A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘yixing’

A busy tea day

November 16, 2007 · 5 Comments

Today was a busy day (yesterday internet died again). I first went out to get some tea for Action Jackson, who has a tea mule waiting for me to bring back stuff from Taiwan. I was on my way to get her some aged baozhongs, when, along the street, I saw a sign saying “Antique and Famous Masters Teapots, 6th Floor!” with some truly dubious looking pots in poorly taken photos next to the sign. Hmmm

What the heck, I had time, I thought, so I went upstairs to the 6th floor. It looked a little creepy. I thought about leaving. Then I saw the teapot sign…. the door was open, so I figured it’s not a bad idea to peek. Taiwan has a lot of scams going on, so I was a little worried about getting sucked into one. Inside that little office were a few shelves full of pots, and an older guy just walking around. I entered, and he greeted me and started talking pots.

This place was pretty interesting. There were, by my estimate, about 200 pots of various shapes and sizes on the shelves in that place. Every one of them had a little sign in front of it, listing the approximate age, the seal (or signature) and whatever else info there is. Most looked like credible zhuni pots. Many looked old, some very much so. They’re clean, well kept, and obviously in good hands. The only question is…. are they real?

The man claims he’s been collecting pots for about 20+ years. Makes sense. The 80s was when Taiwanese went nuts collecting yixing pots. What happened to puerh in the past few years happened to yixing pots in the 80s. Then, of course, the market went bust and prices of many of the older pots dropped dramatically. Tea probably won’t suffer as bad a fate, since it’s perishable and will continue to be consumed, whereas pots aren’t. Nevertheless… it is entirely possible that somebody’s sitting on a big stash of older pots.

The craft of many of these pots obviously look good. Some are very good, and have intricate details and fantastic calligraphy. Some have very rough finishes, especially on the inside, which I learned from another source is quite typical of older pots — it was not usual for them to make picture perfect finishes inside back in the day; it just wasn’t done. So you had a lot of what one might consider a rough finish now on the inside (outside all look good). I didn’t bother inquiring about prices, but some had prices on those labels and they ranged from what seems like a hundred or two all the way up to a few thousand. Age of pots range from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) to 1970s.

I didn’t have much time there, only spent about an hour chatting with the owner, and looking through an incredible array of pots. The guy obviously wants to talk, and isn’t particularly pushy or anything. He clearly loves his stuff… and kept showing me pot after pot. Unfortunately I ran out of time and had to go (I still had to buy the tea and then rendevous with the tea mule). I will most likely go back to this place though.

The buying of the tea was itself fairly uneventful. I did drink some 20 years old cooked puerh mixed with osmanthus. That was interesting.

After dropping off the goods with the tea mule, I had to meet with two people — and we chose Wisteria as our meeting place. I haven’t gone there since I arrived in Taiwan, and figured it’s time to go. Their original location is under renovation. This is a branch of sorts.

Wisteria is mostly a place for you to drink tea (unless you want to buy stuff there). The way it works is this: you go in, you sit down, and you look at the tea menu (there are a few snacks, but no real food). Everybody has to order something… or at least, everybody has to order one serving of tea or its equivilent. So, for the three of us, we had to get three servings of something. I leafed through the menu. For a Taiwan oolong, say, one serving would cost 350NT. So for three of us getting something of that calibre… that’s 1050 NT or thereabouts.

Then I flipped to the back where the good stuff (Tongqing, Red Label, etc) are… for three-four people, a serving of a 30s Sun Yi Shun is…. 1980 NT.

Is this a no-brainer or what?

I suggested we go with the SYS. The other rationale is that it was near dinner time… and drinking something as green as a gaoshan oolong right before dinner is potentially suicidal.

The tea is as I remember a SYS to be…. nice, medicinal, mellow, had a soft kind of qi, easy on the body…. very durable. Nice tea, even if not mind blowing. People in Hong Kong told me to try to find them in Taiwan, as they think it might still be reasonably priced there for what they are. Either way though…. good tea needs good company. It always makes a tea more enjoyable 🙂

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This is how you clean an old pot

October 30, 2007 · 11 Comments

I went back to Fuxing (Fushen) today… and as usual, the owner talked and talked, interesting info spewing out during the tea session. Among other things, I asked — how do you clean an old, dirty pot?

“Bleach”

Huh?

“Yeah, bleach — stick the pot in bleach, cover it in bleach, leave it there for a day, and then take it out”

So, apparently, what you’re supposd to do is to bleach the damn thing, inside and out. Then, you take it out, rinse it a few times with water (I suppose cold is good enough?). Then, you use spent tea leaves — throw them in, fill the pot up, and fill it up with water. Leave it overnight. The next day, your leaves and the water will smell like bleach, but the bleach from the pot will be gone. If you feel queasy, repeat this a few times.

Sounds rather insane to me.

But… maybe not? After all… we use bleach on a lot of things.

Maybe that’s what I should do?

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Chayuan

October 27, 2007 · 3 Comments

There’s a tea mall in Maliandao called “Chayuan”. “Cha”, you all know, is tea. The word “yuan” ç·£ in this case can mean “predestined affinity”, or something like that, anyway. Chayuan, when combined, can mean something like “some natural affinity through tea”, either between two people, or between a tea and a person.

I suppose I had some of that today, when I went walking around the Chungking North Rd. area again where the old teashops of Taipei are located. There aren’t that many of them nowadays, and one or two that I went by looked downright imposing…. even worse than the “Grand Old Store“. They were so imposing, I didn’t go in at all.

Then I found this place that’s across the park from Youji. It still looked like a Grand Old Store — old decor, lots of big (I can comfortably sit in one) canisters for tea, all lined up along the store and two women sitting there watching TV. No customers. I walked in, and asked if they have “laocha”, old tea. This is parlance for old Taiwanese tea, usually, when one’s in Taiwan. Surprisingly, she took out some puerh — cooked, loose puerh at that. “No no no, old Taiwanese tea”, I said. “Ok, we have some”. She popped open on of those big cans, inside of which is a big plastic bag, and there it was… kilos of what look and smell like aged baozhong. It was then the owner of the store, a man in his 60s, came out. Wanna try some?

Sure…

The tea itself wasn’t very good. It’s a bit too sour — sour enough to make it unpleasant. The conversation, however, was going well. I think the owner liked the fact that I know a few things about tea, and that I am a young person seeking old Taiwan teas. These days, he laments, young people don’t know these things anymore. They just drink the new stuff, and all those new stores that are popping up — those owners know nothing about tea. You can’t drink that green stuff too much. It’s too stimulating, and is bad for you. This is what we drank in the old days, etc etc

Not surprisingly, he then brought out some better aged baozhong… they look better, and tasted far better. It’s a little sour in the opening, but it’s only a touch sour and is entirely acceptable. There’s an aged taste to the tea, although not a lot of the fruity sweetness, but the qi is strong and obvious — I was sweating profusely, and today was hardly hot. This rarely happens with me, so I know I’ve got a winner here.

So I got some of this, and then, the guy was like “want to try some of our gaoshan oolong?”. I think he likes educating a young man in tea. I’m a happy and relatively knowledgable audience, so he was having a good time talking and brewing. He took the stuff out — looks like good gaoshan oolong. Roasted about 8 hours, he said. You can’t really tell by the way it looks when dried, or wet. The stuff is still pretty good.

You can, however, tell by the taste. There’s very little of the grassy notes in this tea, which I loathe in a green Taiwan oolong. Rather, it’s fruity, smooth, with a nice hint of sweetness and also some floral notes. The difference between something like this and some of the unroasted stuff is quite obvious. It doesn’t have that nasty, green, and metallic edge to it that I really dislike in green Taiwanese stuff (and which generally makes me feel unwell after too much drinking). This tea was good… not awesome, mind you, but good, and I don’t say that very much about green Taiwanese oolong.

The best part was the conversation though. He was telling me a variety of things, some of which I knew, others I’ve heard for the first time. It’s always interesting to hear a man who’s spent his life in the tea business (since 13, he said) tell you his take on things. As I’ve said before, these are the real tea masters who really know their stuff.

So I got some of both, left…. picked up a gift along the way, and ended up at the place that sold me that $10 pot again. I couldn’t resist going back there to see if there’s one or two more pots to pick up that are cheap enough. I ended up choosing two…. he sold them to me for even less than 350 per pot. Amazing, eh?

So here they are. The first one is not bad, I think, the second a little more iffy (the nub on the lid, as you can see, is not well done). The clay on that thing though feels awfully silky and soft. You almost feel like you can push it in and turn it back into a ball of clay. Heck, it’s not even $10. All in all, a pretty productive tea shopping day.

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And the winner is…

October 23, 2007 · 13 Comments

(drumroll)….. John of Chabei!

So, how much was it?

Well…. I’ll explain in detail how I got this pot.

So I left the Youji store on Saturday. By that time, it was already 5pm. I decided to wander around the area a little, but most places were either closed, or were not interesting (non-tea related). I walked and walked, and saw this sign across the street – an antique shop that, among other things, sells teapots. Hmmm

I walked up, and noticed that it’s actually two similar looking shops right next to one another. One was closed, the other open, and the pots were right near the door. They looked interesting enough for me to walk in and check them out.

I normally never buy pots from antique stores, mostly because they’re either fake, really expensive, or both. Granted, most of that experience has been in China, where almost everything is fake when you walk into an “antique” store. Then again, this place looked shabby… but I thought it doesn’t hurt to just look.

There were about 20 pots on the little shelf, all of similar size. I picked up a few to check out. Some were bad — obviously poor quality stuff, not obviously faked to be old (they looked rather new, in fact) but just not high quality. Others were in the old Southern Yixing style with the curly spout and the pear shaped body, but the calligraphy on the bottom of the pot was wanting. Then I picked up this thing that I bought…. hmmm, looks ok. I smelled the inside — smells a bit weird, like an old attic. It’s a bit dirty inside too. I asked how much.

“350”

350? I thought I heard wrong. Surely, it can’t be 350? But at moments like these, you can’t ask to double check, nor can you really react in any way other than just a simple nod and a little grunt. Anything more, and you might risk an immediate price raise. I put the pot down, looked at some other pots, and asked prices for those too…. turns out they’re ALL 350 NTD, which translates into almost $11 USD. That’s about 5.50 pounds…. just enough for a short ride on the Tube, I think.

I had some reservations about this pot, because it 1) smelled, 2) was a bit dirty, and 3) was almost too cheap. The clay seems to be good, the patina seems really nice (it’s a bit uneven and doesn’t look like the obviously fake patina I’ve seen on some other pots), and the thing feels sort of right. It’s a bit too big for one person, but is perfect for two. On the other hand, the lid is well fitted, the spout looks clean and good, the body was well moulded, the wall is not too thick, not too thin…. hmmm

At 350 NTD, I figured I could take a chance. Worst case scenario, this pot can serve as a decoration. I’ve bought useless souvenirs that cost more. Heck, I’ve bought a bottle of beer that costs more.

So…. now this pot’s with me. I’m trying to see if I can get rid of the attic smell. I’ve brewed some of the cheap and not very great aged oolongs in it already after rinsing it repeatedly with hot water. The first few pots of water brought out a lot of old bits of something (probably a combination of dust and dirt). Now it doesn’t smell like an attic anymore. It just smells like the aged oolong tea. I’ll perhaps try making tea with the pot in a few days and see what happens…

The winning guess was 395 NTD. I wish to make one point clear though — I do not think it is normal for a pot like this (or really, any pot) to sell at this sort of price in Taiwan. While they do obviously exist, as evidenced by my purchase, for the most part pots I’ve seen cost more than this, even small and crappy ones. Not necessarily a lot more, but definitely more. So don’t get the wrong idea 🙂

I do wonder if I should go back there and see if there’s another pot worth gambling on at that store. One or two others looked ok. I’m probably being too picky at this price. The other store also had pots, and since they weren’t lined up near the window, I couldn’t get a closer look. Maybe it’s even cheaper :p

Meanwhile, a few more pics, as requested by Toki.

Thanks for playing 🙂

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A tea shopping trip…. and a contest

October 20, 2007 · 6 Comments

Today’s entry is going to be a little long… but it’ll include a little contest, so read on 🙂

It was a nice day in Taipei today. The weather’s gotten a bit cooler, with drier air blowing in from the north. I figured I haven’t gone tea shopping for quite a while, and it’s time to explore some more.

Instead of going to the posh and nice Yongkang area, I went a section of old Taipei where it’s said there are a number of older tea stores. I only have the address of one, the Youji. I should note here that “X-ji” is a typical way of naming a store back in the day. It’s function is sort of like the English usage of the “‘s” in “xxxx’s”. So…. lots of these older stores have names like this. The Hong Kong tea store, “Ying Kee”, is actually “Yingji” in pinyin. There are other famous establishments in Hong Kong that also have such names.

Anyway, that was a digression. I got off the subway at Shuanglian station and started walking towards Chongqing N. Rd, where, I’m told, some of these older stores are. I passed by a store that sells both incense and puerh — an odd combo, seeing the incense will probably infect every cake they sell. It consisted of mostly cooked cakes, fake Dayi, and wet stored stuff of questionable provenance. I passed, and kept walking. I eventually ended up near the Youji store, and in front of it, there’s a park

But this isn’t an ordinary park, because it tells you about how Taiwanese tea is made!

It has educational routes you can walk along this park that measures something like 40m by 15m

With relief carvings set in the ground of the processes in question

It’s kinda cute.

On one side of the park is the store for Youji

It actually says “Wang Youji Chahang”, but it seems like they just refer to themselves as Youji. The building is actually quite big. The front end of the ground floor is a store — you can sort of see from the picture above that it is somewhat renovated and newish looking (more pictures on their rather weird website). The back half though is their factory — where they process the teas. They do their own roasting, packaging, and what not. Business is obviously not as good as way back in the heyday of Taiwanese tea export, in their case perhaps dating back to the pre-1945 colonial period, but nonetheless… business goes on.

I tried two teas there — an aged baozhong that is a bit sour, and a roasted tieguanyin that is quite reasonable. I liked them both, although the aged baozhong needs to be finished relatively quickly or it can get too sour. I think it’s time they re-roast that one again.

After trying the teas though, I asked for a tour of the premises, which they apparently do. So…. through the door in the middle of the building and into the back we went.

The first thing you see when you walk through the door is this

These are the templates they used for the boxes that they packed the tea in — you paint over them so the words are painted onto the boxes. These are various brand names, from the “Tea Pot Brand” to the “Mitomo Kabushikigaisha” (Three Friends Corporation, bottom right, probably dating from the colonial period). Then, there are a bunch of machines — used for sorting, drying, etc, but nothing too exciting, and none were in action today. The more interesting stuff is the roasting room.

I’ve seen these individually before, but not in a room like this and certainly not this many at once. Since I think many tea makers these days are using electric roasters (I’m guessing they’re more consistent, less room for error, and probably more economical), this is going to be an increasingly rare sight. These pits are like this

They fill them with big pieces of charcoal

Then they ground them down

Using these tools (specifically the right-most long stick)

Then you cover the pit with what he said are something like burned grain husk

When these burn down, they become the powder you see on the left of the picture. This covers the fire so that you are not directly burning the tea. I always knew you cover the charcoal with a dust like thing. I always thought that’s used charcoal that’s disintegrated into powder. This grain husk thing is new to me.

Then…. you roast the tea for hours….

You can also see other things going on, like in the picture of the tools — look on the left, and you see a guy picking leaves. He’s sorting the tea, presumably readying it for sale, or roasting, I’m not sure. I had a good conversation with the guy, who is running the family business. He said it’s really hard these days to find young people who want to do this, especially the roasting part. It’s just not pleasant work (high temperature, having to deal with charcoal, leaves, etc) and nobody is interested. Why do it when you can sell non-roasted tea for the same price, or even more? They insist on it, and even lightly roast their baozhongs, but that doesn’t always happen anymore. I can’t agree more — this is something that, I think, needs to be preserved because I personally feel a lot of these teas can’t be drunk without ill effects for one’s health without some roasting. (Sidenote: this is also why I don’t drink a lot of the really green Taiwan oolong these days, in answer to Julian’s question a week ago)

I picked up a little tea, and plan to be back here for more. I walked out, and wandered around a little more. I couldn’t find more tea shops… they are hidden somehow. Some of the stores are closed. This part of Taipei is no longer important, economically — the center of action has moved eastward, leaving this area behind. There are some older stores here, definitely, but they are only dealing with locals, and not the big exporters they once were. So it is somewhat fitting that there were some antique shops around here that look rather run down. One, though, sells some teapots…. so I went in for a look. He had about 20 of them on display, which was all he had. They were of various levels of authenticity and craftsmanship. One, though, caught my eye, and I eventually came home with it.

It pours well, the lid is well fitted, the patina is very nice and it felt good enough for me to buy it despite its funny smell inside. I tried brewing some of the cheap aged oolongs in it to get rid of the smell, and it seemed to have worked. I’m going to let it sit around some more and see if the odd smell comes back (probably because of where it was stored for a while). We’ll see what happens.

>
Which gets us to the contest part:

In trying to make this blog a little more interactive (I have a, relatively speaking, very quiet set of readers), let’s play The Price is Right. Submit your guesses to me via email regarding how much this teapot cost me. The person who comes closest (either high or low is fine, in deviation of the rules of the gameshow) will get samples of all the aged oolongs I tasted the last week, good and bad. If there’s a tie (say, one person guessed 1.1 and the other 0.9) the lower one wins.

Please submit guesses to (my username) at gmail. Please quote the prices in Taiwan Dollars (currently about 32 NTD for 1 USD). I am going to announce the answer on the 23rd when I blog. You have lots of time to ponder 🙂

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A few tidbits

October 14, 2007 · 5 Comments

I went back to the Fuxing store today. It’s hard to resist a store that’s only 10 minutes walk away.

I was looking more at pots today, and nothing too interesting happened. I did, however, ask them how they season their pots — since they do it. The answer was “nothing special”. In fact, they don’t do anything other than just clean it of the debris that’s left in the pot, and after that, they just brew tea in them. The pots clean themselves out, basically. Obviously they rub the pots dry afterwards, but that’s really about it. As I was there, she was filling out the pot with some leaves, pouring water into it, and just letting the tea sit in the pot (with the leaves) to stew…. and the leaves were still in it as I left. I guess that works. I also suppose it’s because they have so many pots, it’s impossible to do anything else with them.

While there, I drank an aged oolong from 1983. Pretty interesting stuff, although much weaker than the one I had yesterday. The tea is, as she said, slightly sour if brewed too strongly (due to poor storage), so she deliberately made it slightly weaker. It does, however, have pretty decent qi, and I felt very relaxed after drinking it. Compared to younger teas, such as young oolongs or puerh….

Anyway, that’s all for today.

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Potheads

October 2, 2007 · 6 Comments

It’s an interesting thing going to a store that focuses on its pots, rather than its tea. Yesterday there was a crowd of potheads gathered around the table with the owner sitting there, casually brewing some aged oolongs in a big well made pot that I’m sure is a few thousand dollars, at least. The discussion (to the extent that I could understand when they spoke in mandarin — most of the conversation was in Taiwanese, which is hopelessly difficult) was all about pots. Who made what, which one’s nice, if it’s a real one, how much, look at that nice clay, the good calligraphy, etc etc

Connoisseur pots are, of course, not quite the same as our everyday stuff. For one, they’re big, usually around 500cc, which is only really usable when you have a bunch of people. A 300cc one is already too small, and the stuff we usually use — around 100cc, is not for them at all (although some do like to play with a few of these as an aside). These people are often not too knowledgable about tea. One man thought the aged oolong we were drinking was a puerh at first (it should be immediately obvious). They tell me they just drink tea, but they really, really love their pots. They get custom made brocade boxes for them that are shaped just for the pot, so that it is safe. They take them out, carefully wipe them, put them back, take pictures…. you name it.

And they are expensive. The few nice ones that were being passed around yesterday were ten or twenty thousand USD, per pot. Even the “cheap” ones are a few thousand dollars. There are ones that are even nicer, but those, I gather, are rarely taken out for show. They hide them in the house.

One of the guys who were there, a man in his late 50s, I think, said he’s been collecting pots for a few decades now. I’m sure he’s got a nice collection, as you can tell everybody in the group respects him. He then tells me something which I find a bit startling — he can’t tell a fake from a real, at least for the “masters” pots which he generally collects. “Masters” (mingjia) pots are the ones that are made by living or recently dead pot masters, and are not usually antique. This stuff has a high rate of fakes, and when a guy who’s got a lot of experience playing with this stuff doesn’t know for sure if something is real or fake, there’s something wrong.

The owner of the store said that for them (the dealers) it is possible to get a sense of whether something is real or fake, but even they cannot be 100% sure and sometimes have to hunt down connections to find proof. They know, generally, because they’re the ones who sees the most out of anybody in the pot-food-chain. The makers don’t really know each other’s works. The buyer/collector only knows what they are told by the dealers. The dealers see both sides, and see each other too (as they trade stuff). So, a pot from Master X might have certain characteristics…. this they know.

But then, you have fakes. Fakes are really good these days. Fakes are also a parallel industry, apparently. Pot makers in Yixing have specialities — this guy specializes in fake antiques, that one fakes Master X’s pot really well, and this woman fakes Master Y’s to perfection. These people have good skills, obviously, and sometimes even better than the so called masters. But… they’re not famous. They can’t sell pots for thousands of dollars, not until they’re famous anyway, which is never a sure thing even if you have talent. If they fake somebody else’s though, they can.

So unless you have a dealer who you can absolutely trust and whose knowledge is impeccable… finding a real pot (antique OR masters) can be a real challenge, especially when starting out. The owner of the store says her customers don’t have to pay tuition, because all her stuff are real. While there’s always a bit of advertisment in these proclaimations, I do think the stuff I’ve seen there are better than most. Maybe I can learn a few things from these people…. from simple issues like how they season pots to clay quality to everything else. Here’s hoping, anyway. Meanwhile… I’ll just drink my tea using my inferior teapots.

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Old teapots

August 13, 2007 · 1 Comment

Today I had a lesson in older teapots. I went to the Best Tea House today, as my usual haunt in Hong Kong after doing some errands. Tiffany was there, along with some other tea drinkers who frequent there and whom I’ve met before.

What’s different today is that somebody brought with him two teapots he recently acquired, both with claims to old age. He brought it for another tea drinker to evaluate, since he’s known as an experienced collector of particularly zhuni pots. It was really an eye opener for me, as there were things that I didn’t previously know that he told me about how to check for older teapots. For example, he thinks (from all the pots he’s seen) that the clay and the way the clay behaves under fire is really important. It’s interesting that he brought with him a 30x magnifying glass — the kind jewellers use to evaluate precious stones. He uses it to examine the surface of the pot and to see how, semi-microscopically, how the teapot reacted to the heat. By looking at that, he thinks that both pots are of an older age — one being a late Qing pot, while the other one being an early Republican period one. It’s difficult to explain everything he said without having a real life example, but it goes to show that much of it has to do with simple experience and having seen a large number of such things.

The other thing interesting is that we talked about the art of making tea — or the lack of an art of making tea. After all, what we’re doing is to make the best out of every tea we’re presented with. So, for example, with inferior quality tea, you want to use lower temperatures with longer steeping time, because if you use high temps with short infusion time, the tea won’t behave well — it will become bitter, astringent, rough, etc. Whereas with a good tea, you want to maximize the good qualities by pushing it as hard as possible. Using lower temperatures and longer steeping times is simply wasting the leaves — you’re not getting the most out of them.

So to illustrate, one of the tea drinkers talked about how one time he tried a tea made with a 12 minute infusion in a small yixing pot. 12 minutes… is a long time. It was, as he said, a brew of a really low grade tieguanyin, but that doesn’t matter, because the resulting cup was excellent. The long time, the relatively low temperature, and the expert manipulation by the brewer made sure it was a good cup.

That’s something we can all aspire to — again, it’s all about experience and knowing what to do with what you’ve got in your hands.

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New teapot

April 6, 2007 · Leave a Comment

This is a new teapot I got for my girlfriend. I got it in Beijing, and we’re doing the work to season it for the first time today.

This thing is destined for cooked puerh… so now it’s simmering in a slow cooker with a lot of cooked puerh smell going around the room….

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