A Tea Addict's Journal

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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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Passing the year

February 17, 2007 · 3 Comments

Today’s the final day of the year of the dog, and tomorrow (in about an hour) we usher in the year of the pig. In China people would be lighting firecrackers like crazy at midnight, and sleeping might be difficult for a few hours. In Hong Kong, no such things are allowed (all firecrackers/fireworks are outlawed — too dangerous in a place with such a high concentration of population). Nevertheless, people celebrate, mostly by eating dinner at home or outside, but definitely with family. This is about the equivilent of the Thanksgiving Dinner in the US, where families try their best to gather together and have a long dinner. We just finished ours.

During the day today, as you can imagine, it was rather quiet outside, but a little gathering was going on in the Best Tea House. It was, surprisingly, an exceptionally busy day for them. I stopped there earlier with my cousin, but it was so crowded with (mostly Japanese) tourists that we had to take a walk. When we came back, I saw somebody unexpected — sjschen of the LJ Community. He is in town visiting, and by chance found the Best Tea House a few days ago. We ended up chatting a good bit about the teas they had, and started brewing some.

Among the teas we drank was a somewhat wet stored cake, which tasted like a 10-15 years old tea and was still a little sour/green in the undertones, but generally starting to taste like aged teas. Then it was a loose tea from, supposedly, the Menghai area. It’s starting to taste like a real old tea, with a shadow of the Red Labels I’ve had. It’s not quite as strong in the qi, but the taste is very similar. It’s sometimes quite interesting to see these changes in puerh.

Then we tried the puerh I bought for Rosa, which I personally now think is good value for the money. It’s not a great tea now, but it has some signs of a good one to come. The chaqi is strong and the tea is generally good. Rosa was happy with the purchase.

We finished with a high fired tieguanyin. Always nice to drink such things after a bunch of puerh. We didn’t get to the one cake I recommended sjschen to try, but oh well, what can you do. Maybe they went back to the store after dinner? I’m not sure. Either way, we had to leave and so we all left. It was nice meeting another tea friend in person, and it reminds me again of the real benefits I get from this blog — I get to meet all sorts of people from all over the world, people who I would have never met otherwise, all because we share one common interest.

I wish you all xinnian kuaile (Happy New Year), gongxi facai (wishing you to be prosperous – standard Cantonese new year’s greeting), and most importantly, xinnian he haocha (drink good tea in the New Year!)

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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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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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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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Tea tasting in Shanghai

January 13, 2007 · 2 Comments

I had tea with L today at his office.  It was a dizzying array of teas, among which a comparison tasting of two Jingmai teas stood out, because they are made by the same person, one in Spring, and one in Fall 2006.

The leaves look similar when dry, and exhibit a simialr fragrance.  When brewed though, the spring leaves are obviously more tender and younger.  The fall ones are a little bigger, older, and less tender.  The colour of the brew was significantly different — the spring one being darker in colour, due to age, no doubt, but I think also concentration of leaves.  The spring one also just simply tasted more concentrated — a higher level of aroma, fragrance, a smoother mouthfeel.  In fact, the spring was better in every respect.

How much of this is due to age?  I suppose some of it must be due to age, as it’s got basically double the time of the fall to age.  Yet, the spring cake still tastes really raw, and I think the fact that it is consisted of younger, more tender leaves also makes a huge impact.  Younger leaves, especially buds, tend to produce a smoother tea.  It is also more concentrated in flavour, reflected in this tasting.

If at the same price, I think it’s a no-brainer that one should buy the spring.  There is, of course, the variable that the spring leaves might be of a lower quality (say, from lower quality plants).  That, unfortuantely, is the variable that is the hardest to gauge.

Tomorrow I might be going with L to a friend’s place to try some more tea, and to meet up with a reader of my blog who also lives in Shanghai.  I hope it’ll be fun 🙂

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A barrage of youthfulness

January 8, 2007 · 2 Comments

I went out for tea today in the afternoon with L, who came back from Shanghai.  He went tasting at the Zhongcha office today again, and invited me to go along.  When I got there, things were already in full swing… and there were LOTS of people.  SH, the guy whose family member made the Yiwu cake I bought yesterday, was there.  L was there.  In the end, ZH also came (sorry I use these “names”, but I don’t know if any of them wish to be identified).  There were others too… about 8 people in all.  It was a big gathering.

They had already tasted two aged bricks of some sort, and which I only got a taste.  It’s here when you could feel the immaturity of the Beijing market relative to Hong Kong… this is stuff that people in Hong Kong won’t even bring out to taste with friends, because really, it wasn’t that good.  Yet here people treasure it, because it seems like some really good stuff.  There’s really a dearth of aged tea here.  In 5 years time, I’m sure that situation will change, but right now… it’s all new tea, and everybody is still trying things for the first time.  SH is obviously more experienced, since he’s based in Guangzhou and has access to many more good teas.  ZH and the other tea taster at Zhongcha also have tried a good bunch of stuff.  Everybody else, however, are relative novices.

The first two teas that we brewed up after I got there were the two new fall 06 production Zhongcha cakes.  One is a Bada Mountain cake, while the other is a Yiwu.  The Bada is quite nice, very fragrant, reminds me a bit of some Nannuo teas I’ve had… almost oolong like in its fragrance, and fairly alluring.  The Yiwu, on the other hand, is a bit …. off.  Bitter, a bit thin, not that interesting, and IMHO, not really Yiwu at all.  It smells like a Yiwu, but when brewed, it doesn’t taste right in many respects.  I’m not sure why.  I guess the most obvious explanation is that it’s not pure Yiwu, but mixed with other stuff.  It just doesn’t taste like the many other Yiwus I’ve had so far.

Then we went on to a Xiaguan Iron Cake from the 90s.  Wet, wet, wet stored.  The whole thing has a coating of whiteness on it.  Not very good.  Tastes heavily of wet storage.

At this point, SH pulled out a tea from his bag.  He poured the contents of the bag into the gaiwan, and a cloud of dust appeared.  It looks like fannings, stuff you pulled out of a teabag.  It looks quite unremarkable.  He said this is bamboo tea — the tea that is stuffed in bamboos.  He said that apparently what they do is put mud over the opening, and then store the whole thing under soil for a year, before pulling it up again.  This will make sure the bamboo won’t crack and I imagine also ages the tea.  This thing is about 40 years old.

It’s very nice.  Old tea taste, more like an aged liu an or an aged thousand taels tea.  Smooth, sweet, got good qi, some huigan…. very nice, very tasty, and he said when they got it, they only paid 200 RMB each…

We then had some cooked puerh.  It’s really not very exciting and not even woth mentioning.  Reminds me again why I generally don’t drink cooked puerh.

L wants to get together again.  We might drink something on Wednesday.  I also need to pick up some tea for Rosa, as well as going to where I got my electronic scale to see if they will replace mine — the thing isn’t working anymore, and I’ve used it a total of maybe 5 times!

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2005 Yisheng

January 7, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went to Maliandao today, predictably enough.  What else am I going to do on a sunny, cold sunday in Beijing?

I didn’t exactly make it very far today.  I walked into the Puerh Chadu, not having been there in ages, thinking that maybe I can find a few 02-04 things.  Chayuan, nice as it may be, is too new.  Most of the stores there only carry stuff from 2005 onwards because they haven’t been around that long.  While some are moved from somewhere else, so they have older stock, most of the time they just sell very new teas.

I ended up in the third store I saw.  They had a tea from a maker called “Dou Ji”, which I’ve seen online, so I figured it’s not a bad idea to at least look at it in person and check it out.  There are simply far too many puerh brands out there, and the more you see, the more you know.

I stayed there till almost 6pm.

I ended up trying three Yiwu teas, one is 04 spring and two are 05 spring.  The 05 springs, despite being from the same company and the same period, taste different.  They’re not hugely different, but different enough for anybody to notice.  One was obviously better, more rounded, fuller in flavour, body, texture, etc.  The aroma is especially good, tasting obviously like a Yiwu that is beginning to age… or at least like all the aged Yiwus that I’ve had.  I don’t know why, but there is something particular about this aroma that I like.

The 04, on the other hand, felt a little stale.  While it’s still good, and actually more full flavoured in the aged taste, it’s somehow missing something.  I ended up purchasing 3 of the 05 spring that I like.

Then I went to the store that L partially owns.  L’s in town, and I figured I’ll go see if he’s there.  The manager of the store saw my cakes, and screamed “oh no you didn’t!”.  Turns out she has a few jian of this, and could’ve easily sold me a few for less (she didn’t say how much less).  Oh well.  She did give me a sample of the tea she has quite a few weeks ago, and which I never tried.  I should try it now to compare with the cake I got and see if it’s actually the same stuff, or if it might be the other 05 spring batch that I didn’t like as much.

One of the persons in charge of making this particular cake was in town, and he came to the store shortly after I arrived.  We brewed up a Mahei cake from 04, which I thought was utterly unimpressive.  It’s a lot worse than a lot of Yiwu teas I’ve tried.  The conversation with this guy, however, was good, and it was interesting to see his take on the puerh market these days.  Among the things he told me…. 5kg of raw leaves makes 1kg of maocha now, whereas a few years ago only 3.7kg of raw leaves could make 1kg of maocha.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, although it does leave me a feeling that something’s going to be really wrong with the puerh market in a few years’ time.

 

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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10,000th hit

December 10, 2006 · 9 Comments

One of you reading this post today will be the 10,000th visitor of this blog. Not a large number, I know, but given that the average blog has 7 readers a day (according to The Economist), I feel like I’m not doing too poorly.

This blog began on January 28th, 2006, as a sort of record-keeping method for all the teas I drink. I wanted to be more systematic in my tea drinking and record keeping. I found that I was mixing different teas up in terms of what I think of them, and thus writing down a record, with pictures and what not, could well be the best way of keeping track. A blog format made sense. That’s also why I called it by the somewhat silly name of “A Tea Addict’s Journal”.

The blog changed over time. I have taken to taking more pictures. I have also started commenting less on tea-related things, for some reason. I suppose partly because I think that what drives you all here is not what I think about certain issues related to tea, but the tea itself. Since I am in China, and I have access to teas that are rarely seen in the West (where most of you are), the best I could do is at least write about them.

In many ways, I am merely a commentator, sometimes a picky, inquisitive, and opinionated one, but a commentator whose job is to talk about teas that I come across. I don’t claim to always know what I’m talking about. If I sound authoritative when I write, that’s because too many caveats will make this blog unreadable. I think I am learning, just like everybody who reads this blog, everytime I drink a new tea. It reveals new things to me, and adds one more reference point for evaluating future teas that I drink, whether it be a green, an oolong, a puerh, or a red. I think I have developed my taste in tea more in the past few months in Beijing than the previous four or five years combined, and I think the act of blogging about what I drink has benefited me because it makes me more critical of and pay more attention to what I drink. By sharing these observations, I hope that others can somehow benefit from what I’ve learned.

At first only myself and maybe a few people close to me were reading this thing, for obvious reasons. Then, gradually, readership grew bit by bit. I discovered other sites, such as Teachat, LJ Puerh Community, Cha Dao, RFTD, etc, and also made new friends like Toki, Phyll, bearsbearsbears, among many others, some of whom I have now met in real life. It is encouraging to see that other people are reading this blog, some on a very regular basis, and that, in turn, is a motivation to keep writing, because I know that there will be people who are at least interested enough to check back here. Some I can tell who they are by where they’re located, etc, but others I have no idea, but somehow found their way to my blog and decided it worth their time to look once in a while. I have romantic notions that one day, I will open a teahouse somewhere where I can share this wonderful drink with people in person, sipping each cup, talking about it, exchanging views, ideas, thoughts about it. Tea is, after all, partly a communal experience that is best enjoyed with a few friends. Alas, that’s not possible, not yet anyway, so for now, a blog will have to do.

I know Xanga isn’t very comment friendly, and I wish I could change that, but since I can’t… if you feel like announcing yourself, please drop me a line at marshaln (the at sign goes here) gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you. But regardless — thank you all for reading along.

P.S. I wish I have a way to reciprocate all the links that others have put on their sites to this blog. I still haven’t figured out if there’s a way to post permanent links on the front page of this one. If anybody knows where/how, please let me know.

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Drinking tea with ZH

December 1, 2006 · 5 Comments

It’s my birthday today, which is part of the reason I invited ZH over for tea. Of course, I would’ve invited him over anyway. I like other tea nuts.

We didn’t waste too much time and got down to business. First up was my Yiwu maocha that I got almost two months ago. I thought I would ask his opinion on the tea.

The tea, I have to say, changed a bit since it was picked. Now, the bitterness is coming through a little stronger. It’s a little more bitter, the colour’s a little darker, and the overall profile has changed slightly. I remember it was sweet, fragrant, and all that. It’s still mostly that, but turned slightly more like a regular puerh. The Yiwu taste is very obvious, and ZH agreed with me on that. He also noticed some sort of numbing bitterness in infusion 3 or so, but only slightly and not very obvious. By infusion 4-5, the bitterness went away and turned into a smoother, rounder, tea.

We were puzzling over the tea’s origins, because while it tastes largely like a Yiwu, it doesn’t taste exactly like a Yiwu old tree tea, because of the current presence of the bitter element (a little much for a Yiwu — very low standards). He also thought the colour of the maocha is a little dark, and some of the leaves didn’t look like old big tree. I suggested perhaps it’s partly plantation tea mixed it… which could be the case (or just teas that are plucked from trees in the same area but of younger age — after all, you have to have young trees in a forest!). The mystery remains.

The next tea we tried was a free sample given to me by Hou De. It’s the Xizihao 2006 Taiji series Lao Banzhang. The one I got is the Yang. I broke some of the tea, and brewed it up. I have to say that having just had the Lao Banzhang maocha from ZH two days ago…. the Xizihao pales in comparison. It’s not nearly as good, and doesn’t have that requisite profile that only Lao Banzhang has. The taste is mixed, and ZH thinks that some of the tea is from other areas in the Bulang mountain. Sigh. I will try it again, next time with more leaves.

Then after debating over what to serve next, I decided to use the remaining bits of the 95 Zhenchunya Hao that YP gave me. There’s not a lot left…. only enough for basically half a brew, so I filled the gaiwan halfway up with water to brew the tea, resulting in two small cups each infusion. Still the same as last time…. a very odd flavour for puerh, and now that I’ve had a whole bunch of older Yiwu recently, I have to say this one does NOT taste like a typical aged Yiwu. There’s a bit of that older taste, but a more prominent trait of this tea is that it is a little fruity with a bit of a plum note. Last time when I had this with BBB, I didn’t think much of it, but now… I am starting to think that this might be a tea that went through pre-fermentation before the pressing, during the processing stage of the leaves, and thus the tea is not strictly speaking puerh, or not pure puerh. What I am tasting here is a mix of older puerh taste, and more importantly, of older oolong taste.

Of course — a big caveat — this is all speculation on my part. However, having had that oddly fruity and sweet aged red tea a few days ago… I feel like I have connected two dots. This will explain where the fruitiness of the Zhenchunya Hao is coming from (which, by the way, I don’t really detect in the version on sale at the Best Tea House now — they are different batches). Older oolongs do have a note that tastes somewhat similar to what I had. That, and an old puerh shouldn’t be so light in flavour and aroma. The typical Yiwu aged taste (detectable now in the Yangqing Hao 2004, and the Jingye Hao 2001, for example) is just not really there. This is not to say this is bad tea — far from it, it’s very interesting, if a little odd, and the tea is very pleasant to drink. It’s just a different kind of taste, and if you buy something like this, thinking it will turn into your typical Yiwu (for example — not that this is available for sale) you will be surprised, but probably not nastily surprised.

The leaves look nice:

I saved the best for the last, but this also made sense in terms of age progression. We had the Zhongcha Traditional Character that was given to me by YP. ZH sat up when he too the first sip, realizing that this is good tea. The tea, as I’ve said last time I brewed it, looks awful. If you just look at it, you’d think it’s a cooked cake. It looks like one, it smells like one, but it does not taste like a cooked cake, or at least not entirely. It’s a raw/cooked mix, at least that’s what YP told me, and I think you can tell that the cake was mixed because during the infusions some obvious “cooked tea” notes come through. Yet, there’s an unmistakable presence of aged raw puerh in the cake. There are more plum notes this time, and a very soothing mouthfeel — round, moisturizing, sweet, huigan… it’s all there. The throat feels cool after drinking, and stays cool. A beautiful tea, and I’m really, really glad that YP gave these pieces to me. I still have enough of the sample left to brew it one more time. I’ll have to save it for some other occasion.

I decided to take some pictures of the wet leaves of the Zhongcha

Closeup

Even closer

This leaf is a little odd — the lone leaf that unfurled easily and that is particularly light compared with everything else

A nice meeting over tea, and I’m sure we’ll be meeting over tea again. It’s obvious that he is not nearly as expereinced as, say, some HK tea people, but he makes up for it by his enthusiaism. If I can go to Yunnan with him next year, that’ll be nice.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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