A Tea Addict's Journal

A while ago the 2001 Menghai Factory Yiwu Zhengshan cake received a lot of attention for some reason (you can find links to other reviews through Tealogic’s entry). I tried it without knowing what it was, and didn’t really like it. I also commented that it tastes like something I already know. Now back in Beijing, it was the first thing that was on my mind — to compare it with what I think tastes quite similar, at least in my memory — the cheap but slightly problematic Keyixing brick that I bought a while back.

When I bought this brick very early on, right after I got to Beijing, I thought I found something good. Then, tasting it quite a while later, I decided it’s not so good. Something was off about it, although I couldn’t quite pinpoint what. It didn’t taste right. I now regard it as tuition. I never thought there will be another use for it — as a benchmark, of sorts.

I still have some of the sample A left for a side by side comparison — turns out it was 5.5g.

I used 5.5g from my brick too in a two gaiwan tasting.

Well, what happened?

The Keyixing brick is on the left, the Menghai on the right. You can see the colour of the liquor is very different — with the Keyixing considerably darker. So they must taste really different, right?

Wrong… despite the colour differences, the teas tasted remarkably similar. I was surprised when I first took off the lid to smell after I brewed the first infusion… while the Menghai was slightly fruitier in smell, the base of the smell and the overall profile were quite like each other. I drank the two teas…. wow… they are very much alike. The Menghai was indeed lighter, and has a bit of that fruity taste in the tea as well, but the difference really isn’t huge. The Keyixing is a bit deeper, shall we say, or heavier, with a more pronounced bitterness.

Second infusion… both have taken on a slightly sour taste. It’s more like a tartness, but it’s very obvious in both teas. When I tried the Menghai the first time, I thought it was a little sour, and this time, it was no different. What surprised me most was the way the Keyixing developed the sourness in the same infusion as well.

Then the third, the fourth…

The colour of the liquor remained different, with the Keyixing brick being darker throughout, but the tastes actually approached each other as infusions went on. The Keyixing continued its slightly more bitter note, while the Menghai is a little more airy, but one can definitely imagine how the Menghai might turn a little darker in a few years like that. Two things that came to mind when I drank them. One — when I closed my eyes, they felt more like a red tea… maybe a Ceylon, with that little tartness and astringency, but not too much, and that bitterness. It’s not a very refined red tea like Darjeeling or a smooth, sweet one like a Keemun. It was a regular, run of the mill red tea taste. Actually… a bad dianhong might taste like this.

The second thought was that if I served the 6th or 7th infusion of both to somebody who was blindfolded, and who doesn’t know that much about tea… they may very well think they are drinking the exact same tea, or at least, a different infusion of the same tea. The teas were extremely similar, and I really couldn’t find a huge difference between them. From the smell, to the taste profile, to the lack of a real huigan or throat feel (I need a better term than this!)… they were, well…. too similar.

I don’t think my Keyixing is Yiwu, and nobody has ever claimed that it is Yiwu. By extension, I also don’t think the Menghai is a Yiwu. The Menghai is slightly more tasty than the Keyixing, but that is only by a matter of some small margin, not some really obvious difference. In fact, if I were tasting it blind, I’m not entirely confident I can tell them apart.

You can see that the wet leaves show some difference.

The Menghai cake is a bit harder pressed, but also, the leaves of the Menghai cake seem a bit rougher and stiffer. I tried opening some, and they felt rough and coarse, not the smooth and soft type that the Keyixing is. Some even felt like those “yellow leaves” type of leaf. I’m not sure why.

I hate to say I don’t think very highly of the Menghai cake… and definitely not for the price it was selling at recently. The Keyixing brick was about 1/10 of the price that was recently quoted for the Menghai…. and I won’t even buy THAT now.

I drank this today

Another view — USB for scale

Yes, this is tea. Very very very hard, compressed tea.

I was pretty proud when, after struggling with it for about five minutes, I finally was able to split it into two

It was the good, trusty puerh knife (the one with the faux-wood handle) that did the job.

This piece was given to me when I was visiting New York. I wasn’t told much about it other than what it was. I think this is supposed to be aged somewhat, although I’m not sure when. 1997, perhaps? I don’t know. I’ve seen some of those Hong Kong return commemoration bings that were made pretty recently…

The conventional wisdom on commemoration cakes/bricks, especially the ones that are so hard compressed, is that they are no good. They are more display pieces than for consumption, and you drink it at your own peril. There’s a term for this kind of tea, gongyi cha, which means “craft tea”. What it means, really, is that this is tea that is valued more for the way it looks than the way it tastes. However, I was told that this piece is not too bad, and that I ought to try it, so I did.

Smelling the dry leaves, you can detect some nice, slightly aged puerh smell. It’s of the sweet variety, and quite pleasant to smell. It seems promising.

I rinsed it twice — the first time to soften the piece up so I can peel it into pieces, and then the second time so that all the leaves actually touch water at least once before I start brewing. The aroma is the same as the dry leaves… smells nice!

The first infusion was a bit bland… with a slightly off taste in the back. It’s the first infusion after all.

The second was a little stronger

The first sip is quite nice…. with that sweet aroma coming through, and a bit of a sweet taste. Something still there that was sort of off, but not really obvious. I took a few more sips…. the tea is a little bland and a little weak in the taste department. It hits the back of the mouth with a bit of a cooling effect, which is nice, but somehow tastes a bit like water, which is not nice.

Then, in the next two infusions, I had more of the same thing, except that the off taste is becoming more prominent. By the fourth infusion it was clear that something is not quite right. While the first sip of each infusion was rather smooth and sweet, the next sip comes off as sour… there’s a puckery feeling on the sides of the tongue, and it becomes very unpleasant to drink. The colour of the brew is stronger

But the taste remains more or less the same, other than the more pronounced effect of the sourness of the tea. The tea is also a bit drying on the mouth… I feel my mouth dry up as I drink it, and it doesn’t really moisturize the mouth like some teas do. Instead, it sucks water out of it.

I tried the tea for two more infusions and gave up on it. It wasn’t really improving. It’s truly an odd tea. The initial impression is quite favourable, and I even thought that this might be a tea that is nice enough to defy the “commemoration cake is bad tea” rule. Then, as I go deeper into the tea, things change and the problems show up. The sourness is particularly unpleasant, but it is interesting how it only shows if I drink more than one small sip of the tea in each infusion. I even thought it’s something that’s a little denser than water that’s causing tihs… that somehow the stuff causing sourness settles, so I tried shaking the tea up before drinking, but the result is the same. When there’s no sourness, the tea is quite pleasant, though a bit bland. When the sourness is there, you just don’t want to drink this.

I used about 8g of tea, which is almost half my sample. I don’t think it was too much tea, as I did very fast infusions later on to try to reduce the effect of the unpleasant tastes, thinking that I may have overbrewed them. It didn’t work, and the sour feeling eventually got me to stop drinking the tea.

The leaves are a bit broken, and small, as one would expect in such a highly compressed sample. It almost feels like there are two kinds of leaves in there…. one that gives off that nice sweet aroma, the other that gives you that sour taste. The sour taste, unfortunately, wins out.

It was an interesting experience though, regardless, as I rarely drink this sort of thing.