A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘aged puerh’

As promised

March 14, 2007 · 7 Comments

A better look at the GYG leaves, after I finally emptied the pot after two days….

You can see the unevenness of the colour of the leaves… some are darker, some lighter. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that I used three pieces — pieces that could’ve been from different cakes. It could just as well be differentiation in aging within the pieces themselves. The tea is very tightly compressed, so that is entirely possible.

Anyway, these days my tea drinking isn’t terribly interesting. It’s mostly been loose-tea-in-a-bag of various kinds, because that’s what’s most convenient when I have to run around. Today, for example, I had a Ceylon Breakfast from a place called Timeless Teas. They’re a store on Newbury Street in Boston, and underneath them is a cafe (that is always full) that serves their tea (although most of the business is coffee).

These people specialize in Ceylon teas. I really haven’t tried many of their offerings, which are definitely Ceylon tilted. The tea I had today, brewed in a big pot, was a “Ceylon Breakfast”. It was…. mild, sweet, pleasant to drink, but not that exciting. It’s probably BOP or even lower in grade, although I’m no expert in such things. The tea, while pleasant, was utterly uninteresting. It’s simply not a great cup, merely an average one.

Of course, I’m being picky. I’m also not drinking it the way I normally would, so the comparison is hard to make. That said, any store that sells loose leaf tea is not a bad thing. I really ought not to complain.

The next few days I hope to do some tastings, because a few samples arrived.

The two Yiwu on the right are what I ordered, and Guang of Hou De threw in the extra, a sample of the Malaysia Trade Fair commemoration cake, on the left. Commemoration cakes are rarely my thing, since they are hardly worth the money (i.e. there’s always a commemoration cake premium built into the price). At the same time, it might be worth trying it out just for the sake of trying it out.

I am planning on doing the two Yiwu tasting soon, in the next few days, and posting on the LJ Community. I know a few others will join in on that. If you have a sample of this, have tasted it, or are about to, it might be good for all of us to do that and exchange views on it.

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Guangyungong bits

March 13, 2007 · 7 Comments

Ok, so here are some pictures now that I’m sort of done with the tea, although I’m still brewing yet another infusion in my pot.

These are broken pieces of Guangyungong cakes that I bought in Hong Kong. I find them rather good and tasty, and as is obvious, long lasting.

You can see that it hasn’t been stored very well. There is obvious evidence of wetness.

I’ve got more of them… all in pieces

The tea is very sweet and smooth and mellow. The owner of the store said that it’s just broken cakes, because in storage you inevitably end up with cakes that don’t survive. Since part of the process of storage is that you have to move the goods every few months to prevent mould from developing, the movement, etc will always cause some breakage. That’s the stuff you sell in jars.

This is the first infusion:

A few infusions later:

A day and half later:

At this point I ought to be boiling the leaves in water, but I have no such implements, so keep rebrewing will have to do.

The tea is woody up front, with a good sweet taste throughout, and a bit of a cooling effect down the throat. The woody/musty taste dies after 5-6 infusions, leaving only sweet tea taste, but that lingers on and on forever. It’s really quite nice to drink 🙂

The wet leaves are rather dark, and I will take a better shot of them spread out once I feel like having finished with them. For now…

This is taken with natural sunlight.

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To be continued…

March 13, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I know, I’ve been bad and didn’t update again yesterday. The reason is because the tea I brewed yesterday morning, I’m still drinking it now, 24 hours later.

Of course, I haven’t been sitting at the table 24 hours straight, chugging cup after cup, but I just finished the…. 20? 25? 30? infusion of the tea, brewed for about 10-15 minutes. Quite nice, sweet, and mellow. The key is that it doesn’t taste like water.

This is a tea I got in Saiwan in Hong Kong. It’s rather cheap, and I snapped up the whole lot of it. I think I found a true bargain.

More on this thing later. I also suspect I need a caffeine source of some kind today aside from this tea, since the caffeine was probably all extracted yesterday, so I might be talking about yet another black tea or something from some insipid source somewhere in the Square.

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Tea meeting in Cambridge

March 8, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went and met up with Dogma and D today at Royal East. Dogma has already written about his previous experience at Royal East with Corax here. A scholar from my school who goes by the net name of Indra also joined us.

We met over lunch and chatted, with Dogma brewing up some darjeeling in those typical big pots of Chinese restaurants. It was rather strange drinking darjeeling at a Chinese restaurant, but it was good darjeeling.

When we were about done with dinner… we all started motioning for our teas. I pulled out one of the teas I bought from Hong Kong… the loose, broken cake that is well aged and rather smooth. It is a Guangyungong cake, vintage unknown. I suspect we have 30 years old pieces mixed in it, but also stuff of more recent vintage in there. Wet stored, I think, but mellow and sweet. Dogma commented on the clarity of the liquor despite the dark colour, and indeed, the colour of the tea is rather attractive. We drank it from the big pots in big cups, sort of like how you’re supposed to drink puerh. Puerh is better when you’re drinking in big gulps rather than tiny sips.

A few rounds after, Indra pulled out his traveling set, which includes a gaiwan, 6 small cups, and a small fairness cup. It’s quite handy, actually. He then pulled out the tea he was going to make — a rougui, medium roasted. He brews it in a rather unique way, one I haven’t seen before. The gaiwan is filled with tea leaves — I’d say 90% full. He pours the water in carefully, and waits…. for a long time. Whereas I would generally pour out the tea within 5-10 seconds, he waited at least half a minute with the first infusion, and subsequent infusions were even longer.

The resulting quality of the tea is rather darker than I imagined, mostly because of the long steeping time. It’s a bit rough from the tannins that got released, but full of the roasted flavour. The tea itself would’ve yielded a much weaker brew if brewed quickly. It was definitely interesting to see somebody make tea in a way that is very different from your own.

Meanwhile, we were still gulping down the puerh while getting the occasional rounds of rougui. We chatted about teas and other things, and the owner of the place, Otto, joined us. Dogma had to leave early, and we stayed on for another hour or so before heading out our respective ways.

It was definitely a fun time, and I wish we had more free time to drink teas. Oh well, that will probably have to wait till next time.

When we were leaving the table — requisite fortune cookies plus a lot of used teapots 🙂

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Jabbok loose puerh revisited

March 8, 2007 · 1 Comment

Now that I am back in Boston, I went and pulled up one of the teas I left behind, the Jabbok loose puerh, that I haven’t had since I left.

The tea… is quite nice in a way. It’s got some nice camphor aromas up front, pretty intense aroma, and it’s got a bit of depth in the way of an aftertaste. However, the tea seems thin, and it’s not very rebrewable.

Third infusion

Seventh infusion

With truly good old teas, the tea will lose the colour but still has a taste — or an aftertaste. In this case, I find this tea dying fairly quickly. You can still let it sit with water and brew an infusion given long enough brewing time, but it’s not quite the same.

The leaves though tell me that these are definitely aged raw puerh. I would think this is at least 20 years old — otherwise it won’t taste the way it does

I still regret not having bought more when I had the chance. Now it’s gone forever. Oh well. I guess I have other things to drink.

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Old teashops

March 1, 2007 · 12 Comments

I went to Saiwan with B, a HK tea friend, today, to find teas, old teas.

Saiwan is even further West than Sheung Wan, where Bonham Strand is, and is home to many, many, many stores that sell various kinds of Chinese delicacy, dried seafood, medicine, and that kind of thing. There are basically lots of old stores in that area. I’ve never been there until yesterday. It’s a very very interesting area to visit.

The teashop in question looks rather old. There are more in that area, many of them are “upstairs” teashops that only cater to wholesale businesses. In fact, right above this teashop is one such wholesale store, and according to the guy at the teashop downstairs, those wholesalers do big business. Each order is something like 100 jian of tea or more, and their annual business, per wholesaler, can be something like $3 million USD. Not a small sum at all.

The teas we ended up buying were of the broken cakes variety. I got some broken GYGs, vintage unknown. They tasted good enough, and similar to the one sample I tried in Beijing. I think the guy who gave me that bit also got it from these people. It’s quite a bargain and I’m really quite happy with it.

More interestingly, we also tried a poo-poo puerh. This is tea that is, basically, the feces of bugs that eat teas. In fact, the name of the tea given by this teashop is exactly that — “bug shit tea”. Not exactly an elegant name, by any stretch of imagination. Yet, this is really quite a novelty item.

The bug shit tea is basically collected as a by-product of regular storage of tea in large quantities in a wetter storage facility. Wet-storage facility is generally located on a mountain slope in a basement or some such, which means greater level of natural moisture and probably better retention of such moisture. The bugs, I guess, grow naturally in such an environment. When they take out the tongs of tea to sell, they take apart the packaging for the tong of tea, and brush off all the dust and what not. When they do that, however, in the bottom of the tong there will be collected some bug droppings. This is what they collect for this tea. They are really tiny pellets, each about… half an mm in diameter? Black, smelling like old puerh, and unremarkable. When you brew it, you do it using about half a teaspoon of tea, put it in one of those mesh filters that you use to filter your tea, and pour water. The water will drip through the filter very very slowly…. eventually going through.

The liquor is VERY thick. It’s quite strong in taste initially, yielding a rather aromatic tea with smooth texture. The taste is clean. It doesn’t last too many infusions. No, I don’t have any stomach problems right now, many hours after the fact. The tea is really quite interesting. The mom of the family that owns this shop is now 87, and she drinks this everyday. These are truly old tea hands…. with experience that none of us can ever match.

Sorry, no pictures. I wasn’t prepared with a camera.

We ended up with a good bounty of loose puerh of various kinds, and B also bought a few oz of the poo-poo tea. We then went to the BTH to sit and chat for a little more. It was, all in all, quite a fun day.

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Back to the regularly scheduled programme

February 28, 2007 · 2 Comments

Of course I didn’t live in a tea vacuum in the past three days. One can hardly avoid tea in Hong Kong, especially for a tea fanatic like me.

Aside from the restaurant teas I’ve had the past few days, I’ve had a long (and I mean long) list of teas from various places.

Of most interest was a Yiwu cake I had at one of the Sheung Wan teahouses. It was very, very good. It was also very expensive for what it is (3 years old). I’m debating whether to get a few cakes of it or not. The good thing is, it displays similar characteristics as the tong of tea I bought recently, so I think I am in the right territory in terms of finding really good Yiwu. The downside is I’m not sure if I can find such good tea again even if I go to Yiwu, and I am not sure given the way the market operates there, if I can actually find the teas I want.

I also had some other interesting stuff. Some of it is loose aged stuff… one of which was quite decent, and which I might stock up a bit on for personal consumption. Others were so so, or downright poor.

Among the bad stuff I’ve had was a cake of puerh, allegedly from the early 1980s, that is on sale at the BTH for what seems to be a ridiculously cheap sum of $200 USD. Now, early 80s tea for $200 is, I assure you, very very cheap.

Let me show you some pictures

Looks good enough, right? I think it’s a 7542 type of tea. Not entirely sure. It’s wet stored all right, since it’s got the signature wet stored look — a slight coating of white stuff on the tea.

Well…. the first infusion had an odd taste in it, and was somewhat rough and bitter. It was thin. Yet…. the colour looks great

Yet…. something was wrong with the tea. After another 4 infusions, we stopped. It was just…. not good. It was bitter, thin, and had some weird tastes. There’s a reason why it’s cheap….

Even the wet leaves look good

This is definitely stuff that can fool a beginner.

Categories: Information · Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Disneyland with niece and dad

February 23, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Which means no tea… until 7pm. I was, needless to say, having a bit of a caffeine withdrawal headache, since 4pm, in fact.

I came back and drank some of the Ying Kee puerh in a cup… it serves the purpose. It’s mostly cooked stuff, I think, with some raw mixed in, and just… well…. it downs well, if nothing else. The other great alternative is drinking some Wuyi tea, with a low amount of leaves in the cup. That also works well.

My girlfriend, who’s Korean, tells me that Koreans don’t have the ability to drink tea with leaves in the cup — apparently to lots of people it’s quite a difficult thing to do. In Hong Kong at least, and definitely in China as well, you learn how to use your teeth to filter out the leaves while getting the liquor into your mouth. With some teas, like biluochun, it’s quite difficult. With others, like Wuyi or puerh, it’s also doable.

At the end of the day…. that’s how most people in China drink their tea.

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A rather eventful day, tea or otherwise

February 22, 2007 · 4 Comments

I started my day early with a breakfast at Lin Heung Lau in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. One of the old style Hong Kong “Teahouses”, it’s a place where you go very early in the morning, sit there for a few hours while reading the paper, order a few dim sums and eating them at a leisurely pace (very very slow — you do not order a whole bunch and chow them down and head out. That’s not the point). You meet people you know and talk to them. You chat with the waiters. You enjoy the tea while you’re there.

This is our remnants (the steamers were taken away by the time I took the picture). Yes, the things on the dish are remains of what were chicken feet. The tea is wet stored puerh. The other people at the table we do not know, but some of the met up with each other, evidently friends of some sort, and were chatting, but they didn’t come together and it was obvious that they didn’t plan on meeting at the place. It’s really a neighbourhood place where people just go and meet others who they know anyway. We saw lots of “Gong Hey Fat Choy” greetings from various people to one another. It was very interesting to go today, and I think I will go again, although I might bring my own tea next time. By the way, the little card on the table says “Table reserved for staff meal — 10:45am”

(Not tea related, but interesting nonetheless) Then after lunch, in a mall, there were teams of lion-dancing people who came to the mall to perform. There’s a website that explains all this in more detail than I should post here, and you can look at it here. There are links at the bottom of the page (don’t ask me about the website’s design) that will lead to more information on this subject. You can, of course, also read the wikipedia article here.

I did take a video of the dancing being performed. Basically, stores put up a bundle of vegetables and a red envelope (with money inside) and hang it somewhere from their door. The lion will stop at every door where such a bundle is hanged, and will do more or less the following in the video that I took:

This wasn’t a particularly energetic version of a lion dance, but it serves the purpose of showing you sort of what you can see. It’s better live, and it’s also better if there are two lions (or even more). This is in the Southern Lion style (explained in more detail in the website I linked to). Quite an unexpected surprise and I spent some time watching them before moving on.

Moving on to tea tasting with K, a friend I met last time when I was in Hong Kong. He had some Zhongcha brand Traditional Character cake, and he wanted to compare it to the samples I had (from YP)… and we did.

YP:

K:

YP left, K right

The verdict is that YP’s is a little better in terms of aroma…. and K’s is slightly smoother. His was probably a little wetter stored, while YP’s was probably stored a little better. They were both quite good, and very, very nice to drink. It just goes down so smooth and sweet. The difference, if drunk separately, wouldn’t be very obvious. His was also compressed a little more (mine has been separated into pieces through traveling). I think it made somewhat of a difference. The colour of the liquor, however, is quite different, and the difference stayed throughout. The darker didn’t necessarily mean it was more flavourful, however. It was just darker. It was really interesting to see how the colour was so different yet the taste was not.

We also had some other stuff, but relatively unremarkable. There was some 15 years old liu an… barely drinkable. I don’t know if I should buy any liu an given the long aging you need before the tea is anywhere near good.

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Cooked loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen

February 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

When I went to Bonham Strand a few days ago I bought a little loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen. The owner of the place, who is a very kind old gentleman with a lot of knowledge of the tea business, described this tea as having been through “swimming” storage. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’d imagine it’s a little wet.

I should note here, by the way, that the term in Chinese that describes dry or wet storage is “shicang 濕倉” (wet) and “gancang 乾倉” (dry). The word “cang” in this case is better translated as “storage” as in “storage condition”, but the word literally means “warehouse”. So you can also translate those terms as “wet warehoused” and “dry warehoused”, or some such. When talking about a tea that has been wet stored, it is usually only referred to, in Chinese, as “this tea has been through storage”. This issue led Mr. Lam to quip “people have been asking me a lot lately whether this or that tea has been in storage. What kind of a dumb question is that? Where am I supposed to store my tea if not in my warehouse? Under my bed??”

Anyway, Chinese lesson over. The tea, when dry, looks like any other loose puerh…

Almost impossible to tell what it is. All I know is that the grade of the tea is fairly high.

The liquor is a dark matter…. slightly opaque. It’s got none of the “fermentation” taste of a young cooked tea. Instead, it’s just …. old, kinda sweet, and somewhat bland in a way. Smooth, although not 100% smooth. There was a slight unpleasantness in the back of the throat… very slight, but detectable. This is supposedly a by product of wet storage that hasn’t been fully aired-out, so to speak.

The wet leaves are…. not too remarkable

But the fairness cup, after using it, shows how much stuff was dissolved into the tea liquor… and the viscosity of the tea.

The reason I’m drinking this at all (I’m sure some of you are wondering why) is that ZH from Beijing wants me to look for some cooked puerh for him, preferably aged. This is supposedly about 10 years old. He wants to try putting ginseng with the tea in a sealed jar to let the tea be infused with ginseng smell, sort of as an experiment. I’m going to send him a sample of this and see if it meets his approval.

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