A Tea Addict's Journal

This is what passed for tea today

Lengshan (Cold Mountain) oolong, it says. No sugar, the little red seal in the bottom right indicates. The little sticker sticking out (you can see the profile of it) says “2007 Yushan First Prize Tea winner (again)”. Ingridients? Water, oolong tea, Yushan oolong tea (less than 20mg/100ml natural caffeine). Retail cost is about $1 USD (or maybe $2 USD now the way the exchange rate is going, haha)

Hmmm, yum.

The “first prize” thing is obviously a gimmick. I bet there’s 1/1000000 in weight of first prize tea in whatever vat they use to brew this tihng. Most of it is probably cheap grade oolong…. leftovers from whatever else that was being made, or maybe liquid pesticide, or some such…

This actually is one of the better tasting ones out there, although it is a bit sour. The one thing it has going for it (besides no sugar) is that there’s no “natural flavours” in the tea. You can definitely taste it when they add flavourings. The tea would come out a little saccharin, with an odd aftertaste and something not quite natural in the way it behaves. This tea is ok by comparison, although I actually still prefer the Itoen Huangjingui. That is actually decent, for what it’s worth. This is merely ok…. good enough for the necessary caffeine for a day with no time at home for real tea.

I wanted something light today, so I figured drinking the baozhong again, this time in my little pot, will be a good thing. Last time’s double tasting means I couldn’t taste each tea very well, individually. Those tasting sessions are great at alerting you to differences in mouthfeel, flavours, etc, but are not so good if you want to really examine a tea on its own with no interference, because the other tea there is interference.

I opted for the more expensive one to drink, but as I noted last time…. when dry, they look basically identical. When brewed:

They also look pretty much the same.

I tend to brew light Taiwan oolongs delicately. Temperature of water is still kept high, but poured from high up and in a small stream, but that depends on what’s going on and can change… There are different schools of thought of what makes a good cup, and as I’ve observed it really runs the gamut, but I find it just fine like this usually. Add to the fact that my body generally doesn’t like a large amount of Taiwan oolongs that are not roasted, and it makes perfect sense why I brew it this way….

The resulting tea is overwhelmingly sweet, with a soft floral aroma and just a slight hint of grassiness if I overbrew it a bit. There’s some qi there, as I could feel my body reacting to the tea after the first few sips. The body is thick enough, and all in all, quite a pleasant drink. It’s a bit mellow, and perhaps less strong than some of the better stuff could be, but those are sometimes too punchy for me in their flavour, making it taste almost artificial. There’s a sort of saccharine quality to that kind of aroma/feeling that I don’t personally enjoy.

The tea passed on with about 6 infusions. It’s not an overly complex tea, but once in a while… it’s good for what it is.

Along with the two green baozhongs I got was this roasted baozhong. I generally like roasted teas. They’re easier on the body (stomach and otherwise) and usually also require less attention to make, which enables them to be teas that can be drunk without too much attention being paid to how you make it.

Roasted baozhong, as the owner of the shop reminded me, are often teas from last year that weren’t sold. Since unroasted teas are no longer fresh and have lost some of their fragrance, roasting will enable it both to keep as well as to change its composition so as to make it marketable again. It makes sense. Why roast good, fresh crop when you have older stuff? Of course, there are teas that are made to be roasted by design, but in this day and age when lighter teas often command higher prices, it would be silly for a farmer to forego the higher income for a roasted tea.

I made this once before since purchasing the tea, but last time I didn’t use much leaves as I only wanted something weak and mellow. Today I decided to push it a little harder and use a Wuyi yancha proportion

Which basically means stuffing the gaiwan.

The resulting tea is quite dark

And initially there’s a strong charcoal roasted flavour. It’s not, however, so strong that you feel like you’re eating charcoal (I’ve had those kinds of tea before). It’s a very fine line between over roasting and just right — when it tips into the “I’m tasting charcoal” territory, the tea… really isn’t so good anymore.

This tea manages to stay within bounds. Not much of the original flavour of the baozhong remains, of course. Instead, you get a deeper, heavier scent, something like a dark fruity flavour. This tea is not aged, at least not that I can tell, so it can probably benefit from some aging — both to lose a bit of the charcoal flavour and to gain a little more sweetness. It’s not that it’s not sweet, but I find that roasted teas, aged a few years, can have a unique mellowness and roundness that newly roasted teas can’t.

This predicates itself on having been stored correctly. Unlike puerh, generally it’s not a good idea to have them exposed to much air. They can turn sour if it’s moist outside. At the Best Tea House, for example, boxes of Wuyi yancha and other roasted teas sometimes go sour because they’ve been opened for a as samples but not finished in time. Some people actually like it a touch sour, but I personally think sour tea is just nasty. This tea doesn’t have any sourness, no matter how long I brewed it for. Neither is it rough or too bitter. Pretty decent, actually, and not a bad find for a tea that didn’t cost too much.

The wet leaves are a bit stiff — a lot of roasting happened. Not the heaviest I’ve seen though. It’s very strange, but extremely heavily roasted teas, when done properly, are incredibly sweet.

I might buy a few bags of this before I leave and let it sit at home. I think it will be worth it to have some of my own supply of aged baozhongs.

Since I bought two packs of different grades of baozhongs last weekend… I should actually try them.

Generally speaking, I’m not a big baozhong drinker. Nor, for the matter, am I a big Taiwan oolong drinker in general. That’s largely because my body doesn’t take it too well. A lot of Taiwan oolongs are really green these days with low oxidation and little to no roasting. It’s a bit much for me sometimes. But when in Rome… act like the Romans do, I guess.

The teas are actually almost indistinguishable in dry form.

Or, for that matter, in the brewed form

Any differences in colour you see is mostly due to the slight difference in positioning relative to the light source. I’d say that if I had given one of these to you and asked you to guess, your chance of getting it right would not be much higher than 50%.

There is a bit of a difference in the dry leaves — the aroma coming from the tea when it hits the warmed gaiwan. The cheaper one (left) has a slight smell of something grainy — a little like some kind of lightly toasted grains. The right one is more floral — smelling like a gaoshan oolong.

The same is largely reflected in the taste. The left one is clearly the weaker tea, tasting a bit more watery, while the right one is more full bodied, with a deeper and more complex flavour. The teas are hard to tell apart when dry, but when in tea form and drunk, anybody with a tongue can probably tell which one is better. I used the same amount of tea in both gaiwan, measured by my scale, and the difference in taste is obvious. The better one also lasted longer — about 5 infusions, whereas the weaker one was tasting watery earlier. You might even say it tasted watery right away.

Then again, the better one is double the price of the cheap one. So you do pay for what you get.

The wet leaves…. look similar, although I feel that the expensive one is a little more sturdy than the cheap one. It’s quite subtle though, the differences.

This is the cheap one

And the better one

So, the difference is really pretty much all in the taste (and smell). It was interesting, if nothing else. I still prefer them roasted.

P.S. I really need to fix the lighting situation for picture taking. It’s horrible 🙁