A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘shopping’

Teaware dilemma

April 30, 2007 · 3 Comments

It’s been more than a week and half since I got to Shanghai, and yet I still haven’t properly brewed tea at home.  I have a tea tray, a water heating unit, and a gaiwan now, but I lack a cup and perhaps a fairness cup.

I finally opted for the cheapest gaiwans there are.  Most of the gaiwans available here are very nice Jingdezhen ones.  They are those hand painted ones (or allegedly hand-painted ones anyway) and they look quite nice.  For a while I was rather tempted to buy one here, but if I do, it would have to be brought back as I don’t want to leave it here.  With this 5 RMB gaiwan… I feel no qualms about just leaving it here so whenever I come, I’ll have a set to use.

The same problem is there for cups, and to an even greater extent, the fairness cup.  The issue is that with a cheap fairness cup (the cheapest I’ve seen is around 10 RMB)is that the pouring is poor.  The spout is shaped like a semi-circle, and those generally pour very poorly, with the thing dripping all over while you try to pour.  Ideally, the spout should be long and tapered.  The fairness cups that have that nice spout, however, are expensive and generally well decorated.  It seems rather stupid to buy an expensive fairness cup to go with the dirt cheap gaiwan (and the dirt cheap tea tray).  It just doesn’t match.

The same is true for teacups.  I can buy the cheapest thing, but they don’t look so nice.  Anything slightly nicer is expensive.  I also want one where all the contents of the gaiwan will fit in one cup, eliminating the fairness cup all together (unless I’m serving guests), so that limits my choices.  There just isn’t much middle ground here, as opposed to Beijing.  Mind you, even the expensive stuff clock in at under 100 RMB, but when a gaiwan can be had for 5…. it seems like a lot.

What to do, what to do??

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Where do the wrappers go?

April 28, 2007 · 4 Comments

A constant on CCTV these days during prime time are these programs that essentially try to educate the viewers on the virtue and the intricacies of copyright.  As everybody knows, copyright in China is almost an oxymoron.  However, there is some real attempt, at least through government controlled television, to educate people to the problems with piracy and the importance of respecting copyright.  All the participants in these programs seem well versed in such matters, and when they get it wrong, the program hosts will quickly correct them and everybody will nod and smile.

Contrast this with the following image:  a tea store that is packing teas for shipment to somewhere else, and they do it by stripping the neifei, neipiao, and wrapper of each cake and rewrapping it with something else, or nothing at all.  However, all those wrappers (all the ones I’ve seen are Zhongcha) are saved carefully and meticulously.  They unfold the wrappers, put them in neat stacks, and obviously stock them away somewhere.  I don’t know where exactly, but somewhere.  This is stuff that you would normally throw away, but not here.  Instead, they are probably going to somehow reuse it.

I’ve seen this done at least twice now at two different places.  I can’t help but wonder where these wrappers go.  I’m sure they go somewhere, and I’m sure that of the many many new or semi-new cakes out there wrapped in Zhongcha wrappers…. at least some of them are faked this way.  Some will be used to fake older teas.  What can you do about it?

Then you have the practice of repackaging a tea with some other wrapper and calling it by a different name.  Lots of people do that.  Lots of factories do that — essentially the same tea but using a different neifei/wrapper, and all of a sudden, you have a different tea!  While some people might be able to tell you the minor differences between one and the other, many regular drinkers probably cannot (if there is any difference to begin with).  Since puerh changes over time, even in the span of a few months, it is not too hard to think that they taste different if it’s an idea already lodged in your head.  That’s one way that some factories could use to bolster their own lineup and also encourage more buying by tapping into the “I must collect all” mentality.  I’ve tried some factories’ cakes that are really very similar… and makes me wonder if they are really basically the same thing with a different name.

A variation of this is where one company buys a bunch of cakes from somebody, and strips the packaging from that company and puts on their own or none at all, and sell it as something else.  I’ve had a teashop owner complaining to me about this practice as he has been a victim of it.  He and a few others made a lot of one cake.  His had his own neifei in them.  Somehow most of his were sold, through a third party, to somebody else (let’s call him Person A) in that group who had sold out his own version of the same cakes, and that somebody else stripped the neifei out of the cake to prevent people from knowing they have a different provenance.  The tea is now a known item in puerh circles, and the name that it is known for is the one that Person A uses, not the original tea store owner’s.  He still has some of it left, and I saw it with neifei and all — it does look the same as the cake with the more famous name. I wasn’t entirely sure of the story, and since he now charges the same price as person A’s store… why would you buy the no-name one (even though the no-name one is actually the original)?  His loss all around.

Last but not least, there are just the out and out fake stuff.  There are lots of them, with big factory teas being the most commonly faked.  Some are poorly faked.  Some are well faked.  Some, at least according to those who’ve tried, are even better than the real stuff.  I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s possible.

This is all really depressing.  At least it’s reassuring that they’re trying to do something about all this through education.

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Tea Expo Shanghai 2007

April 27, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went to the Tea Expo today.

First of all… the thing is a little surprising given the amount of puerh tea vendors in there.  Granted, puerh is all the rage these days and is the new darling of the tea industry in China, but I didn’t expect quite so many of them.  A fully 80% of the stalls, by my estimation, were puerh ones, and the best attended/decorated ones were definitely the puerh ones.

All the usual suspects were there… Menghai, Xiaguan, Mengku, etc etc.  Mind you, the Xiaguan stall was deserted (while the Menghai one was pretty well attended).  There were some green tea ones, and a few tieguanyin stalls, but not many.

The other thing odd about this thing is timing.  It’s obviously designed with green tea in mind, because this is a perfect time for manufacturers to showcase their newly picked green tea in late April.  However, for puerh it is too early.  Most factories present didn’t have their spring tea ready… many showed up with only the packaging of the teas, but not the teas themselves…. because they haven’t finished making them yet.  It’s a rather odd situation.  The “official puerh vendor” of the expo only had one spring cake ready — the rest were still in various stages of production.  It was a strange thing.

Here are a few sights from the place… it wasn’t too big, and we went through a backdoor (we don’t even know where the front door was) and just walked right in.  You don’t need to pay anyway to get in, so it doesn’t really matter.

The prices at the expo were actually fairly high by Maliandao standards.  One store quoted me something that was 4x what I could fetch at Maliandao… so why should I buy from the expo?  I don’t know.  Prices in general were quite high, and no bargains were to be had, as far as I am aware, especially considering this was the “trade” day.  Non-trade visitors were only supposed to visit tomorrow and Sunday.

Then again, as at all expos, there were freebies to be had.  Action Jackson, especially, got a free cake from some gentleman from a relatively unknown factory

Sometimes, it pays to be a foreigner in China.

I also had my first experience drinking tea from a huge teapot today

The tea inside is similar to what I had at the Xinjiang restaurant, except with a bit more spiciness in the tea.  Maybe it’s the same thing brewed a little stronger.  If it’s what I think it is… it’s Fu Bricks from Hunan.

Thanks to L’s connection, all of us got some freebies as well from the puerh sponsor.  He knows the manager of their factory in Yunnan, who was there today, and he gave us this:

Which, if opened, reveals the goodies:

This is maocha from all six of the Six Mountains.  In order from top to bottom they are Yiwu, Yibang, Wangzhi, Manzhuan, Youle, and Gedeng.  Yes, I’m going to try them all, and of course, you’ll all hear about them when I do.

After the tea expo, where we only spent about two hours and change, we went to Tianshan Tea City to buy some stuff.  We stopped at a Wuyi store, drank a few things, including a fairly interesting, but very high fired, Wuyi tea.  This stuff was black and tasted quite strong of charcoal taste.  I liked it, Action Jackson didn’t, and neither did L’s business partner from Hangzhou.  L himself wasn’t around, but I don’t think he would’ve liked it either.

We made it out of there with a bit of tea, then looked around for the cheapest gaiwan we could find.  I finally have a gaiwan for the house now for a whooping 5 RMB.  I don’t have a cup, but that is easily fixable.  I also saw some curious cakes on our way out, but I already had enough.

We drank even more tea as we went to L’s office, including a 2003 Purple Dayi and a cooked cake of some kind from Zhongcha.  All this while a few Menghai factory dealers were there drinking stuff and basically saying only Dayi teas are good.  It was too much for me… and my stomach complained when we didn’t get to eat dinner until after 8.  Sigh.

All in all, a long day for tea.  Gotta get some work done tomorrow to compensate, and at some point in the near future, I need to head back to Tianshan to try some tea I don’t get to try in Beijing.

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Breaking news

April 25, 2007 · 8 Comments

It seems like the disorderly exit that I semi-predicted has begun.

L just called me.  He said that there have been news that he heard that the markets in Kunming and in Guangzhou have started the big decline… and nobody is asking for Dayi (Menghai) goods at this point.  Makes a lot of market sense, really, since as soon as the prices start dropping, everybody who wanted to buy will wait till the prices stabilize a bit before jumping into the fray again.  All the tea investors who’ve been buying will want to let go of their goods very quickly.  One of L’s customers in Tianshan Tea City told him that the biggest Dayi distributors in Shanghai has already called him a few times, asking him to help sell stuff for prices that you could only dream of a month or two ago.

This is welcomed news, really.  The prices for a lot of these younger cakes has reached astronomical levels, with new, fresh off the mountain cakes selling for things like 250 RMB each, and a lot of these are cheap plantation teas that aren’t really worth that much.  Many people I know who are the end customers for such things — tea drinkers like you and me, think that prices are simply far too high to buy any more new cakes.

I had thought that given the fact that much of the country still has to tap into the puerh craze, that there might be enough future customers to sustain the run for a little longer.  However, once a fall happens it is hard to stop if everybody wants to exit the market, or at least withdraw from active buying.  I think it started with Xiaguan teas — it briefly reached 220 RMB for a stick of 5 tuochas.  That price was about 7x what I could’ve bought the same tea when I first arrived in Beijing.  Somebody made a lot of money from investing in Xiaguan tea in the short term, but more people have now lost a lot of money.  Xiaguan prices already fell a bit when I left Beijing for Shanghai.  I wondered, at the time, whether it will cause a drop in Dayi teas too.  Seems like people have woken up to the fact that investing in puerh is a risky business, and are no longer willing to take that risk.

We’ll have to see what happens in the next few weeks, but I think it will be hard for prices to pick up anytime soon.  Hopefully this will usher in an era of more rational purchasing, as well as more sustainable development of products and farming techniques.

I am going to go to the Tea Expo in Shanghai this Friday.  If what I’m hearing is actually true — this will definitely make it a very, very interesting experience.

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A local find

April 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today on my way to the library, I noticed this little shop that is literally right next door.  It’s a 30 seconds walk from my house to this place, but since I haven’t been in Shanghai that long, and since I just usually walk right past it… I never paid attention.

This is the kind of store through which most of the t eas in China are sold.  He posts the prices of the main attractions on the board to the left of his store.  On it it reads:

Yuqian (Before rain) Fried Green — 14 yuan/jin (500g)
Jasmine — 15 yuan/jin
New Longjing — 30 yuan/jin
Oolong tea — 42 yuan/jin
Huangshan Fried Green — 7 yuan/jin
Huangshan Maofeng — 38 yuan/jin
Huangshan Silver Hooks — 18 yuan/jin
Yunnan Maofeng — 25 yuan/jin
New Maofeng — 18 yuan/jin

As should be obvious… the prices are very pedestrian.  This is apparently last year’s prices, with this year’s being slightly higher.  Nevertheless, it’s… cheap.

I went up to the counter (you can’t really walk in — too small) and looked at the teas on display.  It’s typical of stores that sell green tea to have them on little white dishes with a price tag next to the tea.  You can see for yourself what they all look like, and the different looks that go with the different prices can be quite instructive.  Somehow in Beijing they don’t do this.

I picked out a Yunnan green to try.  I bought 50g of it for 5 kuai.  I think I overpaid, and if I had gotten the same thing at a tea market, it’ll probably be 2 kuai or some such.  But heck…

The Yunnan green actually smells and looks a lot like some of the maocha I’ve had recently, but the leaves here are a bit smaller.  I will really need to try it out to see exactly what this Yunnan green is made of… and to try to age it and see what turns out from this green.  It will be interesting.

Categories: Misc · Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Shopping in Shanghai

April 21, 2007 · 6 Comments

I walked to Tianshan Tea City from my place today, looking for some cheap teaware to use in Shanghai.  It’s a 20 minute walk if I don’t walk too fast, and I can make it there in 15 if I walk really briskly.  It’s a bad combination, I know.  Luckily, the place is not big enough to hold a lot of interest for repeated visits.  It’s two floors plus some ground floor open stores.  In total I think there are about 80 stores of various kinds.  Interestingly enough, there are more puerh stores here than last time, and that was only two months ago.

I had set out to look for some cheap teaware to use in Shanghai, since I didn’t want to bring more stuff than I was already carrying.  However, I got sidetracked into a Keemun store.  They sell basically only Keemun, with some other teas as well (some unknown green, plus some Taiwan oolong — a mixed bag).  I was attracted by the Keemun, because she had all the grades, and they were clearly marked.

I ended up tasting two, a Haoya (she said it was B when I asked), and a tea she called the “Li Cha”, which is a new style Keemun which is not broken up — it’s instead using whole buds.  Keemun, as most of you know, is the sort of classic Hongcha (red tea).  It’s got a distinctive flavour, and the leaves are usually quite fine and cut up… is it broken orange pekoe?  Anyway, the Li Cha is not like that.  Instead, it’s buddy, looking a little like a red version of biluochun.  I think I’ve seen stuff like this before called by different names, but didn’t know it’s from the same region as your classic Keemun.

The Haoya is quite nice, although slightly rough on the tongue.  The Li Cha is better, but it lacks that Keemun flavour I was looking for.  I want something that I can use as a sort of benchmark to judge other Keemuns by, and I figured this is a good place to stay (I must confess I know little about Keemuns in general).  I sat there for a while longer, tried their green tea, and had a cooked tuo that she bought for 200 RMB (way overpriced — she wasn’t selling the tea, just drinking).  I then bought some of the Haoya and left.  She offered me a 30% discount without me prompting it, which was nice.

I wandered around the market for a little longer, looking for a gaiwan and a few cups.  The gaiwans are quite nice — I think BBB is right in saying that the teaware here is nicer.  The nice gaiwans, of course, weren’t the cheapest, but they were tempting.  I had to leave to go to another place, so I never finished shopping for teaware… having just bought one tea tray and no cups/gaiwans to use it for.  I’ll either come back here or go to Jiuxing, the other tea market which is a bit farther away.  Maybe I’ll go next weekend or, if I have time, sometime during the week.

On my way out, I noticed another store that specializes in Keemuns.  I should go check that place out.

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Random shopping

April 19, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to Maliandao today to pick up some stuff for L in Shanghai. Meanwhile I went and did a little shopping for some teaware — to bring to Shanghai to use. It’s one of those alcohol lamp + glass kettle combos. While I complained about the smell, in Shanghai I know I can open the windows wide with good ventilation — where I stay there’s such a spot. I also have a water dispenser that dishes out already-hot water, so the boiling times will be minimal.

Interestingly enough, going to the store that sells such things with L’s business partner has toned the price tag down by a few notches. I got it for the below-wholesale price of 50 RMB for the whole thing (wholesale is 52). I was expecting to pay around 60. I remember paying around 80 when I bought my set here after arriving in Beijing. In fact, for almost everything I can now confidently say that I have a pretty decent idea of how much things should be, having spent a good amount of time in Maliandao and also have quite a few people who now at least have seen me once or twice (thus making them think I work in Maliandao). Initial quotes for a lot of young puerh have dropped from those 200+ range into the 100 range, or even lower. One guy voluntarily halved the price of the cake he was trying to sell me, without much prompting on my end, and quoting me what I believe to be honestly a wholesale price. It’s amazing what a little time can do for you.

I also got to taste some teas. One was a maocha from Yiwu, fresh this year, that are from those plantations — those same plantations that everybody loves to hate. Taste is sweet, mellow, but weak… easy going down now, and infinitely drinkable, but lacking the strength (in terms of feeling the tea AFTER you swallow) and the depth that one finds in better Yiwus. In fact, it is a great drink-it-now tea. If you brew it like a green tea, it’s very nice, not bitter at all, and can hook anybody onto young puerh (if you can even call this young puerh). It’s just not what you necessarily want in a tea for aging. It also has the advantage of being quite cheap.

Another tea I drank was purchased in Yunnan when Xiaomei and L went there a few weeks ago. It says “Yiwu Gushu Cha” (Yiwu Old Tree Tea), but I think it has been poorly made — green tea pressed into bing. It has all the right characteristics of a green tea, and not really of a puerh. It was especially obvious when she told me this is from 2004… the tea doesn’t taste right. It’s always a delicate situation when somebody has a tea that you think is horrid, but don’t know what to say. I could only say that there was some huigan. After being largely silent for a while, I think she figured out that I didn’t quite like it, and even offered it up herself that “This tea is really fragrant — I wonder if this is green tea”. Whew, the awkwardness was broken. Otherwise I had to suffer more infusions of this rather bitter and unpleasant tea….

While there, a customer came in looking to buy a whole jian (or several) of the “Weizuiyan” cooked puerh from Menghai, produced last year and now fetching about 3x the original price when I first heard about it. He sat for a while, deliberating, but eventually walking. He has heard that prices for some puerh has dropped, which is actually true for Xiaguan — prices have toned down a bit, apparently, in Kunming. Menghai, however, still rides high…

But can this last? Will the drop in price for one factory cause a cascade? Will it be the warning sign of the risks of puerh investment? I wonder. There are obviously those, like him, who are trying to buy teas for cheap, hoping that prices have gone down a bit to a more acceptable level. But can it not keep dropping? After all, I think much of the newer stuff have simply lost connection with their inherent value. Menghai cooked puerh is not so much better than everybody else’s that they deserve to be three or four times as expensive, and raw puerh of this sort are quite undrinkable, relatively speaking. A lovely Wuyi tea or dancong can be had for less. Longjing is the exception to the rule… where prices are always high, but that’s because there’s the demand for it, and a good, top shelf longjing is really quite good.

Oh well, the ride continues…. but tomorrow, I’m off to Shanghai!

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A beautiful mistake

April 15, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went to Maliandao today. There was a cake I saw last time that I wanted to try at a store I’ve never been to (there are lots of those), so I went there today and asked to try it.

We sat down, the girl brought over a cake, face down, and she started peeling tea off it and rinsed it. I took it in my hands to look…. and noticed it’s the wrong cake. Oops. I told her, pointed out the one I wanted. She wanted to throw the tea away, but I said since she rinsed it already… let’s try it.

The mistake was a Bulang cake, which is something I usually don’t fancy. I find the stuff not that interesting, especially when compared with Yiwu. Bulang is quite expensive these days, mostly thanks to Banzhang’s proximity, but nevertheless… I’m not a huge fan.

The cake I actually wanted to try was a Manzhuan cake. It looks nice, and it’s got a good price. The Bulang is a little more expensive, about the same age (3 years or so), but not as nice looking, cake wise. Both are from Quanji, whose tea I own some of already. I liked it last time, and this is the first store I’ve seen that carries it in Beijing besides the one where I bought my last lot from. I figured I could give them a go. Since I am usually a fan of the Six Mountains area tea…. Manzhuan was the obvious choice.

We started off with the Bulang, as it was ready. It was immediately obvious that the tea was decent. It hits the back of the mouth with a bit of a cooling effect. It is somewhat bitter, but leaves an aftertaste. There’s qi. The tea is not that rough, especially for a young tea. The taste is changing… losing the very green sort of taste you’d come to expect in very young puerhs. The few years of aging, wherever it was done, has done something.

The Manzhuan, on the other hand, is sweeter. The tea, however, was less strong…. less powerful, and has less feeling in general. It doesn’t penetrate as deeply as the Bulang. It was especially obvious after a few infusions, where the Manzhuan started acquiring a slightly puckery feel to it. The Bulang stayed the course and delivered strong infusions round after round, even when we were more than 10 infusions into the tea. The Manzhuan, on the other hand, started running behind, lagging. It acquired a bit of a water taste after a some infusions. It was obvious when you compared the two. Oddly enough, while the Manzhuan was brewing a stronger coloured brew, the taste was obviously weak and flat in comparison to the Bulang, which was lighter in colour but yet deeper in flavour.

I think I would’ve thought the Manzhuan to be a pretty decent tea, if I had not had the Bulang to compare. The puckery feeling was not strong, and the sweetness that it delivers is quite alluring, at least initially. I might’ve written off the weakness later on to amount of leaves or time brewed, and it’s always harder to tell such things when you have no basis for comparison. This is proof positive that, when trying to evalute a tea…. it’s best to have something against which to compare, and the question of which one being better and which one being worse will reveal itself very quickly. I had that with the two grades of Lapsang Souchong, where it’s essentially the same tea, but I am seeing this again very clearly in this instance.

I ended up not buying any of the Manzhuan, and picked up two of the Bulang. It’s probably one of the best young cakes I’ve had in the past few months. I am contemplating picking up more… I’m just a little weary of buying more teas, as I already have a bit of a stash. Then again, this cake really is quite good, and if I think I have extra room when I’m leaving town… I’ll go buy more of this.

I went around Maliandao some more, but nothing too interesting to report, especially not after this.

Some tea pictures….

I think you can see how one side of the cake looks more compressed than the other. I suspect the person doing the filling/rolling of the bag didn’t do it too evenly. Doesn’t matter.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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An afternoon of tea

April 13, 2007 · 2 Comments

As I stepped out of the west gate of the Forbidden City, I noticed that it was a nice, bright, warm day. The archives close early on Fridays at 3pm, and I had a choice of going home, or going somewhere else. I decided, the tea addict that I am, to go to Maliandao.

Part of the reason is that L’s business partner in Beijing is back from their trip from Yunnan, and I was eager to talk to her to get some news from the battlefront, so to speak. I got there, and we started chatting over some tea. We started drinking some longjings they brought from Hangzhou last month, fresh from the spring picking (they are all pretty decent, with obvious differences among the three). Meanwhile, I learned about the new prices. They go something like this (all in RMB/kilo and only to the best of my knowledge — subject to change anytime!!!)

Lao Banzhang – 1200 (and rising)
Jingmai – 600
Yiwu – 400 to 500
Other area ancient/old arbour tree teas, at least for places in Menghai and Xishuangbanna – 250 to 350 ish, depending a lot on where, what, and who

Which is insanely high, as this is about double last fall’s prices, and more than double last spring’s. These are per kil of maocha, so divide by three if you want a rough estimate of how much a tea cake from these regions should cost. If the base cost of the materials of a Banzhang cake is 400 RMB, anybody retailing the tea in China will probably have to sell it for 1000 to make a reasonable profit of any sort. That, I think, prices a lot of people out of the market. Of course, plantation teas are much cheaper…. maybe only 20% of the cost of the ancient tree teas or thereabouts.

I got some free samples from her — maocha they bought from Nannuo and Banzhang. I’m going to try them out in the next few days.

I then went to the Mengku puerh shop to see when their new stuff will arrive. Early May, they said. That’s a long time, but for bigger factories, the delay is usually quite long. I guess I’ll find out what they’ve got in the spring this year. Right now, their store is deserted — no stock at all of anything. It’s almost all sold out, and it looks eerie.

I ended up in a store where I bought a cake before, and started looking through the newer stuff they got. They press their own cakes, so they have some pretty interesting stuff. I ended up spending quite a few hours there, trying 3 different kinds of Yiwus and some cooked stuff. The guy even bought dinner, so I felt sort of obliged to buy something. I ended home with one Yiwu, a 2006 fall tea, and I think was decent and not too expensive. One can always try a new cake and compare it with the stuff you’ve already got.

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Back to Beijing

April 8, 2007 · 3 Comments

Today was a lovely day, with warm temperature and great weather, and the sky was actually blue and not some shade of yellow. I am rather jet-lagged… feeling sleepy around 12pm. What better way to try to keep myself awake than to walk around on this sunny day while pumping myself full of caffeine?

Yes, I went to Maliandao. Surprised? Didn’t think so.

When I got there, I had this strange feeling that everything felt foreign, somehow. I know the place pretty well now, but somehow today, when I went there, I felt odd. Maybe not having been here for more than a month did the trick and made me feel a little odd.

In order to get myself into the mood, I went into Jingmin Chacheng to see what’s there, and if there’s anything new. I went into a store that I have never really went to previously, looked at some cakes, sat down to taste some, and I think I gradually got myself back into the mode of drinking tea with strangers while there.

I originally didn’t want to try anything there, but ended up trying three different kinds of tea. The first is a quite delightful Bulang cake, and quite reasonable too after hacking off more than 50% off the list price. I didn’t end up buying one, as the guy offered me those discounts without me asking for it (oddly enough). I told him I’ll probably go back and pick up a few. I think he’s basing on the assumption that I’ll buy a tong (he’s quoting me those prices) but I don’t know if I actually want a tong of tea….. it’s a little too much at this moment. At most I want two or three cakes.

The second was a Banzhang, which, while being about 5 times the Bulang at something like $50 USD, is not as good. It doesn’t strike me as a good tea, and is expensive merely by being Banzhang (everything Banzhang is astronomical these days). That’s why I don’t generally buy anything Banzhang…. price/quality wise, it’s not usually a good deal.

The third tea is a mixed cake of some sort, and the guy couldn’t tell me where it’s from. From the taste it’s from the Six Mountains, probably something like Manzhuan. It’s not too bad, but too pricey and not good enough.

I didn’t buy anything. I might go back for the Bulang… and to try their spring teas, which are coming down in a week or so.

I then proceeded to L’s store, where I sat down to have some dianhong. The girl who’s usually there, L’s business partner Xiaomei (L’s usually in Shanghai) is down in Yunnan with L and others to check things out for the first time. So only the assistant was there today. The dianhong is of the larger leaf variety, quite nice, but a little weak. I think they didn’t steep the tea long enough and were brewing it like young puerh, which is not the way to go. After drinking it, I thought to myself that I should really go check out redteas everywhere.

I ended up in a Wuyi tea store that is opened by a relative of one that I often go to. I tried perhaps half a dozen teas there, and bought 100g of one. It’s a heavily roasted Shuixian, quite nice, and good chaqi. It’s not that cheap, but I think it’s worth it for the price. I have, of course, more than enough Wuyi to handle, but not quite so much that I’ll have to worry about not finishing them. Part of my calculation is that I need “drink it now” teas more than “storage” teas, and this falls into the “drink it now” category. Young puerhs…. gotta really think about them before buying a bit lot of them at this point.

Some of the other teas I tried there were older dahongpaos, which were of varying degrees of interest (some were quite good!). One tea stood out as interesting… a variation on Zhengshan Xiaozhong. I didn’t like it, but it was interesting to look at the leaves and taste the tea… which was like ZSXZ, but not really….

I got pretty pumped up by caffeine, but that didn’t stop me from feeling extremely sleepy once I got home…. I think I am heading to bed.

P.S. Seems like all blog websites are down in China!

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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