A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘shopping’

Going lower and lower

March 24, 2011 · 7 Comments

One of the peculiar things about my tea shopping habits over the past few years is that I have been buying cheaper and cheaper teas.  I am quite literally paying less money overall for the tea I am buying, and on a per gram basis, I am definitely paying far less than I used to a few years ago.

I think tea shopping, in general, falls into two categories.  There are the teas that are for general consumption — stuff you drink regularly because they’re good, and then there’s the special stuff, teas that you bring out when you have tea friends coming over, or when you feel like you want a special treat.  What these things mean, however, depend on the person.  I find that the gap between my “daily” tea and my “treat” tea is quite slim, and I find very little difference between them.  I have a few things that are old and aged and expensive, but I find very few reasons to drink them.  I don’t even have much of an urge, for example, to dig into my cake of Traditional Character.  It just doesn’t excite me enough to do so.

There is, actually, a lot of tea out there — far more than anyone of us can consume in many lifetimes.  Whenever a vendor tells you something is “rare” or “exceptional” or what not, chances are whoever is reselling the tea (usually on the internet) bought it from someone who has a virtually unlimited supply of the tea.  I just had a great tieguanyin the other day that I thought was complex, deep, and well balanced, and it was quite cheap for the quality.  I’d be more than happy to drink it every day.  In fact, it has revived my interest in tieguanyin, because I can see that good ones still exist and they don’t all have to be nuclear green.  Yet, there’s no story to this tea, no “I got this from farmer X who did Y to get this tea”.  It’s a blended, roasted tieguanyin, made year after year by this teashop, sold to locals who got accustomed to the taste and will refill their jars when they run out.  For a lot of people who live far from a tea producing country, this is definitely a luxury, but the internet should make it easier to acquire such things.  Unfortunately, that is not the case.  Cheaper teas online tend to be very bad, and the expensive things are often not a lot better.  Things priced as “treat” are often just slightly higher grade “daily tea”, especially when it’s attached to some story, which is pretty unacceptable.  I’m pretty sure that the loose puerh that some of these stores sell can beat any loose puerh sold online these days, but alas, nobody can find them.

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An old new acquisition

March 22, 2011 · 6 Comments

Shopping at old teashops in Hong Kong is always fun.  You find things unexpected, like this one

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What is it, you may ask?  The date says 1978, April 27th.  Sadly, it’s not old tea, but nevertheless, it’s well worth the money — it’s a tea tray.

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It’s brand spanking new, but old at the same time, especially since these are no longer made and so are quite hard to find in good condition, never mind a brand new one.  Most old shops have one or two that they use regularly, but no more.  This is a smaller one, big enough for four cups and a shuiping, but not a lot of room left after that.  I’ve always wanted one of these, and now have found one.  Too bad there’s a one-per-customer limit, because otherwise I’ll buy them all.

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The later, the better

March 8, 2011 · 3 Comments

Sometimes some teas behave oddly, or rather, they behave in unexpected ways.  I had two “white paper” puerhs in a row, both of which are from no-name makers, purchased off taobao and claiming to be “Yiwu” of the 05/06 vintage.  One of them looks like this
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Nothing too fancy, clearly, even though the seller claims it’s from Mahei and used old tree leaves.  Both teas share a similar characteristic – they are both slightly sour, not very pleasant, but get better, not worse, as I continue to brew them.  The first is, I think, the better tea, with a stronger taste and better longevity, but it also has more off flavours in the initial infusions — sourness, mostly, but also some odd flavours.  The second one is much cheaper — by a factor of 7, in fact, and a little weaker, but still quite good, as long as I keep brewing.  The initial infusions, once again, disappoint.  Both brew a similar looking cup.

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It’s things like these that throw me off.  I can never quite tell whether teas like these are really worth buying more of.  On the one hand you have things like the Yisheng, which you know, right away, that they’re made of quality material and will do well.  Then you have the clear losers that are just terrible in one fashion or another, and can be written off almost immediately.  Then you have stuff like this — pleasant, decent, but having enough negatives to make you wonder if they’re any good at all.  The fact that they have some legs seem to suggest that they’re not all bad, but it’s also hard for me to say that they’re indeed all good.  Price often becomes the primary deciding factor — I may not buy the first one, but might buy some of the second, simply because it’s dirt cheap.  Shipping would cost more.

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Zhaozhuang Hao 2008 Manzhuan Walong

January 22, 2011 · 6 Comments

While I was in Hong Kong this Christmas I went to Shenzhen for a day trip, and while there, I visited, for the very first time, a tea market there.  I haven’t been to Shenzhen for probably fifteen years, and it has been a big change since I was there last.  When I last went I remember it was crappy, dirty, and ugly.  Now it’s still rather dirty, but not so crappy and ugly anymore, and it definitely does not feel like a giant construction zone, which it used to.

The tea market I visited is called Sandao (three island) tea market, which is about ten minutes walking from the Lo Hu train station right after you pass the immigration.  For those of you who visit Hong Kong but want some younger (5 years old or less) it might be worth a visit, although like all Chinese tea markets, it’s very much buyer beware and watch out for scams.  There are other tea markets in the city, but I didn’t have time to go to the other ones, which are further away from the train station.

I always do a walkaround of a tea mall before stopping at any stores — it gives you a good idea of what you’re up against, and in this case, since time was rather precious, I didn’t want to waste my time at a store that didn’t have much that I liked.  It’s always enticing to just walk in and sit down and start drinking, but that often ends poorly.  A lot of the stores at Sandao sell more or less the same kinds of stuff — no name CNNP cakes of various vintages, older pu that has been variously stored, and some younger, small label stuff.  I eventually settled in a shop that sold some young, small label stuff to take a closer look.  On the shelves were this

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Which, for those who have followed this blog for years, will remember as being the same maker of the “Yiwu girl” cakes from 06.   Those were some nice looking, decent tasting things, and are currently sitting in Hong Kong, hopefully getting better with time.  I have found a few cakes of this maker on Taobao since then, but they have been largely elusive.  I did not expect to find it in Shenzhen, of all places.

This maker is really located in Manzhuan, not Yiwu.  The story I got from the Yiwu girl, way back when, was that this was her maternal uncle’s workshop that pressed the cakes — they lived in Gaoshan village, which is on the Yiwu side, while her uncle lived on the Manzhuan side of things.  How true it is, I don’t know, and don’t really care much, as long as the tea is good, which I most definitely thought was the case back in 06.  I sat there and tasted a few of this shop’s offering (the vendor also pressed his own under another brand, this Zhaozhuang stuff was someone else’s goods) and decided that, heck, I’ll buy a cake and take home and try it more carefully.

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You can see some evidence of aging here — the cakes were taken out of a bamboo tong, and there are light stains from the tea’s oil seeping into the paper.  I find that you almost never see this sort of thing with cakes stored in places like Kunming or Beijing, no doubt a result of humidity and temperature.

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The cake, I thought, looks decided more pedestrian than the ones I bought in 06.  The leaves are darker, and they also brew darker

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Granted, these are two years old, whereas when I got the Yiwu cakes, they were fresh off the press.  Manzhuan teas also tend to be a bit darker in colour as well as taste, so it may also account for some of it as well.

This is where memory starts to fade — how did that cake taste?  How does this one taste in comparison?  Looking over old notes, I have very little sense of how it actually went down.  I remember, vaguely, that it had a deep “throatiness” and solid huigan.  That’s all though — nothing else.  Not that it really matters, but if I were to compare, I think that’s important.  This tea in question here, on the other hand, is decent — good huigan, still slightly bitter, but nothing that lingers (which is very important) and good body.  I find it to be slightly hollow in terms of aromas, but that’s fairly dependent on drinking and brewing conditions, and I may need to try it again to tell.  Would I buy it?  I honestly don’t know.

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It’s funny how brands, even small, no name workshops like this one, have an effect on our purchasing behaviour.  The problem with small producers, especially ones like this where you’re very unlikely to run into them in different places, is that you really have no idea how they will fare from one production to another.  One year it can be great, next year it can be terrible.  They also tend to be single estate, single source teas, so some will contend that they sacrifice complexity in the process.  On the other hand, if they’re good, the tea’s quality can sometimes be very high, without the very high prices that are often attached to such teas.  So, it’s all a rather large gamble, basically, and one in which the only tools you have to combat the randomness is your own sense of taste.

Seeing this cake sure brings back memories though.  I guess that’s worth something.

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Tea gifts

December 20, 2010 · 3 Comments

It’s the holiday season, and gifts are flying.  As the known “tea” person in your social group (if you read this blog regularly, that’s you) you will probably receive some teas as gift.  You may also be expected (or at least they think) to give tea out sometimes, as what you buy will inevitably be “better” than whatever they have at home.  It’s, I think, a very interesting dynamic.

On the receiving end, I think we’ve all been there before — people buy you tea as a gift, knowing you love tea.  It’s a very kind gesture, and something that I always appreciate.  Depending on the person who gifts tea, you may end up with something quite nice (I got some decent lapsang recently) or some butterscotch vanilla peppermint lemon rooibos.  Thankfully, the latter never happened to me.

Gifting tea is harder though.  What to buy?  What to give?  Of the major tea groups, I think puerh is almost by definition out of the running, unless the giftee specifically asks for it, or you know the giftee is an avid drinker.  Puerh is just too much of an acquired taste for it to be a viable gift.  Blacks are obviously the most gift-ready, since most people are familiar with it and it’s difficult to mess up, brewing wise.  I tend not to gift Ceylon, just because they’re terrible, and will not gift anything from these newfangled tea producers (Kenya is getting more popular) unless I’ve personally tried them.  I find Assam to be quite safe — solid Indian black, and if I have access to good Keemun, I almost always choose that over other blacks.  Darjeeling I personally find them to be more fickle — they are more demanding on the brewer, and can end up horribly wrong if the person making it is not careful.  They’re great teas — but not always appreciated.

The same can be said for oolongs and greens.  If the person is already somewhat into tea, I may gift them some oolong — it’s often a good “gateway tea” for people to really get into drinking more and more varied kinds of tea.  I find Taiwanese teas to be, by far, the best in that regard — not so much because they’re necessarily better, but because I am more likely to be getting what I think I’m getting.  With teas from the mainland, the quality can vary quite wildly, and I wouldn’t give anything I haven’t tried before.  With Taiwanese stuff, I find them to be more likely to be of a known quantity.  I like to give Jinxuan and Oriental Beauty.  Gaoshan tea is more of a hit or miss — too easy to overbrew and end up in a bitter mess.

I only give greens if the person already likes tea and has a preference for greens, and I almost always give Japanese greens rather than Chinese ones — good Chinese greens cost far, far too much for any normal gift, and for anyone who’s not used to drinking these, it’s always a waste (I don’t even buy good Chinese green for myself).  Japanese greens, I find, can be nicer without the difficulty of Chinese greens and the prices are not exorbitant for some reasonable, drinkable tea.  I’m personally inclined to drink gyokuro (the two times a year I drink greens), but I know opinions differ wildly there.

I think of a gift of tea as a pretty practical gift — you can almost always find ways to use it, although in the case of people like us, we probably have already way too much tea, and so the gift needs to be tailored to the person’s collection and likes and dislikes.  For people who are not quite as enthusiastic, I think of a gift of tea as an introduction — I always try to push the boundaries of what they might accept as good tea, and perhaps convert another hapless one to the habit.  After all, if your friends all think of you as the “tea person”, you can’t just give them a tin of Twinings Earl Grey.

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What is a scam?

November 30, 2010 · 2 Comments

This story in the Economist has me thinking — what exactly constitutes a scam?  $130 is really not that much, in terms of tea, even in China, especially if the buyer is buying a number of gifts.  So, price itself is really not a determinant.

I think in general, a scam requires two things: price gouging, and false advertising.  Just overcharging people on tea without actual deception is, I think, not quite a scam — it just makes you really expensive.  Someone selling a pencil for $20 is price gouging, but until they promise you that the pencil can do your homework for you, it’s not quite wrong — you’re just paying too much for a pencil.

It is when lies enter the picture when a simple overpriced item becomes a scam.  I think this can be quite overt — this tea is a 1950s Red Label, when it is in fact a 1990s remake of inferior quality.  The consumer is led to think that he is purchasing something he isn’t — that is a scam.  When a cooked/raw mix is being sold as aged raw tea (which happens more than you think) it is a scam.  When an overly roasted oolong is being sold as an aged oolong, that is a scam.  Price, in some ways, does not matter.

Then there are more subtle forms of deception that are a little harder to delineate.  For example, what if someone says a certain tea is particularly high grade, when in fact it is only of medium quality?  What about price discrimination, when the price changes depending on the purchaser?

My general advice for people going to China is that unless they know exactly what they’re doing with tea, don’t buy any.  More often than not, people who don’t know what they’re buying will end up overpaying for stuff that aren’t worth half the price of purchase.  It’s even worse when person A asks their friend, person B, who’s going to China, to buy tea for them.  That’s just like asking for bad tea for a bad price.

Are they being scammed, or are they just sold inferior goods for too much money?  It’s a fine line.  I think of paying $15 for popcorn and a drink at the movie theatre as grossly overpriced, which is why I never do it, but I don’t think it’s a scam, so to speak.  They’re just exercising their monopolistic power within the theatre to stop you from bringing in outside food and thus forced to pay for theirs instead.  For tea, however, there’s no such restriction.  Unless the seller is lying, it’s not technically a scam, but it does make it a bad deal.  So, unless you know what you’re doing, or are willing to take the risks, don’t bother with the source and get it from your local, reputable vendor — let them take the risk of buying bad/fake tea.

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Taobao lottery

November 23, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Buying tea from Taobao can be a little bit like buying a scratch lotto ticket — you might win, but you might not, and more often than not, you get nothing (or not much) out of your purchase.  I bought a number of cakes recently, and only two or three have really turned out decent…. the rest are quite so so, or even worse, terrible.

Herein lies the main problem — I can’t taste them before I buy, and I can’t just buy a very small amount before committing to a larger purchase (a cake).  So, oftentimes I’m stuck buying cakes that look good, or what not, but even then, you really have no idea what you’re buying, and looks are (especially on the internet) very deceiving.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother at all, but after a while of no-purchase, I’d inevitably get that itch and want to try something new again.  In that sense, it is also like a lotto ticket — the gratification of finding something nice (which does happen sometimes) is just too alluring.

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Bad tea

September 29, 2010 · 3 Comments

Drinking bad teas is a very, very unsatisfying experience.  Now there are a few different ways of “bad” that I can think of.

1) Plain bad — it’s insipid, boring, bland, just not very good tea

2) Badly processed/stored — usually with this kind of thing you can pinpoint something wrong with it, either in the processing or the storage, or both.  Poorly stored puerh (too dry or too wet) can fall into this category.  Teas that are made with wrong or bad processing methods can also fall into this category.

3) Spoiled — stuff is growing, or green tea has turned yellow.  Things like that

4) Bad value — this is usually a tea that is on the margins, but the price did it in.  An ok tea at $10/lb might be perfectly fine, but if it’s $100/lb, or, for example, a lao chatou selling for an egregious $150CDN, then it can be downright criminal.

Usually with 3, you can spot it without drinking it.  Even 2 is sometimes obvious.  1 is harder to tell — the tea can often look quite ok, but a few cups in, I would want to bail on the tea.  I want to stop, and start again with something I know is good, something I like, something that will make me feel like it’s worthwhile to drink.  Most of the time, bad tea is not a problem that I have, but sometimes when I sample, it happens.  Today’s one of those days, and the tea, unfortunately, falls into the 1 category.

I tried the YSLLC 2010 Yiwu.  Now, knowing the price of good raw materials from Yiwu this year, I know this price of $16 for a cake is really in the “too good to be real” category.  But then, since YSLLC probably cuts out quite a few middlemen, I figured it’s worth giving it a shot.

Unlike the Gedeng, which is fine, the Yiwu is not anything I’d recognize as Yiwu at all.  The tea has signs of poor processing, but also doesn’t seem to be from the Yiwu region — it certainly doesn’t taste like anything I’d recognize from Mahei, or at least anything decent coming from Mahei.  What I find is a rather odd tasting tea with some strange flavours, and a fair amount of smoke.  Not impressed.

Then again, I do, sometimes, change my mind, so might give this another go some other time, to see if my initial impressions are right.  But as it is, there are better bets than this tea.

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The value of samples

September 21, 2010 · 2 Comments

I just got a shipment from Yunnan Sourcing, full of samples and a cake.  I remember a long time ago, I advocated that a newcomer to puerh should sample lots — it’ll eventually get you to where you want to go, wherever that may be.  I think I still stand by that, with a caveat – even after you drink lots of samples, you may or may not know more about teas.  You really have to think about what you’re drinking to learn something from them.  Sampling, I think, is useful for two purposes:

1) To determine whether or buy something or not.  This one’s pretty obvious.  It is also always useful.

2) To broaden your sense of taste.  This is why I buy most of my samples.

A lot of the samples I bought this time are from YSLLC itself — the cakes that Scott pressed in the past two or three years of various mountains.  First of all, I’ve never tried any of his pressing, so I’m curious to see what they are like.  I also bought a cake of Bulang from a no-name factory (in fact, the paper is white).  I find that these are often more interesting than big factory stuff.  When I get a cake of Shuangjiang Mengku Ronshi tea, for example, or a cake from Menghai factory, you more or less have an idea what it’s going to be like, how it’s going to be processed, and roughly how it’s going to go down.  There are usually very few surprises, and what surprises there are, they are often because the tea was stored strangely, or fake.  With the smaller factory stuff, however, that is not true.  You often get a lot of teas that are pretty strange, or interestingly processed.  They could be good or they could be bad, but they are almost always a learning experience.

So for today’s tea, which is the said Bulang, I brewed it in my usual pot.  I find it to be quite green, still, even though it’s 2006.  I’m sure Kunming storage has something to do with that.  It does have a few years in that the taste is starting to turn, ever so slightly, but it is a long way from mature.  I can guess that it was, when made, quite a green affair, and pretty bitter.  What is really interesting for me though, is that it is very different from what I normally drink these days.  The first taste of the tea brought me back to when I was in Beijing in 2006 and tasting my way through hundreds of cakes.  I noticed that these days, my standard fare is usually something pre 2007, or aged, or aged oolong, or wuyi.  There just isn’t room for some of these younger drain cleaners.  I should probably make a little room for them and to evaluate how the newer crops of tea are doing.

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Maliandao Geography – an update

September 10, 2010 · 7 Comments

A long time ago, I posted something about Maliandao Geography, mostly to help others going to Beijing to navigate themselves around the street where they sell all things tea.  After this recent trip, I noticed that the old map needs a little update.

So, what changed?

Well, first of all, the Beijing Pu’er Chadu (black on the old map) is no more.  It’s dead, gone, turned into something unrecognizable.  Those stores all left, I guess, to go somewhere else.

Instead, we have two shiny new tea malls that are now BEFORE the all important Carrefour (purple and orange).  Now, what I said about the Carrefour still stands — anything that shows up before the Carrefour is for tourist only, and the serious tea buyer should not bother with them, because they are more expensive and so you will probably not find your best prices there.  Keep walking.

There are also two newer (although not new — newer only relative to my last post) places that sell tea that are slightly more out of the way.  Brown is Tianfuyuan tea mall, which you can only get to if you walk through the Beijing Tea Corporation mall (or through a nondescript alley with shops).  That’s where Xiaomei, my friend, has her shop.  It’s now a little shabby, and honestly, I thought she should move, but then, she seems to be doing all right, so I’m sure there’s business there still.

The other place that is newer is the Beijing tea trading center, coloured pink here.  I walked by, walked around, and didn’t see much that I like.  However, I didn’t see much that I liked anywhere in Beijing this time, so that’s really not saying much.

I went on a rainy day, and it was not very crowded at all – in fact, it was positively dead.  At Chayuan, only about half the shops were actually open.  I was told that on sunny days business is much better, and that I went on a bad day.

So that’s that — an update to Maliandao.  Just remember — walk past the Carrefour.  It’ll pay off.

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