A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘musings’

Young puerh prices (1)

February 15, 2007 · 4 Comments

I went back to the Best Tea House today for my usual visit. I dropped off some of Rosa’s tea, although most of it is still with me. I also tried a bunch of teas, none of which I’ve had before. They got some new goods, and so I was eager to give them all a shot. Talking about them, however, would be boring. Instead, something else popped into my head today.

Prices at the Best Tea House, for young, raw puerh anyway, is all over the place. For example, I tried a very expensive new cake today from the Jingmai area that was entirely unremarkable and boring, not to mention weak and unappealing. Tiffany tried it once before, and thought she just didn’t brew it right because she was rushsed. After today’s tasting, however, she realized that it wasn’t so much that her brewing was bad, but that the tea was bad. The price, however, is mystifying. It’s much more expensive than some of the older stuff which are also better. No idea why, really…

Then you have some cakes that are really quite cheap (relatively speaking, anyway). The one I bought last time was one of them. Of course, then I discovered that I could get it off taobao for a slightly lower price, but given the hassle of using that service and the shipping cost, the price was basically the same… and this is from a store with a much higher overhead!

In some ways, this is sort of a microcosm of the young puerh market in general. Prices are all over the place for all sorts of reasons, most of which aren’t even logical. Much of this, I think, derives from a lack of information on all fronts. There is a lack of information on the side of the purchasers, of course. Services like taobao and access to markets like Maliandao (provided you’ve done a lot of walking on the street) will give the consumer a good idea of what might or might not be a fair price, but both activities take a substantial amount of time to do. Most consumers don’t have that kind of time. When you can only rely on your local teashops and when you only shop for tea once every, say, two weeks, it’s hard to know what’s a fair price for what kind of goods.

There is also a lack of information for the retailers as well. Many times the retailer is simply selling stuff that they got from whatever source they have, and mark it up the usual % and resell it. Quality is not always involved in the calculation of the prices. Much of this is also arbitrary and unpredictable, depending on many factors such as storage, fame of the cake, production numbers, etc, all of which affect the price of a particular tea. At the Best Tea House, for example, I have seen 15-20 years old cakes, wet stored, going for half the price of a 10 years old cake, dry stored. This is quite normal. I have also seen entirely new cakes be almost 10x different in prices, despite a similar quality. I cannot understand the pricing. I think how much the tea cost the retailer in the first place plays a heavy role.

On the other hand, there are the genuine attempts to deceive consumers. At a place like Best Tea House, you can be assured of a fair quote, no matter who you are. That is not true on the mainland, where everybody gets a different quote. For example, I have asked L to get quotes for me from the Haiwan Factory store for some of their cakes. He got them for me. I then went back with him a week later, asking the same question for the same prices. I think I got a different salesperson that day, and not surprisingly, the quote was different by about 15%. It was actually lower, but it could’ve been higher as well. We just laughed it off as a funny incident (especially since he’s actually a tea vendor, when I’m not), but without transparent prices, such things happen all the time. I’ve personally experienced them many times on Maliandao, and I’m definitely not alone.

While prices are lower at a place like Maliandao, getting the low prices involves substantial work and a reasonable amount of knowledge and experience in dealing with these people. I have seen a dramatic decrease in the prices I pay for puerh in Beijing over the coures of the year. Although you might think it is nice to get the low prices, in some ways, those buying tea from the US or Europe or elsewhere, especially those purchasing tea over the internet, have a much better and easier time. Even though prices are obviously higher through ebay vendors than what I could get at Maliandao, prices are also transparent and more importantly, stable. While prices do rise, they do so in a slow and predictable fashion. Whereas Dayi tea in China over 2006 has seen times when it was literally “one day, one price”, internet prices through ebay were the same for the same 7542, 601 batch. That itself is a bit of a blessing. In fact, some of the ebay items are selling at basically no premium over what the current market prices for the same tea in China. Since ebay consumers probably won’t tolerate a 40% price hike in the course of a few months, the prices can only stay the same, or more or less the same.

Raw material prices for old, big arbour trees in Yunnan have been shooting up by something like 50% a year. This year, from what I have heard second hand anyway, raw leaves prices are the highest in Lao Banzhang, reaching 550-600RMB for one kg of maocha. Yiwu is second, clocking in around 280-300 or so. Jingmai is a bit lower, and then you have the rest. This is only what I have heard. Work in some attrition of maocha during production, add in sundry costs like pressing and transportation and overhead and stuff, and you can roughly work out how much a cake of these old wild arbour trees should cost to make and to be sold at a profit by the people who first made them.

How much they retail for, however, is an entirely different subject. As I have noted, pricing is all over the place, but I think it would be quite unreasonable to charge anything more than 300% of raw cost of the tea for retail, more if it’s being sold overseas (as it’s been through somebody else’s hands). The more hands its been through, the more it would cost. Other factors come in, such as the kind of market the store serves (i.e. stores that are located in CBDs with pretty salesgirls and fantastic decor will sell the same tea for more, obviously). Factory reputation come in (the Dayi premium, for example). The stories, unfortunately, also come in (this is tea made by so and so when he discovered a new field of tea trees in xxx area, unharvested for a long time!).

More on prices tomorrow. This is getting too long.

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Difficult question

January 22, 2007 · 6 Comments

Inevitably, when your friends know you as the “tea guy”, they start asking you that very difficult question — “what should I get?  What’s good?  What should I buy as a souvenir for xxx?”

A friend’s friend who is visiting Shanghai asked me that today, and I really was at a loss for an answer.  I thought about longjing, but really, longjing is not very well appreciated, necessarily, by the people who don’t particularly like tea (in this case, the object of the gift-giving are some Americans).  Longjing is also expensive.  The girl then said “would chrysanthemum be good?”, and I thought that might be a good gift — not expensive, tastes reasonable, etc, but then, I am loathe to suggest an herbal tea…

It’s always made more difficult when I ask “so what kind of taste do you like?” the answer will be “I’m not sure — anything good will do”.  Ugh.

So…. if someone asks you this question, especially when buying stuff for someone who knows little to nothing about tea, and if you have an unlimited supply of tea at your disposal, what would you usually suggest?

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Lipton teabags

January 12, 2007 · 4 Comments

Some of you know that I am a PhD student doing research in China this year, and today, in Shanghai, we had a dissertation group meeting today, with a few fellow PhD students talking about their respective projects.  That, of course, is not interesting subject for this blog.

What is interesting is the tea I drank.  Lipton Yellow Label tea.

A thought occurred to me today — what makes it so that Lipton, a company that sells what really is an inferior product, can penetrate the country where tea is originally made and still made with such sophistication?

I posed this question to the group, and got everybody wondering.  After all, there are cases where something that is abhorred earlier would take over a market after it’s been accepted, but usually, that something is foreign, unknown.  Tea, on the other hand, is not such a thing.  Chinese drink tea all the time.  I suppose bad tea in a bag is unknown, foreign, just as coke or pepsi or sushi might be, but still…. it’s like introducing some weird burger to Americans and taking the States by storm.  Mos Burger (google it) is weird, is good, but is not popular outside of Hawaii.

So, I guess the question is — how did Lipton do it?

I suppose the fact that it’s in a bag helps.  The perceived image of drinking something foreign (foreign must be good!) helps.  But the tea itself is horrible… it’s a little sour, flat, not aromatic, goes well only with milk (I was imaginging it having milk in it the whole time I was drinking my bag).  Why do people like it?  It’s not even that cheap.

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Provenance

January 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

One of the things that distinguish a Hong Kong tea vendor from a mainland (at least Beijing) tea vendor is that Hong Kong tea vendors tend to be very imprecise about the provenance of their tea. Most vendors in Hong Kong cannot tell you if the tea you’re tasting right now is from 1989 or 1991. Most vendors also cannot tell you which mountain its from, or whether it’s a fall or spring tea, or what not. Some do, like Sunsing, but that’s rare. At the Best Tea House, for example, such information are usually qualified… i.e. “I think this is from xxx” or “we started selling it in 200x”. The Mengku Yuanyexiang, for example, is, I believe, a 2001 cake, but Tiffany always thought it’s from 2003, because they started selling it in 2003. They don’t always sell everything right away, and that is fairly standard practice. Usually they are not in a hurry to sell… and why should they, with prices going up so fast?

This is in stark contrast to Beijing tea sellers, who will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the cake in question, from the production date, raw material origins, storage location, etc, down to every last detail. Sometimes it’s probably true, but more often than not, I think it’s probably at least sometimes fabricated. I’ve heard so many times from people in Beijing that their tea has always been dry stored since production in, say, 2001, etc etc, except that I find them sometimes to be slightly wet stored, damp, etc. They will always tell a story, but the story is not always true.

The other thing is… how many people can tell the difference of a tea when it’s ten years old? As far as I am aware, nobody knows what a 10 year old Banzhang tastes like. Pure Banzhang (substitute any mountian here) cakes didn’t appear until about 10 years ago. Before that, all we’ve got are recipe cakes, or cakes with leaves of unknown or only somewhat known origins. Who can say for sure where the leaves for the original 8582 was from? The season it was picked? Anything? Yet, we’re drinking them up like there’s no tomorrow (with prices to match). I recently heard someone tell me that this 1997 brick was made with Banzhang area materials. Huh? How do you know that? It’s not written anywhere. By taste? How many people can taste that much of a difference among these locations?

Yet, it is on this sort of information that prices are driven up. XXX cake is expensive because it’s a pure Yiwu from, say, 2001, and the 2002 and 2003 have correspondingly lower prices. If the materials (and the quality) are about the same… why buy the 2001 when its price is, say, 100% more? Your money won’t make 100% return in two years unless you’re a very good investor, so wouldn’t it be better to pay the 100% lower price to get the tea that is 2 years younger? There’s an opportunity cost involved. I guess if I were 65, I might pay the higher price to get the further aging, but otherwise… I’m willing to wait. This is mainly why I only buy cheap or loose aged puerh for current consumption, and buy mostly 5 years or younger compressed teas… because they are correspondingly much cheaper. At the end of the day, 15 years from now when I am drinking some of my current purchases (when they’re finally ready for consumption), I probably can’t tell the difference between the stuff I bought in 2006 or 2007.

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Different locales, different tastes

December 22, 2006 · 5 Comments

One of the things that became really apparent on my trip back here this time is how differently people taste teas here. Let’s start with the brewing.

In Beijing the brewing is usually done with relatively little effort and concentration. In the gaiwan the leaves go. In pours the water. Out comes the tea. There’s some variation in how the tea is done at each store. Some storekeepers will do flash infusions with no regard to how much tea is in the gaiwan or the temperature of the water. Others will let the water sit a bit. However, usually the first method is dominant. This has to do with local tastes, where they prefer lighter, cleaner tasting teas. Anything too heavy is deemed to be either too bitter or no good. Ditto for anything remotely wet stored. Some will go as far as to say that anything that has been stored in Fujian or Guangdong is bad.

Then, in Hong Kong, the tea brewing is very different. This is most apparent with Tiffany at the Best Tea House, who takes a lot of care in both the temperature of the water, the amount of tea, and the way the water is poured. She lowers temperature for brewing after 3-4 infusions for almost all teas, but especially the older ones. However, the same can be said of some of the other places I’ve been to (though not all). Jabbok brews teas also in a fairly careful manner. Sunsing a little less so. The people at the Yue Wah National Products store are more like mainland brewing…. a little less attention than I like.

The tasting requirements are also different. Everybody talk about mouthfeel, but what exactly do you want from the mouthfeel is not quite the same. In Beijing, it’s about how thick the tea is, huigan, where the bitterness is, etc. Flavour is also important, to a certain extent. In Hong Kong, the overwhelming first factor that people seem to talk about is whether or not a tea is smooth. Smoothness, it seems, matters a lot to them. Some teas will be considered smooth by most people, but some of the tea drinkers at the Best Tea House still go “oh, this is quite rough”. Requirement in that side is high. The other thing they look for is “throat feel”, also something that is rarely discussed in Beijing (I seem to be one of the only person who talks about it, no doubt a HK influence). Where bitterness is, etc, is rarely mentioned. The thinness and thickness of teas is talked about in conjunction with these other factors, but not really the first thing they mention.

This leads to very different ideas about what makes a good tea. This is most evident in puerh, but also in other teas as well. I am still trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes a good puerh, and having conflicting concepts doesn’t really help. At the end of the day, it will take experimentation and careful observation. I’d tend to think that the Hong Kong way is right — because they’ve had more experience dealing with it. But then, maybe it just comes down to personal taste.

What do you look for?

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Buying tea…

December 21, 2006 · 7 Comments

I’ve felt less urge to buy tea in Hong Kong now that I’ve been in Beijing. I suppose it’s only natural.

Whereas before I left for Beijing I was only too eager, now…. I feel like I can wait. Of course, having bought a bunch of stuff there helps cure the urge, but I also think I’ve sort of passed the initial “rush to buy” phase, and have settled down a little. I noticed that tastes really do differ widely between here and Beijing, and what people here consider good tea might not be what people in Beijing consider even ok tea, and the same is true vice versa.

Which means that…. there’s always a market for any tea, regardless of “quality” because tastes differ so much.

But more immediately, it means that I need to sit on my stash of puerh, maybe only buy a small amount from now until….. a few years later, and see how my holdings so far develops before making any bigger commitment to buy more. I think I still want to go to Yunnan, and will still want to press some cakes, if the opportunity arises. Yet other than that, I think I should really stop buying until I’ve got more aging experience under my belt.

Of course, this is easier said than done, with something as big as Maliandao there. I probably will succumb to temptation as soon as I get back. I’m sure you all know the feeling.

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Thinking about tea on a plane

December 17, 2006 · Leave a Comment

The past few months in Beijing, aside from my dissertation research, has been fairly productive in terms of my tea studies. Maliandao is a valuable resource for those adventurous enough to go and seek out the teas. Although I have been told by some that only lower end puerh exists in Maliandao, I don’t find that to be true — it just takes some effort to locate the stores with nice puerh. As for other types of tea, while Maliandao is woefully inadequate in roasted tieguanyin and roasted dancongs, it has a reasonable selection of Wuyi teas and more qingxiang tieguanyin than you’d care to drink. There are also an amazing array of green tea, which I almost never touched. The presence of a lot of government officials, important businesses, and simply a lot of people has made sure that the supply of tea is varied and good.

I have probably tasted at least 150 teas on all the trips I’ve taken to Maliandao and other tea gatherings. I have made a bunch of purchases, usually in the form of one or two cakes at a time, that seem to suit my fancy. Some are supposed “big tree” teas, others are teas that seem to be genuine big tree or high quality puerh, and then there are the oddballs, the ones that I bought more out of curiosity than anything else. All these, of course, present a wonderful opportunity for learning about the nuances of all the teas that are available, and to use as reference points for separating the good from the bad.

I have learned a few things so far. I think I have finally started divorcing myself from getting too attached to particular flavours in a tea, especially when looking for puerh for aging. Instead, the important point is to go for the “mouthfeel” of the tea, and how it literally feels while swirling in the mouth. This also includes how your mouth feels after the tea is swallowed, as that also yields important clues as to the quality of the tea. Flavours are, in short, a smokescreen. It’s not that they are not important. If a puerh is sour… something’s not quite right. If it’s extremely bitter and does not turn into a sort of “huigan”, something’s not quite right, but to get too carried away by individual aromas is, I think, missing the point, because the aromas will change very quickly. A fresh puerh that has a certain aroma will most likely lose that within the first 5 years, or at least, it will be changed enough so you no longer recognize it as the same thing.

That, of course, is only if you’re looking for teas that are for storage. If you are looking for a puerh that is for immediate consumption, whether raw or cooked, then any of the above-mentioned things really don’t matter. As long as you like it, and as long as the price is right, then anything else does not matter at all.

But what about other teas?

I can only talk about the ones that I’ve tasted a lot recently, namely Wuyi mountain “rock tea”. There is a whole spectrum of these teas, ranging from basically no roasting to heavily roasted teas. Here, again, it depends on individual taste, first and foremost. I personally find that roasted teas will generally last longer in infusions, and have a depth and character that cannot be matched by the lightly roasted ones. Of course, the light roasted teas will have an initially alluring aroma that is unparalleled, but that is really up to individual taste.

I think when it comes down to it, buying tea that suits your taste is simply the most important thing. If somebody tells you that dry stored puerh is good, but after comparing dry and wet stored tea, you decide that you like the sweetness and smoothness of wet stored puerh… then what’s wrong with that? Go buy it, and consider yourself lucky because wet stored teas are cheaper. Similarly, if you like that $10/lb tieguanyin over the $100/lb one…. go for it!

The danger in all this, I think, is imperfect information and a “mob effect”. It is more pronunced for puerh than other teas, and certainly more obvious here in China, where information regarding tea travels faster. Those in North America or Europe are quite insulated by this as there is a real information barrier, and whatever is the current fad in China often takes a long time before it gets translated over. For example, current guesses is that teas from the Mengku Rongsi factory will be the next candidate for speculation — its prices are likely to rise in the coming year. It has already begun, with the heavy promotion of their early 2001 tea, the Yuanyexiang bing. There are also a number of merchants recently who have been touting the Mengku Rongsi made Big Snow Mountain wild tea brick (made for Ruirong trading company), and when I went to the Ruirong store yesterday to taste stuff, I asked if that brick were available as well. In one of the few useful pieces of information she gave me, she said lots of people have been asking about this brick lately, whereas half a year ago, nobody even knew about this thing. BBB and I tasted it when he was here, and honestly… it’s not any greater than any of the other Mengku stuff. I will be surprised, however, if the price of this brick does not skyrocket in the next two years.

So it is both a blessing and a curse when information travels imperfectly and slowly. On the one hand, valuable information regarding various teas are difficult to obtain in English (not to mention any other foreign language), but at the same time, it also filters out much of the rather commercially motivated “information” available as well. The key, I think, is still to try as much as you can and take everything everybody says (including this very blog) critically. In the past few years we’ve seen a few things being speculated on with skyrocketing prices. Some Menghai factory stuff (new ones) are literally “one price a day”, as if there’s hyperinflation going on. Changtai group teas have, over the past few years, appreciated in value significantly. Xiaguan is also undergoing the same process, according to people on Sanzui, and I think I am seeing a similar maneuveur beginning for Mengku. When all is said and done, however, it isn’t about who made the tea, but the tea itself. There are reports of people buying fake Menghai stuff, but ended up laughing when they took it home, because when they tried it against the real one at home… the fake was better. That’s probably not common, but it’s not inconceivable either. The point is, of course, that a lot of people are simply buying teas per recommendation of “experts” who peddle various things, but as all experts in all agricultural products are… in order to have something to write every week (or month, or season, or year) you end up recommending a lot of teas that may or may not generate the buzz necessary for a huge increase in demand and price. In a market as young and uninformed as puerh (9 out of 10 people who drink puerh have probably started within the last year or two) there is a lot of demand for information, but it is also in this kind of atmosphere where manipulation of various channels (whether they are virtual places like Sanzui, tea fairs, or various publications) can easily create the appearance that something is in hot demand. As recent studies have shown… human beings put a lot of faith in what others are doing when it comes to purchases, and are easily influenced by that sort of information.

This is not to say never buy anything Menghai (or anybody else). This just means that when buying a tea… it is important to evaluate it simply on its own terms, and not on whether or not it says “Banzhang” on the label or whether or not others are also buying it in droves. It is, of course, not easy for those far away from any real life puerh vendors to try things out, but by studying the cakes, looking at the way it is pressed, the wet leaves, the tastes, the feeling of drinking it, the liquor…… and trying a wide variety of teas is an important place to start. It’s also what makes this so much fun.

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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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Testing maocha

October 31, 2006 · 1 Comment

More puerh research today.

I’ve been a bit baffled and confused by all that I’ve been reading these days. The concensus on Sanzui seems to be that a cake is bad for aging if either 1) it has gone through too high a temperature at “kill-green”, which causes it to be like green tea. Green tea, as we all know, age poorly. 2) It has gone through pre-fermentation (I think it means oxidation here), similar to an oolong. These teas will not age as well, and can be just as deadly as the green tea puerh in that after a few years, the tea will get stale and uninteresting.

So, aside from good raw materials, you need good craftsmanship to go with the raw tea to make it a good puerh. Sounds simple enough.

Where, and how, do you find this tea with good craftsmanship and good material though? And how do you identify them when you are there?

Let’s throw materials aside for a second and focus on the craftsmanship bit. Basically, you want to eliminate (again from what I’ve been gathering from Sanzui) puerh that are too prominent in fragrance when early (could be either 1 or 2 above), puerh that have signs of honey smell/taste (indicating 2), puerh that are not bitter/astringent (could be both 1 or 2) at all….

Which still leaves a lot of room for error.

I was drinking my maocha from Yiwu today, using more leaves than I did last time. Somehow, I did not enjoy it nearly as much as I did last time. Something was different about the tea — it tastes a bit aged. While aging might be a bit faster in wild/old tree teas, I don’t think it’s quite THAT fast when one week makes such a big difference. What’s going on? Then I smelled the lid… hmmm, there’s a mix of honey/floral smell AND a smell of that slightly vegetal raw puerh smell. Odd. Supposedly, this smell goes away when processed at too high a temperature because the aromatic component that gives off this smell will be evaporated when the processing temperature is high.

So I was a little suspicious of how this tea was processed. While it has some astringency/bitterness, it’s not that evident. Then again, Yiwu teas are like that. I started looking at the wet leaves, and it seems like… or at least I think it might be, the case that there are maocha of different ages in this mix, and that it is not all the same vintage/batch, but rather different ones mixed in together. Maybe last time the bit that I pulled out consisted mostly of younger leaves, thus it tasted so fresh, while this time it is a bit of a mixed bag, and thus the aromatics/taste was a bit…. confused?

I then decided to brew up another maocha to compare. I brewed the Nannuo maocha that I have leftover. I also brewed up a sample again of the Yiwu cake that I got.

It’s a very interesting experiment. The Nannuo maocha brewed up a HIGHLY aromatic cup. The leaves, when I smelled them after the infusion, smelled very strongly of some sort of flower/honey. Hmmm. The taste was sweet, mild, not bitter/astringent. Hmmm.

Compared to this, the Yiwu cake was much more boring. Not much aromatics, a bit of a sweet smell afterwards, but when I smell the wet leaves, there’s basically nothing to it aside from a hint of sweetness. Compared to the Nannuo…. the difference is striking.

Here are some pictures. Unfortunately, visually they don’t say much.


From left to right is the Nannuo, Yiwu cake, and Yiwu maocha. Sorry for the lighting — the Yiwu maocha got less light.


Nannuo


Cake


Yiwu maocha

Some of the Yiwu maocha were reddish brown throughout, which is why I thought something was aged about them (coupled with the way it tasted). It also reminds me a hint of the Zhenchunya Hao taste, as well as the Yiwu Zhenpin taste. I need to ask that girl if this was a mixed bag. Unfortunately, she may very well not know either.

This didn’t really get me any closer to answering any of my questions. I can’t say that the Nannuo won’t age well, and the Yiwu might, or vice versa. All I learned is that the difference between different levels of aroma is stunning.

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