A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘travel’

Luk Yu Teahouse

December 30, 2006 · 3 Comments

Seems like the internet is back to normal faster than I thought. Give it another day, and I can probably start uploading pictures again. Right now it’s still quite slow (think…. 28.8k slow with lots of packetloss)

I went to Luk Yu Teahouse 陸羽茶室 with family today for lunch. It’s a fairly famous old restaurant in Central, best known for rude waiters who only treat you well if you’re a regular, and a murder case a few years ago where a guy was gunned down in the middle of the dining room. Either way though, it’s a bit of a landmark and is not bad for food.

As many of you probably know, going to eat dim sum in Cantonese is “yum cha”, literally “to drink tea”. When we first sat down at the table and mom started looking at the food menu, the waiter commented “so fast?”. The expectation is that you will first sit down, drink some tea, talk, slowly look at what kind of food there is, wait for everybody to show up… and have a very, very leisurely lunch (or brunch, as is usually the case). A lot of Cantonese families I know would go at 9am and stay until well past 1. They sit, chat, read newspaper, etc, and it’s a time for the whole family to get together. Dim sum, the focus of this activity in the West, is only what fills the belly. It’s really a time when you are catching up with family, and tea serves as a lubricant for the conversation.

I think the kinds of tea that are ordered are often jasmine, shuixian, nongxiang tieguanyin, or puerh, with lighter teas being less popular (although I think they are also gaining in popularity). We got a puerh today. There’s no specific thing you order. You just tell them what tea they want, and they give it to you in a pot. There’s no asking of vintage, raw or cooked, or anything. It comes in a big pot where the water stews the leaves. It’s what’s called “cow-drinking”, which basically means drinking in big gulps rather than small cups for fine tasting. They also have gaiwans, if you prefer that, although with 10 people at the table gaiwan is quite impractical.

Usually, the puerh that is offered at these places are cooked or raw-cooked mix puerh, low quality, and quite nasty. The stuff at Luk Yu, while not fantastically good, is not bad. It’s all raw, at least the sample leaves I pulled out of the pot when we were done were definitely all raw puerh. It’s got some age. I can’t tell how long, but it’s not short. Drinking it from a big pot of stewed leaves also doesn’t help. After all, the tea’s just there to help you eat and talk. My family all commented though that the puerh there was better than the usual puerh you get outside, which is often dark and bitter (when overbrewed). I think for what it’s supposed to do, Luk Yu’s puerh is quite good.

I think tomorrow’s a tea shopping day 🙂

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Two darjeelings

December 23, 2006 · Leave a Comment

I had two darjeelings today at two different hotels. Colonialism dies hard, and afternoon tea is one of those institutions that the Brits have left behind in Hong Kong. At the better hotels and restaurants they generally serve loose leaf tea of various kinds, although some places I’ve been to charge you $6 USD for the privilege of drinking an insipid teabag.

So I went to two places today, and the reason it’s actually blog worthy is because the difference was night and day. I don’t know exactly where they’re from or anything, but the first one, served at the local Conrad, was a bit boring and probably not a real Darjeeling. It was a second flush type of tea, dark, strong, but without a lot of the signature “Darjeeling” taste that I like (and the only reason why I’d order it). This is why I suspected it’s just a blend, instead of pure Darjeeling leaves. The leaves were very broken, small, low grade. It was not worth the $$ they were charging for it.

The second one, tasted at the Peninsula, was so obviously better after having had the first one. The tea was lighter — most likely a first flush Darjeeling. The leaves were less broken (forgive me for not knowing the British grading system by heart). The taste… was exquisite. It’s got that lovely fragrance of a good Darjeeling, with a nice bite to the tea but still very smooth going down. I loved it.

Of course, it probably helped that there was a band playing there for the whole time in the lobby, churning out Christmas music for the crowds and what not. It also cost more, but IMO, I’d pay the extra $$ to drink the Darjeeling there than the much, much lesser version of the first.

I wonder if they sell this tea at their gift shop. It might be worth it. I should go back and take a picture of the place, as it’s really well decorated for the Christmas season this year, and drinking afternoon tea in the Pen is something that a good tourist to Hong Kong ought to try.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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First day back in Hong Kong…

December 18, 2006 · 8 Comments

and where do I go? I go to Tiffany & Co., of course… (actually, I prefer Cartier)

Anyway, I haven’t even been to the new Tsim Sha Tsui branch of the Best Tea House… and like bearsbearsbears said, it’s quite small. Here’s a shot looking out from the vantage point of the tea drinker/brewer

But believe it or not… it’s actually bigger, physically speaking, than the older branch. The older branch, however, was square, so even though it’s physically smaller, sitting in it feels better.

When I got there after lunch, there were already two older tea drinkers there. They were all getting ready to taste another tea (obviously much has happened already before I arrived). Tiffany was making the tea…. with two gaiwans. Here are the contents:

They are two “thousand taels tea”. The one on the left is an offering of the Best Tea House, whereas the one on the right is brought by one of the drinkers who were there. Thousand taels tea is basically a heavily compressed stick of tea — a very big stick. It’s usually some 5-6ft long, and the diameter is similar to a regular puerh cake. You can imagine how much tea that is. I believe it’s made with Hunan leaves… and it’s got all sorts of stuff in it.

These are how they are brewed, in the same left right setup. Although the way the tea reflected light makes it seem as though the right side is darker than the left, the reality is that they are very close.

The taste, however, is not. The left is sort of medicinal, but a bit thin. The right has everything the left has, but more, and has also a “chen” taste with a sweetness to it that the left doesn’t. Quite nice. Supposed to be around 50 years old (and in the hands of the tea drinker for 15 years already). I’ve tasted a very young thousand taels tea, and that one tasted very rough and unready for consumption. These are both drinkable, although not at these prices….

Then, we tried a Chaozhou gongfu tea — heavily roasted oolong. We brewed it in a pot — sour. We brewed it in a gaiwan… not sour. Something’s wrong with the pot. The owner (the guy who brought the thousand taels tea) said he’ll have to go home and re-season the pot thoroughly to get rid of the nasty taste.

Then… I brought out the two puerhs I brought (well, I brought more). The first is the Yiwu maocha, and the second is the Yiwu girl cake.

Everybody liked the Yiwu maocha… flavourful, smooth, full bodied. It tasted better than when I brew it, so I thought Tiffany’s tea brewing skills are obviously better than mine, for good reasons. I’m glad it tasted so good.

Then we tried the Yiwu cake…. and something was seriously wrong. It was thin, rough, not fragrant at all. Nobody wanted to drink it after three infusions, and I myself felt uncomfortable with the tea too. Something was wrong, quite wrong.

While we were discussing why this might have been the case, we brewed up a little 88 qingbing (88 raw cake) for taste. I’ve never had it, and neither has the other guy who brought the tea and the pot, so we figured it’s not a bad thing to try.

Boy, was I disappointed. Astronomical price tag aside, the tea is thin, bland, lacking in huigan, etc…. only of middling quality all around, if even, and did I mention it’s expensive?

A shot of the wet leaves

I asked a guy I know on Sanzui who’s also from HK about it… and he said “duh… anything left in the Best Tea House at this point that’s a 88 raw cake is not going to be good”. Good point. The good stuff is long gone — picked out by the people who bought it in bulk, or simply lucky enough to buy early.

Meanwhile, we figured that it was probably a water problem — namely that the water I use in Beijing and the water here are different, with the water here (filtered tap water) being very soft and low in mineral content, while the water I use in Beijing is harder. So, to test, I went out, found the closest 7-eleven I could find (2 minute walk away) and bought a bottle of Volvic for our experiment (my preferred option, Vittel, was not for sale there, and I don’t like Evian).

We mixed the Volvic into one of the water kettles, making it an even mix of the tap water and the Volvic, and the other was just tap water. We brewed the Yiwu girl tea up again after a quick rinse.

The result…. was a flavourful, fragrant tea, much, much smoother, and more full bodied. Closer to what I’ve tasted in Beijing. Not quite the same, mind you, but closer.

We then used the tap water to make another infusion of similar time… thin, rough, just like the first few.

Volvic water again… much better. This time the infusion time was short, and it was even more apparent that the tea OBVIOUSLY improved.

However, I think the maocha tasted better with the tap water. What gives?

We tried this with one other tea. This is a tea brought over by the other guy sitting there today, a Wuliang Shan young cake from 05. We tried it with both waters… and the tea was better with the tap water.

I’ve still got to figure out what it is that makes the Yiwu girl tea better with the high mineral content, while the other two better with the regular tap water. This is a bit of a mystery and needs much, much more experimentation.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Packing and tea

December 16, 2006 · Leave a Comment

How much tea should I bring? My father would like to try some of my teas here, after discovering my blog. I would like to bring some samples back for friends in Hong Kong to try. I also need to drink some stuff at home too.

But then, there’s no water boiler in Hong Kong. Buying one there will be more expensive than getting it here (way more, probably). As it is, I am looking like a traveling tea merchant already, with 3 cakes, two samples, three bags of Wuyi tea, and some other random bits…

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Paris tea gathering

November 14, 2006 · 2 Comments

Tea brings together lots of people. From the vendors and salespersons whom I have met throughout the years, to tea friends I meet in teahouses, to internet bloggers and other active participants on communities like the one on livejournal, I have met lots of people through tea — people whom I otherwise will never have met because our lives have almost no chance of crossing.

Today was a meeting with one more such person. I met up with a reader of my blog who lives in Paris. We went to his house and tasted some of his collections — which is way bigger than mine.

After browsing through his stuff a bit (which includes a lot of teas from Maison de Trois Thes or M3T, more on them later) we decided to start off with tasting the 2005 Yangqing Hao Yiwu to get warmed up. After all, I haven’t had good teas for a few days.

I remember the reviews for the 2005 Yangqing Hao was mixed. Some liked it, others panned it. Now I get to taste it for myself….

We brewed it, and the first two infusions….. the liquor is slightly orangy. Then I thought we should do a more systematic way of tasting, so we brewed it according to the Sanzui method — 30s, 60s, 30s, and pouring the water low, touching the rim of the gaiwan and causing no ripples.

The tea…. tasted like green tea. It smelled like green tea, and tasted like green tea. This was especially evident in the last 30s infusion. There’s some huigan, and some “throat-feel”. However, the green tea taste is unsettling. I think this is why BBB told me this cake is fickle to brew…. it’s got problems. I don’t like it, and neither does my host. He is drinking it as a “drink it now”. It’s not bad for drinking now, I think.

Next up was an oddity, something I’ve never seen before.

My host said this is from the M3T, and that they claim it’s a special order batch made for them in (IIRC) 04. This is a mini-cake.

The tea is not bad. It is starting to age a bit, and I think it probably has some wild tea mixed in. One thing was interesting, however. Using the 30/60/30 method…. the tea is BITTER. It is VERY BITTER. It was bitter through and through, and the bitterness doesn’t go away for a good while…. which is a bit odd. I’m not sure what to make of it, and rarely do I taste something like this. Quite interesting, I have to say, and it has nice notes. The bitterness throws me off a bit. Maybe eventually it will mellow out a bit to become less bitter and more sweet?

This brings me to my gripe about M3T. Although I haven’t been there, I have heard from more than one source now that the place is rather nasty. This is not to say their tea is bad, but rather, that the store has bad practices. First of all…. it doesn’t let you sample teas, so if you want to try something, you must pay the single-tasting fee at the store to drink it there. They also, apparently, are rather secretive about their teas. They don’t tell you any sort of real information, such as manufacturer, storage condition, etc. They are also rather snobbish about their tea, supposedly. I don’t know for sure, as I’ve never been there, but I can imagine.

While I don’t have a problem about this, necessarily, if they are honest about their teas, but it seems like they might be a little less than honest. For example….

This is a cake that is, I think, claimed to be 85 that my host owns. The tea, from what little research I’ve been able to do since I got back, seems rather to be a 90s production. That makes sense, because this Tongqing hao brand was revived by a Taiwanese merchant, and in the mid 80s puerh was not a known quantity in Taiwan yet, as far as I’m aware, so dating the cake to 85 would seem pretty problematic. It’s also gone through obvious wet storage, which in and of itself is not a sin (after all, they didn’t claim it to be dry storage). We didn’t end up drinking this.

Why do people still buy stuff from vendors like this, who refuse to tell you things and who seem to lie about their teas? Because, as my host says, “it’s like you’re a heroin addict — this is the only dealer you can buy from”.

On with the tastings.

We drank this next

This is, if I’m not mistaken, the 1999 original Yichang Hao Jipin cake. 1999 was when Yichang Hao first made some cakes, and became famous (and grew to be the Changtai Tea Group it is today). I didn’t take a picture of the cake itself… but it looks good. No obvious white stuff, etc, seems fine.

We tried the tea… it’s quite nice. Using the 30/60/30 method, the tea is quite tasty, with lots of camphor notes and other pleasant tastes. The tea does not have any of those unpleasant things like closing up your throat or drying you out, instead it feels like it’s a rounded tea that moisturizes your mouth. Overall, very nice, and I can see why Changtai got famous making this cake. Too bad not all their cakes are like this.

We ended with a Yiwu tuo that is also from M3T…. it brewed up a ricey tasting tea. It’s gone through some wet storage, and I’m not sure how old it actually is. I’ve seen the wrapper, but can’t remember for the life of me what or who made them. I need to do a little more research.

We ended with cheese and dinner. It was a very nice day drinking tea in Paris, and I have made one more tea friend 🙂

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Wine and coffee

November 13, 2006 · 3 Comments

Contrary to popular belief, I’m actually drinking some wine here.  Tonight I went to the local wine store to pick up a bottle (because none of my brother in law’s collection is stuff he wants us to open right now — most being 10 years old or more).  I picked a bottle out at random — some Chateau du Cartillon, Haut-Medoc, 2002, that tasted quite decent.  It was pretty smooth, but aside from that, I realize I don’t know how to describe a wine’s taste.

However, since I haven’t been consuming alcohol much these days, my tolerance is really low.  That’s one good thing about tea — you don’t need to train yourself for tolerance, although I suppose drinking lots of tea in one day, a la Maliandao, requires some practice.

During my trip here so far I have also had a bit of coffee…. of the espresso variety (since you can rarely find dripcoffee here).  Coffee’s one great problem, for a tea drinker like me, is that it is bitter to the end.  There’s no huigan, the bitterness doesn’t turn to sweetness like it does in tea.  The flavours I find largely unpleasant — heavy roasting plus the bitterness makes for a bad drink.  I do not understand those who enjoy a cup of coffee.  They obviously haven’t tried good tea 🙂

Categories: Misc · Old Xanga posts
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Lapsang souchong in a bag

November 11, 2006 · 2 Comments

I had a break yesterday between all the museum hopping and eating around, and my girlfriend and I sat down at a cafe to get a drink. I saw a lapsang souchong on the menu, so I decided to try it and see how it compares (since I pretty much never drinks this tea). It was a tea bag, but of a somewhat premium kind, I think, using a silk bag instead of just a regular paper bag.

The taste…. well… the water was thin, the tea was a tad sour in the aftertaste, overwhelmingly smokey, not very fragrant…. mine’s so much better :p

So now I know I didn’t buy the wrong thing. Yay.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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Travel day

November 7, 2006 · 19 Comments

Got in to Paris today… suffered some bad tea on the plane…. but I brought a small amount of the Yiwu maocha with me and I used a few leaves (literally a few leaves) on the plane to satisfy my desire for some decent tea.

Let’s see what bad teas I have to endure this week 🙂

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Maliandao geography

October 19, 2006 · 6 Comments

Warning: lots of pictures today and a long entry! I seperated my entry into two. The first one is just on where things are located on Maliandao, while the second concerns my shopping today.

I figured that since I talk about Maliandao a lot, and since it’s so big, I should provide you all with some sense of the place as a whole, rather than bits and pieces.

So, with that in mind — I will guide you all down the street. With a VERY crude map that I drew of Maliandao. You can all follow along.

This is the map in question — you enter Maliandao from the north (i.e. the top of the map). Remember, this is not to scale, and does not include anything that is not tea related!

As you enter, you’ll see a shabby gate. I usually ask the cabbie to drop me off at the entrance of Maliandao instead of turning in, because the left turn there can take 10 minutes before you actually get to go as very few cars make it through every light change. It’s faster to walk, and today’s weather was pretty nice for walking.

Then, all along the street as you walk down, you will see LOTS of tea stores lined up on both sides, although there are more on the right hand side than on the left. Like this:


They are all generic stores — selling everything from white tea to black tea, with teaware thrown in. Very few have quality goods, and prices tend to be high.

Then, you will hit an intersection

If you turn left, you will see the Beijing Puer Chadu (black on the map)

If you keep walking, however, you will see the Maliandao Tea City on your right (green), in front of the Carrefour

Across the street of this is, oddly enough, a Nike Factory Outlet

This is where I think most people stop. That’s what I did the first few times I came to Maliandao. It looks like there’s nothing more down the street, and Maliandao Tea City offers plenty of stuff for the regular joe. HOWEVER, there’s way more.

If you keep walking a little bit, another 50-100m, you will see this on your left

The Qingxi Tea Market (grey on the map), next to it is the Jingma Tea Market (yellow)

The Beijing Tea Corporation Market (cyan)

And the Jingdinglong Tea Market (Magenta)

I’ve been to all of them, and for the most part, there aren’t much in there that’s impressive. The Qingxi and the Jingma are both open air markets and seem to trade in lower quality stuff, and mostly tieguanyin and green tea and the like. The Beijing Tea Corporation market, aside from a few teapot stores, is mostly crap as well. Jingdinglong is about the same

Across the street from about the Beijing Tea Corporation Market is the Jingmin Tea City (blue)

Where I got the Wuyi tea.

Then, when you are across the street from Jingdinglong, it will look like there’s nothing more down the street

With lots of construction going on

And bricked up storefronts that are about to be demolished while new apartments are going up (tea addicts’ heaven!)

The teashops along the street also stop right around where Jingdinglong is. If my cabbie didn’t go through the south, it might have taken me a lot longer to figure out that there’s something more at the end of the street — Chayuan Tea City

If you look to the right of the gate, you see this neon sign that has “24” on it. Yes, Chayuan is OPEN FOR 24 HOURS!

How?

It’s a very interesting arrangment — the stores at Chayuan all have a staircase that lead to the second floor. I have always thought that the second floor was storage space, with maybe a bed or something for the storekeepers to rest.

Apparently not.

They all STAY THERE! This is their home, at least for the low level storekeepers who have to be there all day. Sometimes the owners of the stores are the ones who sleep there, sometimes just the lowly clerks. Either way, most stores have somebody who stays there full time, thus the claim to open for 24 hours. Many of them run their business until 11 or 12, and if there’s no more customer, they close up shop. If you want, however, you can stay till 2 or 3am, with tea to fuel your late night shopping trip, and they will stay up with you.

So that’s that for the geography of Maliandao. If you want to shop there next time, you’ll know where you’re going. Of course, this will probably get outdated in a year or two, since construction is nonstop on the street and new buildings keep propping up. I have a feeling that those open air markets across the street from Jingmin will eventually make way for air conditioned tea malls more like Maliandao Tea City or Jingmin, or just lots of apartment buildings.

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An LA tea affair

July 4, 2006 · Leave a Comment

A tea meeting in LA. On my way back from Palm Springs, I met up with two tea friends, Phyll and Bearsbearsbears from the LJ Puerh Community for some tea (scroll down the link for pictures). We had tea at this place called Chado in Pasadena (yes, I drove all the way from Palm Springs to Pasadena). It was a curious little place, serving a good variety of tea, although done in western style pots (in Phyll’s words, Polka-dot teapots).

We didn’t have any of their teas. Instead, Phyll brought his own set of paraphrenalia with two gaiwans and a few drinking cups, etc., as well as the all important tea tray for water disposal. We started with my Dahongpao from Tea Gallery. It was fairly mellow even though I did the 3/4 leaves thing. Then we went on to sample a Yichanghao beeng, and finally, a sample of the 97 Xizhihao from Hou De. I have to say the 97 Xizhihao is slightly disappointing. I need to brew it again, as I have a sample of it myself, but it seemed weaker than I expected.

Regardless, it was a lot of fun to meet up with some online tea friends in person. I certainly enjoyed my time (almost too much, as I cut it pretty close to make my flight). And even better, Phyll was very generous and gave us each a little bottle of something, and I got a Zinfandel. Thanks Phyll! We should do it again.

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