretty close.

A few infusions later the tea turned into something sweeter, with a “higher” fragrance. The chocolate notes were gone, giving way to something more perfumy. This is usually what I like best about drinking a raw puerh — even when aged some, the perfumy notes won’t go away. Cooked puerh don’t do this.

And finally, the tea turns into sweet water that is not too flavourful, but quite pleasant to drink nonetheless. At this point you’re drinking it partly just for the body and the feeling, and a little bit of that sweet perfumy notes remain. We’re talking 10+ infusions, of course.

The leaves still retain some vitality. They’re not at all dark or stiff. They are well compressed though.

A few individual leaves — the small one is a bud-sized leaf, while the bigger one is obviously more mature

Having tried drinking it this way… and perhaps with a few months of aging outside of the big canister that it came in, the tea seems quite drinkable and decent, especially when one factors in the relatively low cost. Something to keep in mind when I go back to Hong Kong again….

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Further thoughts on conditioning

August 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

As Wisdom_sun pointed out in his comments to my post a few days ago, talking about “storage” of puerh is not just merely storage… it’s conditioning. He’s absolutely right in that regard, so I will try to remember to use this term from now on 🙂

I think I have talked about this in passing before, but what I have noticed more clearly this time around visiting Hong Kong and also talking to the owner of the teashop here in Taipei is that there are clearly two trends, or two schools of thought, in puerh conditioning.

The first is the old school. Wet storage is good. Wet, however, doesn’t mean soaking in water, mould growing all over wet (that’s cooked puerh). Wet means a high level of humidity in a more or less controlled environment. It does involve a fair bit of skill and know how, as well as experience in doing these and to know what teas will need how much in the conditioning of such teas. Talking to old tea drinkers in Hong Kong, they will almost all tell you that a cake with a touch of wet storage age much better and faster. It was interesting to see the teashop owner here echo the same view.

The other school is the pure dry storage school. Dry, of course, doesn’t really mean bone dry either. I think what dry storage means really depends on the person you talk to. Many consider dry storage to be simply a tea that has not entered a traditional “wet” storage facility. Others take it quite literally — recall my experience with Xinjiang conditioned tea (Xinjiang has desert weather) that tasted thin, sharp, and unpleasant overall. I have met many a drinker and shop owner in Beijing who will refuse to drink anything that tastes remotely wet stored. Anything stored in the Guangdong area they deem to be wet, even after a year or two, when to me they taste quite normal and pleasant.

The overwhelming reason I’ve heard with this particular trend is that it is unhealthy to drink wet stored puerh. The mould really turns people off, and they think it is a health hazard. The same view is echoed by many on Sanzui, a Chinese forum for tea. It’s an interesting thing, really. After all, many people grew up in Hong Kong drinking wet stored puerh, and the city’s population isn’t exactly suffering from some serious puerh-related sickness, so why people worry about it is beyond me. It’s like mouldy cheese… it looks gross, it smells gross, but can be quite tasty, albeit an acquired one. I think puerh is even less of an acquired taste than, say, Roquefort.

I can see why there’s an argument. People in Beijing, for example, used to drink jasmine, mostly. They then switched to green, and then green tieguanyin, and now, young puerh. Their tastes are light in general, and therefore a heavy, wet stored puerh might not suit their style (though oddly enough, people who refuse wet-stored puerh have no problem drinking cooked puerh). This sort of preference is reflected in tastes for other kinds of tea too. It’s difficult to find a good roasted oolong in the north. It’s much easier to find one in Hong Kong or Taiwan. Perhaps we can chalk this down to regional preference.

As for who’s right in their theory on conditioning… I suppose it depends on who you’re talking to. I have, however, noticed a slight trend — more often than not whoever owns the new cakes will tell you dry storage is good. Whoever owns some old stuff to sell will tell you wet storage is good. Given that, I tend to trust my senpai who only buy for their personal consumption. I think some wetness is not a bad thing, and in a home storage condition, care must be taken to make sure the tea is not too dry. That’s partly why I decided to stick my tea in Hong Kong in the family home (although mid-Ohio, curiously enough, is awfully wet). Is it wise to buy slightly wet stored tea to store at home? I suppose it might be. I also wonder if whatever’s gathered in a cake of wet stored tea will pass on to the dry stored one in a house. It should, I’d think. That’s why I want to see if there’s a way to figure out what an optimal condition is… I’m curious, for example, to see what happens to the cakes that Phyll put in his wine storage. I’m also curious to know what will eventually happen to the cakes that happen to be stored in the perpetually wet but cool climate of England. We’ll probably only find out in at least a few years’ time, and I certainly am not as brave (although I have a few cakes that travel with me in the US as I move from place to place).

But at the end of the day… maybe it’s the fact that we keep these cakes and watch them age that makes it fun. Of course, nobody wants a cake to turn out horrible, but if it tastes quite ok 10 years from now, it’s probably worth much more to the owner than if he were to buy it off the market 10 years from now.

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Storage

August 16, 2007 · 8 Comments

Puerh storage has generally been classified as dry and wet. Of course, dry and wet are absolutes, and nothing in reality really operates like that. It’s more like a sliding scale of wetness — from bone dry (say, sticking it in the desert) to extreme wetness (say, immersed in water). It’s obvious that neither of those are desirable, but how much wetness is good?

I’ve been thinking about this problem recently because I’m been fretting over how to store my tea in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has a reputation for being humid. It is also the place where all these fabled wet stored teas are from. I myself have drank many such teas. They’re fine. They can be quite tasty. They’re, by some accounts, how puerh should taste. I’ve met quite a few extremely experienced tea drinkers in Hong Kong who hold this view.

Then you have the dry storage proponents, who say that wet storage fundamentally changes the tea in a negative way. You can’t get rid of the “storage” smell. The tea is less “lively”. You trade in the “liveliness” and the “freshness” for sweetness and smoothness. Many people who sell new cakes are people who will talk about this as if it’s the gospel. That, also, has a large following and many believe this to be the best way to proceed.

As with most things that have to do with taste, however, there’s probably no one real truth behind this. What I think there are though are misconceptions.

What happens to the cake I think is two fold. Since we know that mould grows on the tea when in wet storage, it’s obvious that those are part of the process of turning a tea into a sweet, mellow brew. There’s also, of course, oxidation that must be going on all the time. Pure oxidation, however, probably doesn’t work so well, since teas stored in very dry areas tend to perform poorly. I’ve had some that were truly hideous. So, the trick must be to get enough moisture to get the little mould spores going, but not too much so that it overwhelmes the tea…

What a lot of people in China, especially in the north, believe is that any sort of wetness is bad, and that the tea must be really dry. This is why I’ve tried the really dry teas — people who literally rented storage spaces in places with desert like conditions. The teas suck in those cases. Truly wet teas end up being a little boring and a little flat, and sometimes can taste too much of the storage and lose its charm. “Dry storage” as proposed then must really mean “wet, but only a bit”. After all, places like Hong Kong and Taiwan are quite wet to begin with. You don’t get a really dry environment unless you do serious climate control, and as far as I know, most of the dry storage facilities for tea merchants in these places are not climated controlled, only mediated by things like closed windows and sealed entrances.

What are the conditions that would produce the optimal amount of bioactivity, without overwhelming the tea and at the same time without it being too slow so as to make the whole exercise pointless? Somebody really ought to do experiments to figure this out. How about fluctuations in the humidity? I would think that fluctuations allow the tea to go in and out of the bio-enhanced aging phase. So sometimes it’s just oxidation, and sometimes it’s both. That, I suppose, must change the way it ages compared to a constant humidity environment. What, again, does it actually do? I’d imagine it can’t be that difficult to figure out.

Meanwhile… I am just praying disaster won’t befall my stash of tea.

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Storing tea…

August 14, 2007 · 14 Comments

I’m trying to find a permanent home for my teas here.

One problem — the only suitable cupboard in the entire house smells.. like wood. Whatever wood it’s made of…. it’s got this smell that doesn’t seem to go away and reappears when I close the door. It’s the best place because it’s quite closed, is away from a window, and is the perfect size.

I don’t really like the idea of having my teas soak up the smell of the wood. In fact, in this case a cheap MDF board cupboard might be preferable, since those are usually pretty quick to dissipate their smell after a little while. The fact that it uses real wood is making it more problematic…

Any ideas on how to handle the smell problem? I fear this might not go away permanently 🙁

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Loose puerh

August 10, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Since I don’t really have my full complement of teaware and I don’t really have much tea here, consumption is going to be simple and limited until I get home to Hong Kong and ship the stuff over. One of the few things I do have with me is one of those bags of loose puerh I’ve purchased in Hong Kong. I got this bag, I think, a year ago. It’s been traveling with me to various places, since it’s a pretty good tea to just throw in a cup and make. Over the year though, it’s taken on a softer, rounder taste — a little more like cooked stuff, actually. I think it’s lost that slightly rough edge from the wet storage, and has acquired a little more aged feel to it while actually enhancing the mouthfeel. I got a few different grades, and it’s obvious that they differ in taste when I tried them side by side. The cheapest one was a little sour. This one doesn’t have a sourness, but is thinner than the most expensive version. The liquor of the teas, interestingly enough, reflect that in how dark the tea is. With that comparison (I meant to post it, but I think it got derailed with the earthquake around December that knocked the internet out), you can really tell the differences between different blends and how the feel and taste different in the mouth.

This is all stuff that one can call “cooked”, and the different grades are almost denoting different cookedness. The cooking was not done by the fermentation piles on the floor, but rather in bags in wet storage facilities in Hong Kong. Some would even say that only stuff like this is real puerh — dry stored tea is not technically right if the humidity never got high enough for it to acquire that distinctive puerh taste. Indeed, drinking a 5 year old, real dry stored tea that was in Beijing all 5 years can be a pretty unsatisfactory experience. I wonder though, has anybody actually figured out exactly what kind of microbe is the one that is responsible for the creation of our drink? Somebody should figure it out.

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Orange-in-orange 1996

August 1, 2007 · 7 Comments

Until I get to Taiwan in about a week’s time, you’ll have to bear with me, suffering through more boring tea reviews 🙂

Another old sample from last year, but not a newish tea. This is the Hou De 1996 Orange in orange 7532 sample that I got…. must’ve been a year and half ago now. I think I tried it once and then forgot about it, and here it is again…

There’s almost enough for two infusions, so I poured out some bits for one

I don’t know what the yellow stuff is, I think it’s some sort of grain hust, which seems pretty common. There’s a bit of mustiness in the dry aroma of the leaves, but generally speaking it’s not very remarkable. A little looser, and you’d think this is loose tea. No doubt the 1+ year of storage in a little bag, plus the initial breaking up of the cake, did that to the tea.

The initial infusion was quite nice, giving me a “meaty” feeling — not that it tastes like meat, but it has a sort of solidness that fills the mouth. It makes you salivate a little, and also hits the back of the throat. However…. the same dryness that I noticed of the tea two days ago is also very present in this tea. In fact, it might even be worse in this tea. I wonder why — is it the storage? I don’t know, but something is not right. The flavours are quite attractive, and will go on to change later to a more camphory taste, and then some woodiness, eventually fading to the sweet water that is typical. There was some bitterness, as well as a hint of sourness in the tea in the middle infusions. However, the dryness remained omnipresent — and unpleasantly so. Water was again necessary to continue my tasting, which is really not a good thing. My white tea or my dahongpao, which were stored together with these two puerh, do not suffer from the same problem. Nor is there such a problem for all the younger samples I’ve been drinking recently. So…. is this inherent in the tea?

The liquor is a medium brown.

Digression 1: Two days ago Lew and Davelcorp both remarked that the liquor of the tea looked really dark — almost pitch black. I checked again, and I think it’s a product of the camera’s way of presenting the picture. The one two days ago was untouched. Today’s was brightened. Brightness, I think, is the issue here. Where I sit to drink tea is fairly dark, and so the tea comes out looking quite dark whereas in person, when I’m staring at it, it is lighter in colour. So I brightened the picture to make it appear more like what I was seeing, colour wise (I don’t want to mess with colour balance, which in any case is fine). Which is why the picture today seems to be… whitewashed.

Anyway… if the dryness is not there, the tea today would’ve been quite nice. However, because of the dryness… I’m not entirely sure if I really liked it. It is, however, still on sale. So perhaps if somebody is adventurous enough to try it… we will know if it’s me, or if it’s the tea.

Digression 2: I just found my old notes here. Interesting lack of mention of any dryness. I wonder if it’s because it wasn’t there, or merely because I didn’t notice it — thanks to me not paying attention? Both are quite possible.

The leaves are, on the whole, small. The 3 of 7532 shows. There are some larger leaves, but even the largest I could find in my sample are no more than, say, a medium size (as far as leaves go). They are quite chopped up, which is fairly typical….

Now I really wonder if it’s the storage that did this to the tea. Since it’s been in a ziploc bag continuously since I last tried it… I can’t imagine it being dried out too much on its own.

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Old puerh of some kind

July 30, 2007 · 3 Comments

I had some of those traditionally stored, loose puerh so common in Hong Kong today. I’m no longer sure which particular one was the one I was having. I don’t clearly label these, and they’re not too easy to tell apart, as anybody who’s tried these things would know.

In Hong Kong these things are often not named specifically — usually only with very generic names to denote differentiation of grades, partly, I think, because they’re all blends, so it’ll be difficult to name them anything anyway, since they’re not specifically any one thing. Generally speaking, they are called “Old Puerh”, “Top Old Puerh”, “Aged-taste Puerh”, etc for cooked, and for raw, often they are named “Home-stored puerh”, “Carefully stored puerh”, “Old age puerh”, “Unknown year puerh”, etc. denoting different grades. Home-stored puerh from shop A is obviously not going to taste the same as the one from shop B, and prices can vary very considerably.

This one…. is probably something that might be called “carefully stored puerh”. It’s not great, it’s not too bad, or at least that’s what I remember of it, since last time I tried it was a year ago. This time, however, it presented a problem — the tea is drying. Very drying. After the first cup or two I had to drink some water to moisten my mouth. I don’t know why, but for some reason, it didn’t agree with me. The taste is mostly of an aged puerh variety, a bit bitter/medicinal, but pleasant enough. The drying factor, however, was new. I wouldn’t have missed it if that happened last time I tried.

The colour of the tea is quite dark.

I don’t exactly know why this is the case. Could it be that it was exposed to sunlight or some such? Something happened to it in the year that it sat in the container? I don’t know. I am thinking of airing it out a little before trying it again, to see what happens. Weather here’s been wettish, which is good for airing out problems like these. I hope to fix this, although I really don’t have much of it left.

The wet leaves are stiffish. They’re dark, and small. I don’t think this is Yunnan leaves. Vietnam, perhaps?

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