A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘storage’

Moving

June 28, 2007 · 5 Comments

Moving a good amount of tea is hard work. Last night I packed up my tea cakes as best I could, by first tying them into tongs of varying sizes, then double wrapping them in food bags that are more or less like saran-wraps, I then hauled the tea over to the post office here with my girlfriend helping me. The thing about China Post is that all packages must be inspected before they are sealed — they want to know what’s going into them boxes here in China. At the post office closest to me, the guy who does the packaging said he can’t ship tea like this — too much tea is considered commercial goods, and have to go through the central international post office. Thankfully, that’s not too far away, and we went there — only to discover that there’s no restriction on tea export (as I have guessed). It’ll be insane to tax goods going out of your country, after all.

Most of the time packaging is also sold through the post office. There are almost no stores that will sell you paper boxes here — people reuse old ones, mostly, and if you’re shipping stuff, you buy it from the post office (since you have to bring stuff over for them to inspect anyway, it’s almost pointless to pre-pack anything). Unfortunately, most of the boxes there are not the right sized, so I couldn’t put all my tongs in one or two box, as I have hoped. Instead, I put about two tongs of tea in each box, buffered by other things including my loose teas, canisters, teaware, etc etc…. all in all, it took about 5 boxes to send all my tea related stuff over to Hong Kong. Most of the stuff will then stay in Hong Kong, at least for the near foreseeable future — I think my puerh will age better there than anywhere else, and since I’ll be moving around a lot… it’s better to stick them in one place.

Meanwhile, I am traveling to Shanghai tomorrow, with only one tea that I didn’t pack up — a maocha I bought on one of my very first trip to Maliandao this year. The rest… I’ll have to find my good friends who own more tea than I do to supply me for a few days while I’m there 🙂

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On storage, again

April 14, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the first things I did when I returned from the US to Beijing is to open the cupboard that holds all my puerh here.

Sorry, it’s a little messy, but I leave all the bags open so they all breath, and between that and finding enough nooks and crannies to store all the little pouches of samples that I get, it gets a little messy.

On the right you can see two bowls — one on the top shelf, one on the bottom. Only the top is filled with water right now, but when I left Beijing for Hong Kong, I filled both up to almost the brim. I figured in the dry weather here some water won’t hurt.

When I got back and opened the cupboard, I expected two things. First, the water from both bowls should be all gone. That was exactly the case… it all evaporated, as it should since I was gone for more than a month. All that was left was a lot of salt deposits, testament to the high mineral content of tap water in Beijing. I figured leaving water in the cupboard can hardly be a bad idea given the dry weather here.

The second expectation was that I would smell a strong whiff of tea. Before I left, whenever I opened the cupboard, I can smell that scent of young, green puerh. It’s pretty strong, and I think it smells pretty nice. In fact, when I wake up in the morning and open the door to the living room (where the tea cupboard is) I can often smell the tea faintly. It obviously seeps through the not very tight doors of the cupboard and into the room.

When I got back and opened the door, however…. there was very little smell. I smelled a whiff of sweetness — that sweetness that you get from a 3-5 year old dry stored puerh. It’s not the same raw green smell of a very young puerh, but rather something that has aged a bit. It’s a difficult smell to describe, but anybody who’s had some slightly aged puerh, especially of the Yiwu variety will know what I’m talking about. Even that smell, however, was fairly faint. This was unexpected since the tea was left undistrubed for quite a while. I thought the smell would accumulate instead of dissipate given that the door would be closed all along.

So I added water to one of the bowls, and left the tea in peace except for when I was getting stuff from it. I have a humidity indicator both in the cupboard and in the living room. Throughout the week, the humidity in the living room was significantly higher than the humidity in the cupboard. My meters don’t give precise readings, just general “humid-dry” scale. But the difference was obviously significant enough so that it’s not a product of some mechanical error.

After a few days, I have noticed that the smell that I was expecting has returned… the teas in the cupboard once again give off that young puerh smell that I thought I was going to get when I came back. The humidity of the cupboard was still lower than the room. Even though I opened the door for a while to let in the air in the room, thinking that it will equalize the humidity in the two places, humidity in the cupboard remains stubbornly lower.

This has led me to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the teas are actually soaking up the water in the air in the cupboard, contributing to the lower humidity there despite efforts to equalize it. After all, humidity in and out of the cupboard should theoretically be the same if I left the cupboard door open sufficiently long, and since it’s really not a big thing, you would think that amount of time is pretty low.

The return of the tea smell, or rather, the more pronounced nature of the smell, leads me to think that with higher moisture, the smell of the tea gets stronger — the aromatics in the tea get released into air, I presume, with water. Is that a good thing? I’m not sure, but since they say you need moisture in the air to age the teas, I would think this is only a natural development and not a bad thing. I did notice that in Hong Kong, my rather moist cakes had a strong whiff of tea to them. I didn’t think much of it then. Now I think there’s a correlation and probable causation.

The other thing is that since the bowl of water was replaced, it has lost about 15-20% of its contents already in the past week. This is a little faster than I thought.

All this makes me think that the slightly more moist air that has accompanied my return (it rained for two days, and there’s also my human additions such as steam from the shower, me boiling water, etc) is giving the teas more water to work with.

This would also explain the teas that have been on shelves in Maliandao for too long — they are usually devoid of any smell, and you have to breath into them to get any whiff of tea out of them. In Hong Kong, you never need to do that — you stick your nose up to the cake and you can definitely smell it. Concensus has it that Hong Kong stored teas are probably better tasting than Beijing ones. The few Beijing stored cakes I’ve had indicate the same… they’re not very good and don’t age much. Teas that people have brought back from places like Xinjiang, despite their advanced age (10+ years) taste terrible.

I might try adding another bowl of water, but I think that won’t make much of a difference as there should be a natural equilibrium of how much water gets released into the air, depending on the humidity inside the cupboard. One or two bowls shouldn’t change that very much.

I’d like to think I’m moving the tea in the right direction, at least in keeping the tea a little room to work with, rather than drying them out as they would if I didn’t put any water in the cupboard. For those of you who live in drier climates — have you experienced something like this before? When you open your cupboard, can you smell your tea? Does it get stronger when you’ve had a prolonged period of moist weather? Have you had teas stored in two different places… and have them taste different after a while? Curious to know.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Why do we bother?

March 24, 2007 · 9 Comments

Sometimes I wonder why we bother at all with young puerhs.

I’m attending a conference these next few days, and today during lunch with some current and former colleagues, the topic of tea came up. Eventually it got onto the subject of puerh, and aged puerh, and other aged foodstuffs, and one person asked “can’t you just buy a bottle of scotch and age it too?” Well, you can’t, because you need to buy a whole barrel of the stuff to age to make it even drinkable, or something like that. I have never heard of anybody drinking raw whisky.

And in some ways, this is more similar to puerh than the usual analogy of wine. After all, a fine Bordeaux is still, from what I understand, very drinkable now, even when new. It just gets better with age, but it doesn’t need age to be a good drink now.

Puerh, however, is not quite like that. Sure, there are some puerhs that are decent to drink now, and I think generally speaking people are acquiring more of a taste for younger puerhs, but the fact is that the drink is designed to be aged — it’s the aged stuff that you’re after, not the young stuff. Many of us who buy young cakes are not buying for the “drink it now” category, but rather the “let it sit and get better” category, and it dawned on me that in some ways, it’s rather absurd. This is not like buying a case of wine and let it sit at home. Rather, it’s more like buying a raw barrel of whisky and hope that in 10, 15, 20, 30 years, it will get better with age and become a great barrel of whisky (yes, I know, that’s only the minimum age of the whisky in the bottle). The young product, with a super high alcohol content, etc, is not really what you will call whisky. The law, at least, governs that scotch needs to be aged for at least 3 years, and generally more…

Now…. the difference is that nobody ever buys full barrels of whisky or wine, take them home, and age them in their own rooms. That’s insane — the costs, the trouble, and the risks. Yet, we do it all the time with young puerh cakes. We run all the risk, and we don’t even know for sure, in many parts of the world, whether this stuff will age well at all. A Hong Kong tea merchant told me that he’s sold a container of puerh to Australia before, and within a year he took it all back, because the tea’s quality went down… it got worse over time in the rather dry climate there. Lots of people from Hong Kong believe that a tea only ages well in a wetter environment.

Who’s right? Who knows. People in Beijing think that maybe in 10 years, in addition to HK storage, Taiwan storage, Malay storage, we will have things like Beijing storage with a distinctive taste to it. I’m just afraid that Beijing storage might be bad, dry, rough young puerh with funny tastes. I’ve had one or two of those, and I’m afraid of seeing more.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Tea storage in Hong Kong

March 5, 2007 · 1 Comment

I went to the Best Tea House again… and tried that Yiwu small arbour sample that I have. Interesting observation — the tea got better, and changed character, since last time.

I don’t know what it is, but last time the tea brewed a rather insipid and boring tea, but this time, it’s much more flavourful. It’s still a bit on the weak side, but it came out a lot better. Part of it has to do with the sheer amount of leaves used, but I think the other reason is because it’s really changed a bit…. it’s different from the last three times I’ve had it.

Humidity here today is 98%. Somehow I think the taste change has to do with the very high humidity in Hong Kong. I think it ultimately makes teas change faster, and probably better. After all, almost all the older stuff we have on the market today came through Hong Kong. I am more and more convinced that a place like Beijing will develop terrible tasting teas.

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Storage problem

March 3, 2007 · 5 Comments

I am looking for a place to store my teas in Hong Kong, and there’s a cabinet in the house that will do the job well, I think. One problem though — it smells of varnish still, mostly because the door is rarely open. What can get rid of the varnish smell quickly? Any thoughts? Will charcoal do it? Should I go buy a bag of charcoal, open it, put it in the cabinet, and so when I return to Hong Kong next time, I can stick my tea (from Beijing) in the cabinet without having to worry about them all smelling like varnish?

I don’t have many days left in Hong Kong, so I might do a little last minute shopping around, although mostly, I am just going to hang out at home. Then it’s back to Cambridge for me.

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Cooked loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen

February 20, 2007 · 2 Comments

When I went to Bonham Strand a few days ago I bought a little loose puerh from Lam Kie Yuen. The owner of the place, who is a very kind old gentleman with a lot of knowledge of the tea business, described this tea as having been through “swimming” storage. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I’d imagine it’s a little wet.

I should note here, by the way, that the term in Chinese that describes dry or wet storage is “shicang 濕倉” (wet) and “gancang 乾倉” (dry). The word “cang” in this case is better translated as “storage” as in “storage condition”, but the word literally means “warehouse”. So you can also translate those terms as “wet warehoused” and “dry warehoused”, or some such. When talking about a tea that has been wet stored, it is usually only referred to, in Chinese, as “this tea has been through storage”. This issue led Mr. Lam to quip “people have been asking me a lot lately whether this or that tea has been in storage. What kind of a dumb question is that? Where am I supposed to store my tea if not in my warehouse? Under my bed??”

Anyway, Chinese lesson over. The tea, when dry, looks like any other loose puerh…

Almost impossible to tell what it is. All I know is that the grade of the tea is fairly high.

The liquor is a dark matter…. slightly opaque. It’s got none of the “fermentation” taste of a young cooked tea. Instead, it’s just …. old, kinda sweet, and somewhat bland in a way. Smooth, although not 100% smooth. There was a slight unpleasantness in the back of the throat… very slight, but detectable. This is supposedly a by product of wet storage that hasn’t been fully aired-out, so to speak.

The wet leaves are…. not too remarkable

But the fairness cup, after using it, shows how much stuff was dissolved into the tea liquor… and the viscosity of the tea.

The reason I’m drinking this at all (I’m sure some of you are wondering why) is that ZH from Beijing wants me to look for some cooked puerh for him, preferably aged. This is supposedly about 10 years old. He wants to try putting ginseng with the tea in a sealed jar to let the tea be infused with ginseng smell, sort of as an experiment. I’m going to send him a sample of this and see if it meets his approval.

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Hong Kong is wet!

February 13, 2007 · 7 Comments

I got back, got off the plane, and the familiar scent of a slightly damp city graced my nose. Hong Kong is always wet, and it seems like the super wet weather of spring is hitting early this year.

This leaves me a bit uneasy with my tea stash here. In Beijing I never worry about moisture, because it’s always too dry there (I put two bowls of water in my tea cabinet, so to make sure that the water doesn’t run out before I return). Here, though, you can feel the wetness.

This is where the tea was stored

The place, as you can see, is not ideal. It’s next to the windows, so when the windows are open (as it was when I came back) there was a slight breeze. It brings a lot of moisture through the air. Although what’s stored there are just two tongs (the other loose cakes are in a paperbag on one of the bookshelves), I worry about it. I could sort of smell the tong wrapping. I opened one of the tongs up to check… the cake almost feels damp. It’s wet all right. Time to move them.

So I cleared out a little corner of one of the bookshelves and put my tongs there. Take a peek

I need to clear the area out a little better, but it will do. I am thinking of making one shelf tea related stuff, if my dad will let me. After all, I don’t have a room in this place and sleeps on the murphy bed in the study.

Other than my puerh stash, I also got a nice package in the mail:

These are tea samples from Mr. Lochan of Darjeeling. They’re actually all big bags… 100-200g each, I think. That’s a lot of tea to drink. I might give some to the Best Tea House folks to try.

Anyway, time to turn in. I think I am going to deliver Rosa’s tea tomorrow (which, incidentally… put my luggage over the weight limit…)

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Home stored puerh

January 11, 2007 · 4 Comments

I had the home stored puerh from Best Tea House today. No vintage, no specific region, just puerh in the old style… aged stuff, blended together, and drunk. Sweet, smooth, aromatic, thick… everything you’d want in a puerh. It’s not a Red Label, or Blue Label, or anything near that, but it does the job, and it’s not expensive. In fact, I’d rather drink this than the Traditional Character we tasted yesterday. An aged puerh should be sweet, smooth, aromatic, thick… not coarse and thin. At least for me, that’s what matters.

Don’t drink the wrapper. Drink the tea 🙂

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More tea tasting with L, and funny tea storage

January 10, 2007 · 3 Comments

I went to drink tea with L again today, who has a shop in Maliandao and a vast array of friends.  Everytime I go out with him I’m meeting someone new, which is quite interesting in and of itself.

When I got there they were drinking some cooked pu, with one person looking to buy stuff at the shop.  Since they were busy, I walked out with L and one of his friends, S, to look at some teapots.  While there (mostly crap) I also saw some interesting cakes…. but wow, they were expensive.

Back in the store, we started drinking tea.  I pulled out the tea that I brought along.  It was an Ying Kee Teahouse loose puerh, quite cheap (around $250-300 HKD for 600g, if I remembered correctly).  It’s wet stored stuff, but ok as a drink it now thing.  We had it… and everybody was wondering what it was, and how much it was, etc.  This is stuff that is rare in Beijing.  However, L’s business partner told me that where she used to work, they also sold a tea that was similar, for something like 1200 RMB/500g…. wow, they’re charging a lot.  In fact, I’m sure right now you could sell this tea for just as much here in Beijing.  The taste is plain, but pleasant, and easy to drink.  You can really fool a lot of people with this stuff.

Then we tried a dizzying array of raw teas as some more friends walked in (and out).  It included a Nannuo (ok, but expensive), a Yiwu (not really Yiwu, I think), a Fengqing tuo from 99 (decent).  At one point, there were 10-12 people sitting around the table drinking tea, which is rare for any store on Maliandao on any day.  None of us were actually going to buy anything, of course, and having a whole bunch of people around the table ensures that no business will be done, because nobody interested in buying tea will walk into a store full of customers already.  Nevertheless, Chinese businesses tend to think that the “qi” from people is a good thing.  There’s nothing worse than a store that is perpetually empty (which most stores on Maliandao seem to be).

We had dinner (Fujian fare), and then went to a new store that just opened that sells lots of old teas.

This is probably the weirdest store that I’ve been to on Maliandao.  It’s nicely decorated (a growing trend, it seems).  It’s got lots of old tea.  It’s expensive.  The woman who seems to own or operates the store is the polar opposite of how the store looks.  She looks like an old aunt from a rural village.  She is slightly crude in her manners, and worst of all, not too well informed about her tea.  When we commented on a few things (ZH is around) she doesn’t always seem to know what we’re referring to.  The one thing she keeps repeating is “I have lots of this tea!  I have lots of this tea!  Aren’t they all clean and in great condition?”.  She keeps telling us about her great storage facilities and how clean they are.  It’s in Xinjiang, the NW part of China that is largely arid, and she says she keeps a few workers there to clean the facilities constantly.  She basically transports teas from Hong Kong and Guangzhou to Xinjiang to let them lose the wetter storage flavour before sending them back to the equally beautifully clean storage in Beijing.  Ok, got it.

Well… we tried two things there before I left.  The first is a 99 Xiaguan iron cake.  Nice flavours, reminds me of the Fengqing tuo that we had earlier today.  Teas from that area all broadly taste similar.  Good storage condition, nothing too remarkable.  I didn’t ask how much, but it probably wasn’t going to be cheap.

The second thing…. she asked us to pick something.  Nobody wanted to, so I did the honours and picked a 80s Zhongcha Traditional Character (8653) cake.  I wanted to compare it with the sample YP gave me and see how it’s like…. Wow, what a difference.  YP’s is so, so, so much better.  The cakes look very similar in shape, compression, condition, etc.  In fact, I’d say that looking at the teas, there’s almost no difference (except that this cake is whole whereas YP’s is partially drunk).  This cake you can’t smell anything, while with YP’s you can smell some tea taste.  The liquor also looked similar — the same dark amber hue, very alluring, very nice.  Then I lifted the cup to my mouth, poured the tea in, and swished it around…. and I was very disappointed.

I couldn’t find the nice aromatic taste, the sweet, very sweet huigan, and the general smoothness that is present in YP’s tea.  Instead, this one was a bit harsh.  It’s obviously aged, about 15-20 years I think (she claims 30, but Traditional Character is no older than 1980, I think).  The tea is not that aromatic, almost a bit bland given the age, and the body, while thick enough, was not very smooth.  It roughs up your tongue, and dries out your throat.  There were lots of things that didn’t seem quite right with the tea.  I was hoping it would improve with a few more infusions, but it only got worse.  Why?

I think I have a theory…. I asked the lady if the storage facilities are well ventilated.  To her, it probably sounded like a compliment… but it’s not.  She said, proudly, that unless there was a storm, all the windows and doors of the storage are open, usually.  The Beijing facilities boast of powerful floor fans that blow a steady and strong breeze through the storage at all hours.  This all in the name of “tuicang”, or “receeding storage”, i.e. the process that you do by leaving wet-stored tea in a dry storage facility to let it lose the wet-stored taste.  It all sounds good in theory…. but I think she got it wrong.  I am by no means an expert, but from what I have gathered from reading, and from what I can imagine, a too-well-ventilated storage area for tea is actually bad for it.  The main reason is that the aromatic substances in a tea will dissipate quickly if it’s too well ventilated.  On Sanzui you sometimes hear people asking for help, because they put their tea in a breezy corridor and now they are bland.  I think this is why the Zhongcha cake is so bland in comparison — the flavours are blown away by the too-well ventilated air.

The other problem, the dryness, is probably also caused by the air movement.  Both Xinjiang and Beijing are very dry places.  While this might sound like a good idea for storing teas that have been through wet storage, if you have a constant breeze that blows through the tea, then it is constantly bringing very dry air through the tea — sucking away moisture in the tea.  Not only will it age poorly while sitting in said storage, it will dry the teas out and also cause the rough/dryness that I felt in the tea.  By trying too hard, she might be ruining a lot of good teas.

This is all mere speculation, but most of the stuff I’ve read and heard (from people with experience) all point to the same thing.  Tea is best stored in an enclosed area with little to no circulation of air, to keep in the tea’s aroma.  It doesn’t have to be extra dry or wet — just average, normal, and natural.  It’s a pity that her teas might all be messed up eternally given how they are treated.  Sure, they look great, and look like perfectly dry stored stuff, but when it hits your mouth…. it’s just not the same.  I will pay $600 for YP’s cake, I will not pay $600 for this woman’s.  Besides, her prices are easily double that of Hong Kong.  Forget it.

Wow, this was a verbose entry.

 

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