A Tea Addict's Journal

I had a lot of young puerh today while shopping at Maliandao. I think I need a week to recover.

I first stopped at a Keyixing distributor, and tried two of their Yiwu cakes. One is an attratively priced cake at around 70 RMB. It’s slightly high, and slightly on the bitter side for a Yiwu, but something about the tea made me think it’ll be good for aging. It’s got strength and it’s got smoothness. Gotta think about it. The other tea, from 2003, was lacklustre, and really not worth the price they were asking.

Then I walked over to the Ruirong store, but on the way there, a cake caught my attention… and I tried it. It’s a store that sells mostly Biluochun and Tieguanyin, which means that puerh is, at best, a side business, and that prices are likely to be high. It’s a Mengsong cake that I haven’t noticed before, so I gave it a try… not bad, not great. It’s bitter, and a little rough. Price… 180RMB. Wah. I then noticed that there’s a small Ruirong sign on the wrapper… which…. means I should be able to find it at the Ruirong store.

Which I did, although I went there for another Mengsong cake, a smaller cake that I saw elsewhere and which is reasonably priced. I tried it… and I liked it enough to buy 6 of them. These are 200g cakes, so 6 isn’t as many as it sounds. It also comes in a tong of 5 like this

While each individual cake look like this:

I also tried a Bulang cake there that was decent, as well as a Youle cake that was ok. The Youle cake was slightly expensive, but the Bulang cake is quite tempting. I might go back and buy some of that. The Mengsong cake I saw elsewhere was selling at this store too… for 20RMB, which is 1/9 of the price being quoted at the other store, and they are literally 50m away!!!! Lesson learned — always buy from the factory store if I can help it (although, sometimes, factory stores actually cost more, because they update the prices quickly whereas retailers sometimes bought their stock a long time ago so they can still sell at the lower price).

I then went to L’s store, just to drink some tea and have some conversation. ZH also showed up, and so we drank and chatted. Among the topics — how Zhongcha’s recent production of Banzhang was all snapped up. They are selling for quite a bit of money…. and so I took some pictures

Compared to my “Banzhang” that I bought last week…. the 3 tongs of stuff I bought could buy about 1 cake of the above

Is it really 20 times as good?

Yes, you heard that right.

So to feed my caffeine addiction, I decided to take some pictures of a cake that I got with the 3 tongs of “Banzhang Zhengshan” (which, by the way, I think only has a small % of actuall Banzhang leaves in there, but the price makes that irrelevant). Not that it will cure any headache that might be incoming, but it provides for blogging material, if nothing else.

This is a cake that I basically got as a freebie along with the 3 tongs.

“Jiangcheng Thousand Year Wild Growth Old Tree Cake”. Right….. Jiangcheng tea, as some of you know, is often used to make fake Yiwu cakes. Supposedly, the leaves look similar, although I’m not sure about the taste profile. When I opened up the wrapper it smelled fruity. I couldn’t pinpoint which fruit, but fruity is not a bad description of what I was smelling. Trying it for taste and seeing what a real Jiangcheng tea tastes like is the primary objective of getting this cake. It will give me some basis for comparing against other teas. After all, there’s very little reason to fake a Jiangcheng.

Looks good enough, and if someone else told me this is a Yiwu cake selling for $20 USD, I might believe you. Except that it’s not… it’s only $4.

I went tea shopping today with my girlfriend, mostly to buy stuff for somebody in Hong Kong, and to also show her around where I hang out so much. Let me not bore you with the details…. but let me show you what I bought

Yes, a lot of tea. There was also 500g of Shuixian.

Most of the puerh and all of the Shuixian is for that HK friend. I just bought myself one tong of the puerh. The tea is supposedly “Banzhang Zhengshan”.

The friend’s request was simple. She wanted a bitter and strong tea, for a cheap price. That’s not too hard to do, although it was harder than I thought. Mostly because to meet the price criteria it was not that easy, and to find a tea at the right price bracket that was bitter and strong enough was also tough. I found a cake today for 20 RMB (2.5 USD) but it was just weak. This one, however, is good enough, and still under 4 USD. So I bought a tong for myself, and 2 for the friend as requested.

There was also a bunch of teaware that we got, among which was a puerh plate — those bamboo things that you open cakes on.

During dinner, I brewed tea this way:

Using the Yiwu maocha that I got. It was nice and sweet, no bitterness despite long brewing times. You should all try it 🙂

Some tea leaves

I finally bought a few things after having had a whole bunch of free tastings at various shops. I do, after all, need to keep up the appearance that I’m somehow shopping for tea all along.

I tried three things today. One is actually a Wuyi tea that I brought over to the Best Tea House (for Rosa to try). She wants me to buy a whole jin of it, because it’s so cheap and yet tasting quite decent (for the price). It’s 1/2 of the price of the cheapest Wuyi tea on offer at the Best Tea House, and I personally think it’s even better.

The second is a small 100g cake of supposedly Yiwu tea. I don’t think it’s Yiwu, or at least it doesn’t taste like the Yiwu that I know. It doesn’t have that “Yiwu” taste. Not that great, and very expensive for what it is.

The third… is better. Some unknown origin old tree tea. Good chaqi, nice feeling down the throat that lingers for a long time… it’s hard to find tea that actually does it, and I am still wondering what it is that causes such a feeling down the throat (and why it’s only present in some, but not all, teas). It’s a bit of a mystery to me still, since you’d think that the same chemical will be present no matter what, but apparently not. Teas that look almost identical can have a great variation in how that particular sensation develops (or fails to develop). I think this is why YP thinks it is such an important indicator of a tea’s quality.

It is increasingly difficult to buy anything from Hong Kong though, simply because prices are high. I can usually find the same thing for much cheaper. I know I probably paid more than I need to for what I got today (which wasn’t much), but I can sort of justify it as payment for all the free teas I’ve had over the past two weeks.

Back to Beijing tomorrow, then Shanghai, then Beijing again, then Hong Kong, and then the States for a little bit…. the next few months will be busy!

I went to Sunsing today for the first time since I got back. I don’t usually go there, mostly because their stuff, aged or otherwise, are all quite expensive (in some cases even more than Best Tea House). Also, the service I’ve gotten there before has always been sub-par. I’ve always found them to be a bit snotty and hard to deal with.

I tried three teas there today. The first two were Yiwu teas… one 2006 spring and the other 2006 fall, both made by Sunsing themselves. They are supposed to be Mahei teas, and honestly…. I found both to be pretty poor, especially considering the price they wanted for it. They were not smooth, not that fragrant, not that thick…. and just not that interesting. The fall one is especially poor, and charging the same price for both fall and spring, when there’s an obvious difference in quality, is a little…. meh

Then I tried the 2004 Yongnian cake… it’s a Manzhuan, and I don’t think I really liked that one either. The Manzhuan cake from Beijing that I bought was much better. Price is again a factor.

I think the next few days I’ll actually make some purchases. So far, I’ve only gotten a few loose puerhs in Hong Kong (and picking up the tong of tea I ordered in the summer). There are a few things that I want to buy and deem good enough for the price, and will start going around to buy them….

Time’s running out, but then, I’m going back to Maliandao. I think I learned something this trip to Hong Kong though… so that’s progress, at least.