A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘shopping’

Independent teashops

July 23, 2008 · 2 Comments

I find it amazing that independent teashops survive in this country. This is not a friendly place for tea, and for the most part people drink crappy bagged tea. I’ve always wanted to take some pictures of the tea section in a lovely place like a bad supermarket in the midwest…. it really gives you a good idea of what people are imbibing.

That makes it all the more pleasant when you go to a place that at least tries to provide a nice experience drinking tea in a shop, despite all the extra hurdles that they have to go through to get off the ground running. There’s something philosophically attrative about an independent store that survives despite the onslaught of the Starbucks of the world. I guess they’re the modern equivilent of homestead farmers who make it despite the tough conditions of the frontier and establish a foothold in a hostile land (occupied by its rightful owners, at least on this continent).

I went to a place called Tea Chai Te yesterday while having to do some waiting around, and spent a good hour there just sitting and sipping tea while reading a not very good book about green tea. I wonder how independent shops gather the 100 or so teas they offer — I suppose it’s from wholesalers of various ilk, and sometimes directly sourced from whoever it is that sells such things. I ordered the Wuyi Oolong, usually one of the safer choices out there (no varietal specified). The tea was brewed for me and came as liquid only in a Chinese made small tetsubin, enameled lined and all. I suspect it was made in an infuser basket. I got a drinking cup too — some fairly large red glazed thing, which was fairly pretty, although the tetsubin and the cup’s colour meant that I couldn’t judge the tea. The tea was all right — I think the water makes it better here, and there was some throatiness to it. They also served other more esoteric things, including a few puerh, although most of those are mini-tuos that I wouldn’t dare try.

Still, if only they have such stores everywhere I go — unfortunately, that’s not the case here, and in most cities you’d be hard pressed to find even one or two such things. Oh well, at least, I think, things are starting to change.

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Buying teapots online

February 11, 2008 · 8 Comments

Since most of my readers are not located in places where there are shops that sell anything other than the worst of the worst yixing teapots out there, online is pretty much the only place where one can buy such things.

So online is pretty much the only option. The other is to find friends who’ll do it for you, or fly yourself over to China/Taiwan and buy them yourself. Not very good options, especially since I think teapot is a very personal thing. What works for one person rarely works for another, and there are so many shapes and sizes out there that individual preferences are bound to differ. Buying teapots for other people, as I’ve learned, is a dangerous business.

That leaves online stores and auctions. What I witnessed tonight on Ebay was a frenzy of bidding for a series of yixing pots that some seller in Florida put up. It must’ve come from somebody’s collection of yixing pots. There were some that I am sure were Republican period pots, and I considered joining in the fray — until the fray got too hot for me really quickly. It ended up that a few of them went for something like $500 per pot. Others were maybe more in the $100-200 category. While some of these are genuinely old pots, none of them were in the fine yixing category. Rather, they were commercial stuff, made very roughly, and generally sold for commercial purposes rather than as objects of art or even personal pleasure. It was a utilitarian thing. An equivalent would be if some of these awful $10 Chinatown pots these days are going on auction 100 years from now… not exactly stuff you really want for making tea in.

What I did learn though is that there is a substantial amount of interest out there for yixing ware. One of the bidders on some of the pots have bought dozens of them from Ebay already. Most of them, in my opinion anyway, are far, far overpriced. Others seem to only dabble in pot buying, while interspersing their purchases with LV bags, clothes… and whatever else suits their fancy. Of course, everything is fair on Ebay. Unless the seller deliberately mis-states information regarding the item, which they tend not to do by using qualifiers such as “I think this is…” or “probably 19th century…” and that kind of thing, they are not liable.

Auctions in Asia are not necessarily any better. Those in Taiwan, for example, are numerous in listing, but most of them are rather sub-par in quality, obviously fake, or both. I’ve bought a few pots through that route. If it’s not too expensive, and the pot looks/feels ok, it actually is not a bad place to get a few decently made pots, as long as one spends a lot of time trolling the sites and sifting through the garbage. Then there are the highly priced, “antique” pots. Whether those are real or not is hard to say, and without having seen them in person, risking large sums ($500+) of money on one single teapot is almost crazy.

Aside from the sometimes rather trecherous path of auction, trecherous both because of the possibility of inauthentic goods, and also of the risk of being carried away by the passion of the moment (“I must have this pot!!!”), the other option is online stores…. which offer much more peaceful means of obtaining pots.

Yet those are not without risk either. Increasingly, I’ve noticed that the prices of these things are generally quite high… higher than what I remember, a few years ago. I am personally still apprehensive about spending much money on pots that I can’t see in person, but I speak as somebody who generally has access to other avenues. I suppose buying pots from an online vendor, the first thing you want to know is if they have a return policy. Pots don’t always work out in person. I’ve received one or two that looked not nearly as good as the pictures shown, or the clay texture feels funny once you actually get a hold of it. I am also weary of claims of old age. Taiwan probably has the highest concentration of fake antique pots in the world, mostly because of the big boom in the 80s that created huge demands and made faking pots really worthwhile. I’ve seen heated arguments in Taiwanese forums that are quite fraught with claims of authenticity or otherwise. Honestly, they all look pretty good, but supposedly, those who are really in the know can tell.

Sometimes though, I wonder if it’s not just for bragging rights — “I can tell better than you”, or “mine’s real, yours is not”. I used to view all this with amused cynicism, preferring to stay with the non famous maker, pedestrian pots that served the purpose of making tea. At the end of the day though, some pot, somewhere, will call out to you, and you too, will take the plunge…. that’s what I discovered the expensive way.

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The value of a cheap tea

February 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

From time to time I drink something that is truly pedestrian, or even sub-pedestrian. It sets you straight.

Today is one such day, with a loose, wet stored raw puerh in my pot. It’s still got some bitterness in it, despite its storage condition. The thing was quite cheap when I bought it in Hong Kong, and to me, the incremental benefit of drinking good 10 years old raw from a cake, which will cost many times the price of this tea, does not make the compressed stuff worthwhile. It’s the market forces at play here — whereas compressed tea have a clear provenance and history to go by, loose stuff that have no packaging of any kind simply cannot command high prices in a place like Hong Kong, where this sort of tea is everywhere.

Yet, when you take such things to, say, parts of China where they don’t have much old tea to begin with, all of a sudden the value of it shoots up. Instead of just “random wet stored loose tea” it suddenly becomes “preciously stored aged sheng puerh” with a price tag to match.

Then you have the polar opposite…. I remember bringing some old puerh to a shop in Beijing, only to have it mistaken as cooked puerh, because, well, they’ve never had anything older than maybe 10 years that’s not stored in the bone-dry weather of Beijing. They thought my tea was fake.

Which once again goes to prove that one should only “drink what you like, like what you drink”, and not worry too much about price, hype, or any of those things.

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Ebay misadventures

January 7, 2008 · 10 Comments

I think almost anybody who’s tried buying stuff from Ebay or other auction sites have had bad experiences with inaccurate descriptions, false advertising, etc. I am just reminded how sometimes things don’t work out on these things.

I bought a tetsubin through Ebay from a Japanese vendor. It looks nice, the price’s reasonable, and I have been wanting to get my hands on one to play with. So far, so good. It arrived…. and it looks good. Except one thing — there’s a small hole in the bottom of the tetsubin that the seller didn’t mention. Since there was no shot of the bottom of the pot, it was not possible for me to look at it either. So… I got a pot that will leak water right through the center. Since my name’s not Moses, I can’t part the water in the middle to keep it from dropping through the hole.

So now I’m dealing with the seller through paypal. Has anybody tried using the conflict resolution thing? How did it go?

Oddly enough, I felt somewhat uneasy when I purchased the first one, and I stumbled upon a second one, obviously inferior, but still a tetsubin… and very cheap (cheaper than one of those small enamel-lined tetsubin teapots you normally see). So, I ended up buying that one too, and that has arrived at the same time. It works — although I don’t know what the previous owner has used it for, because water that’s been through it smells like chamomile, and the outer surface of the pot was covered in some sort of grime. Now I’m trying to boil out the nasty sweetish chamomile smell from it… hopefully it’ll be usable after some treatment.

But tomorrow, I’m back on the road…. this time to Portland OR. Fun.

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More last minute shopping

December 22, 2007 · 9 Comments

I finally went back to the teapot store again today. It’s a bit of a pain to go there, because the place doesn’t really have regular hours. It’s more like an office in an obscure building with semi-functioning elevators, and I have to call ahead to book a time to go up.

I lingered for a while, and came home with these

It’s strange, because normally, I’m no fan of squarish teapots. Somehow though, both of these caught my eye — especially the black one.

Which I discovered is actually dark dark brown

The other

I thought looks almost like one of those pewter tea canisters.

While there, he brewed some truly nasty Taiwan (?) oolong. It’s somewhat roasted, but still has that grassy flavour. I did my best to pretend I was drinking it, but it really made me think that for many, good pots are an end in itself, and good tea…. is not important. For me, tea always takes precedence. Teaware only enhances the tea, and that’s their function.

I came home and made some of the competition tea that I picked up yesterday, although under sub-optimal condition since I don’t have my normal set of tools with me, having packed them and shipped them off on the slow boat. The tea is interesting — tastes a bit like an older version of the biyuzhu, without tasting like a puerh from the get go. It’s obviously a good tea — the qi is strong — but I need to make it again to confirm my thoughts on this one.

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A moving tea

December 15, 2007 · 6 Comments

I went to the candy store, and other stores nearby today. The first stop was uninspiring — a few nice teapots, but nothing in the way of tea.

The second was a store right next to my usual candy store. I’ve been in there once, but didn’t get anything interesting. Going back this time, the lady owner was pretty nice and approachable, and it was a slow afternoon, so I poked around. They were selling some puerh. Feeling like trying the puerh… I sat down.

I tried two puerhs. The first is a cake that I’ve seen before — supposedly 04 or 05 Yiwu. It’s…. very bland in a way, but it has a nice throatiness. I don’t know what to make of teas like this. There’s something, but then maybe there isn’t. It’s an elusive tea.

Then… on to a factory tea, supposedly 03 and from Menghai Factory, but not in the Dayi label. I am not a wrapperologist, so I don’t know if Menghai produced any (or many) 7542 in CNNP wrappers. The shape of the cake and the taste of the tea actually seems right — they look, feel, and taste more or less like Menghai Factory stuff. It was dirt cheap, for what it’s worth…. so I picked up some.

Then I asked my usual question, “do you guys have old tea?”. Yes, of course, lots. What do I want? I asked for tieguanyin, from China (as opposed to TGY from Taiwan). “What price range?” A dreaded question, as always. I never know what to say. We went with the cheapest first…. I loooked and smelled, and it doesn’t pass the test. So… let’s try the more expensive one. Looks good…

The owner of the store brewed it, and a brownish cup of tea was served. I drank it…. and wow, I thought to myself, “I haven’t had tieguanyin like this for…. a long long time”. Memories of when I first started getting interested in tea came back. Even then, the stuff wasn’t as good. This is an aged tieguanyin, so it’s fuller and rounder, and sweeter, but that power and feeling of drinking a good tieguanyin, I really haven’t had for a long time. Tieguanyin these days are horrid, especially the greener stuff. They didn’t used to make them this way. This tea brought me back to that kind of taste … and it’s such a pleasure to drink. The throatiness is incredible. There’s a tiny bit of sourness, but entirely managable, and the throatiness…. if you don’t know what I talk about when you feel something in the throat, this is it. The guanyin yun (aftertaste) that is so hard to find in tieguanyin these days.

So of course, being the sucker I am, I bought some of this too. Got some other stuff at the candy store, but it’s just stocking up more than anything else. This tieguanyin though… I think I will always remember that first sip.

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Evaluating an aged oolong

December 13, 2007 · 3 Comments

How do you tell a good aged oolong from a bad one? After drinking a few months of this stuff, I at least have some tentative thoughts on this issue.

Let’s take today’s tea — a bag of tea I picked up yesterday in exchange for the bad aged oolong I got last time. I’ll get to why that one was bad later.

The dry leaves’ physical appearance will rarely tell you anything too useful. Colour of the leaves are almost always dark. Sometimes it’s darker than others, but that in and of itself is a very useless indicator of anything. The shape of the tea might tell you something about what it could be, but even then — not a very useful indicator.

The smell of the dry leaves, however, can. For teas that have turned somewhat sour, you can sometimes smell a sour note in the aroma of the dry leaves. If you want to cheat, you can always breath into a little leaves (that you of course placed in your hands and don’t really intend on throwing back into the bag). That way you can smell the aroma much more clearly. Sour? Give it up already, it’s not worth your time.

Assuming it passes the initial sourness test, then there are the teas that are musty or not musty. The ones that aren’t musty are often re-roasted, the ones that are musty, as I find over time, are usually less re-roasted or not at all. Makes sense — the roasting will kill any musty smell. Sometimes you can also smell the roasted nature of the tea from the dry leaves. Now, done with the dry leaves. Let’s move on to making the tea.

I usually fill the gaiwan with 1/2 to 2/3 full of leaves when I make this stuff, at least for a first try. Sometimes the sourness is subtle, and if you brew it with less leaves you don’t always notice the problem. Now, teas that don’t smell sour can still be a bit sour, but usually, those are sourness that go away in an infusion or two. That, personally, I find acceptable. I also find that teas that don’t taste sour at all when hot can sometimes take on more of a sour note when cooled a bit. That’s something to look out for.

For the really roasted stuff, you have to feel the body of the tea to see if it’s aged or not. Sometimes that charcoal taste masks a lot of things, including age. A highly roasted but not very aged tea will lack that nice sweet note at the end, and it will also be less thick, at least in my personal experience. Some of the really roasted stuff will need a bit of time to mellow out and let the charcoal taste go away a bit before drinking, but even for current consumption they can be good — if you are into that kind of thing. I don’t buy a lot of that stuff, but I do have some. It’s fun.

I personally like the less roasted stuff. They take on a puerh-like note the first few infusions, then mellow out into a sweet tea that will more closely resemble a young oolong. In the end you will get back the young oolong taste/finish without much aged note at all other than the extra sweetness. It’s very interesting that way. Even aged and somewhat roasted stuff can do this. The tea that I originally wanted from the store is exactly like this — the first few infusions taste almost like a liu’an, and then into a softer, sweeter aged oolong taste, and then ending up as a younger tea would taste. I like this kind of tea the best. Today’s tea is sort of like that — I felt almost like I was drinking a new oolong near the end, without the harshness of a young tea. Also, aged oolongs tend to go on forever. You should be able to get 10+ steepings from it easily.

Wet leaves says a lot about what you’re drinking. In fact, I think wet leaves tell you more about what you’re drinking than anything else other than the physical act of drinking the tea. It will confirm what kind of tea you’re actually drinking, usually, and it will also tell you the condition of the tea, whether it’s mixed or not, etc, things that aren’t always apparent in a cup but usually more apparent when you can spread out the leaves. Today’s tea hasn’t been reroasted much — that much is obvious. The leaves unfurl easily, with a greenish scent. Decent tea.

So, what was the tea that I rejected like? It was roasted — tastes like charcoal the first infusion. But the body of the tea was thin and died fast. It was not aged, or not much aged. I’d venture to guess it’s less than 5 years old, which is why I was so unhappy about it.

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A mixed success

December 12, 2007 · 4 Comments

Well, I went back to that store today. The owner was nice enough, and I think it could’ve been a semi-honest mistake. What I think actually happened is this: this store has basically three labels for their teas. Not old, 35 years old, and 60 years old, it seems. This is more of a marker of price than actual age (or quality). Age inflation is also at work here. As the 35 years old I took home yesterday showed, some aren’t so hot, while others (like the one I actually want) is actually pretty good. The thing is, she has no idea what I got the first time, I think. Even though it looked like she knew who I was, she didn’t really, or, rather, she has no idea which particular tea I picked up last time. I actually lucked out that she gave me the right bag last time. Instead of actually trying to figure out what I got last time, or whatever, she just gave me the 35 years old that she has handy — even though it’s actually a totally different tea (and I think she knew it). Oh well

So… I told her my problem, basically having been given the wrong tea. She started saying “oh?” and when she brewed the two, she knew she couldn’t fool me — she had that “hmmm” look on her face. We searched around the store… in the back, in the front, and couldn’t find a single bag of the stuff that actually tasted the same. In the meantime, we tried probably 10 different kinds of aged oolongs of various quality. One or two was decent, some were ok, and others were crap (sour, weak, or a combination of the two). Her teas taste more aged than the candy store teas, although I think it has to do with roasting (her teas are more repeat-roasted than the candy store stuff) and also storage condition (in big plastic bags just sitting in the storage area, instead of inside big canisters that are pretty air tight). That might also explain the loads of old, somewhat sour oolongs she has.

After a lot of searching and no luck, she said she will call up to her storage (or is it home?) on the mountains and ask them to bring the tea down. That’s where they do the roasting, apparently. Ok, sure, but I have to return at 8pm to pick up those teas. Fine. I did, however, swap half my teas with her for another oolong we discovered while rummaging through the stacks of stuff. It’s different. It’s a strange puerh-esque oolong. Taste more aged than the candy store stuff, but not bad. It’s got that puerh musty smell. I haven’t gone wrong with aged oolongs like those yet, and it isn’t sour.

So I did go back at 8pm… she lined up some tea on the counter. Two bags she said she found in the back that should be the same batch as the one I got. I opened them and lo and behold, it is the same tea. The other stuff (the 8pm delivery stuff) however…. are not. Roasted, with a roasted taste. The stuff I bought completely lost the charcoal roast taste long time ago, so it’s not the same. No way, Jose.

So, I did end up returning some of the tea I bought, swapped them for some of the real stuff, and some other random aged oolong. No idea what any of them really are, at this point, as I think she makes things up as she goes along. If I had the time and money, I’d sit there in her store, drink through every bag, and buy up whole bagloads of this stuff if it’s any good. There are bargains to be had here (although the same can be said of the candy store…)

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Screwed

December 11, 2007 · 6 Comments

I went to the store that sold me the claimed 35 years dongding to get some more of the tea. I got the bags, paid, left. I even got a sample of something she claimed to be 60 years old, ok.

I came home, made the 60 years old which tasted more like 16 years old. Well, no matter, that’s free.

Then…. I started having second thoughts about the other bags of tea I got, and decided to try them out….

Hmmm

I think I got screwed. The tea is definitely different — not the same thing I bought last week. I haven’t opened all the bags, but among the ones I did open, they all tasted the same, and none of them taste like the one I bought last time.

Now, I hope this is an honest mistake, but there’s also the possibility that she thought I wouldn’t get to these teas until it’s way too late to go back and go argue with her. Heck, in a way, it’s already too late as she can claim I switched teas on her. I don’t know if I’ll get my way tomorrow, but I know I’m going to be going back and trying to get my money back.

Any suggestions on particular tactics?

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Old Dongding

December 8, 2007 · Leave a Comment

On the way to my candy store yesterday, I passed by another tea shop that is old looking. It’s terribly shabby. From the door of the shop to the table where the owner, his wife, and some guest were sitting, there was a corridor formed by boxes (some empty), bags, and what not… on both sides stacking taller than me. It was full of junk, literally. The whole store, in fact, was filled with junk. I walked in to look at some of the oldish teapots they had there (70s/80s stuff, I think). Most of it was crap.

At a place like this, they usually serve you a cup of something — whatever they happened to be brewing. I got a cup, of course. It was dark, blackish. I drank it… and I was thinking “hmmm, what is this? Liu’an?” It tasted old, not really puerh like, but not really old oolong like either…. I asked what it was, and she said it was an old (35 years is the claim) dongding.

Hmmm

I went to the candy store first, but when I was on my way back, I couldn’t resist, and picked up a little of this tea to try for myself at home.

This shot is from about 10 infusions after I started… the first shot I took turned out to be horribly out of focus

As you can see, still pretty dark. As I brewed it today, the liu’an like taste isn’t quite as strong, but I can still sense it being there. This is, I think, what Zhou Yu referred to simply as the “old taste”. He said such tastes you can get from the liu’an we tried that day, but also from old Taiwan oolongs of around 40 years or more. I am getting some of it here, I think. It’s a smooth tea, not bitter at all. Not much roasted flavour either, but it is definitely a strongly roasted tea (or repeatedly roasted one, rather). As the drinking went on, there is a slightly greenish flavour that crept into the tea — something that reminds me of the 1990 dongding and the 1980s tieguanyin that I’ve been drinking recently. It’s in that same family of taste, but here only as an aftertaste, a hint, rather than what was at the forefront. I suppose much of that flavour has been changed over time, through aging and roasting, into what is now the “old” flavour.

In some ways, despite its older age, I think I actually prefer the younger stuff — I like that strangely aromatic taste. This tea is a bit more mellow, very interesting, very calming, but lacks a bit of that extra push. Then again, maybe that extra liveliness will wear thin after a while, and stuff like this will, on the other hand, be always welcomed on a coldish day in winter.

The wet leaves are a bit of a mixed bag. There are a few leaves that are more flexible and brown, while some others are black and stiff.

Good stuff, and it’s not expensive either. Considering that this is definitely older than the 80s/90s teas I’ve had…. I don’t think people who sell this stuff are really making much of any money from it.

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