A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘young puerh’

How much tea do you really need?

January 7, 2011 · 3 Comments

Once in a while, I get into a discussion with tea friends about how much tea you really need.  Assuming I drink 10g a day, every day, for 50 years (let’s say I get to live 50 years from now).  That’s about 182,500g of tea, or in puerh terms, about 73 tongs of tea.  That is if I don’t drink anything else — no oolongs, no greens, blacks, whatever.  That’s also assuming I don’t drink with friends, drink more than 10g a day, or give tea away.  So let’s say those two things balance out (oolongs/greens/blacks vs gifting) which means that I need a total of about 6 jian of tea, if we go by 12 tong jians.

6 jians is not a lot.  In fact, I know a lot of people who own more than that right now.  That leaves a question — what can they do about all that tea?  I don’t see an outlet for such things, other than the tea market — and the production volume of puerh in the past 10 years far exceeded anything we’ve seen in the 80s and 90s, which means that in years to come, there’s going to be a steady stream of aged puerh, of varying quality (storage and otherwise) that will show up.  If I have reconfirmed anything this trip to HK, it is that storage is of utmost importance, and that not every place is going to be good for storing tea — dry places like Kunming just aren’t going to cut it.  I had a number of “pure dry storage” teas recently, and most are, unfortunately, insipid and uninteresting.  The best teas I’ve had are the slightly traditionally stored ones.  You just need that moisture, and if your storage doesn’t have it, fix the problem now before it gets serious.

Or, you can just buy from the secondary market five years from now.  I can’t see a puerh shortage coming any time soon, as long as you’re not in the market for pre-1995 teas.

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Satisfaction

December 30, 2010 · 2 Comments

I’m in Hong Kong right now, and one of the first things I do when I get here is to check on my tea supply.  Last time I was here things were just fine — nothing was moldy, as I checked every single tong of my tea.  This time there’s no need to be so thorough, since it’s only been half a year and it’s been the dry season, so instead of actually physically examining all the cakes, I decided to try something I haven’t had for a few years instead, specially, tea that I bought in this instance.

More than four years later, it looks like this now

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The tong was never very pretty to begin with, and after a little moving around in four years’ time, it’s gotten less pretty since.  The tea, however, looked just fine.  I was trying this for the first time since I bought the tea — which is quite a while ago.  The leaves are actually on the brown side now, but still reveals greenness when I removed the outer layer.  I brewed it up using my makeshift setup

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And…. the result was most satisfying.  It was a good tea — good qi, nice body, thickness, etc.  Everything I want in a young puerh, for a pretty low price.  These guys DO know how to pick puerh for aging.  I remember it was pretty harsh when I tried it in their store, but this thing is not a mistake.  I should’ve gotten five tongs instead of one.  Maybe I’ll go back for more.

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Young puerh

December 9, 2010 · 2 Comments

I have been drinking a lot of younger puerh recently, from both Yunnan Sourcing and various shops on Taobao.  I think production of younger puerh has generally changed — teas these days seem more delicate and flowery, in a way that I personally do not find appealing or good.  A lot of them seem to be green-tea ish, which to me means it won’t age well.  I could be wrong, but I’ve tried cakes that were like this when younger, and a few years down, they have aged terribly.

I think some of this goes back to what puerh is actually for.  Is it really meant for aging?  Is it meant for drinking now, and is only aged by accident?  How long is the optimal age?  I think opinions differ considerably on these points.  Even though most people seem to agree that puerh is meant for aging, there are, I think, producers who are making things that are really more suited for drinking now than anything else.  A lot of the cakes I’ve tried in the 5-7 years old category are not very good at all.  Only some are, and I think if anything, the common denominator is that it was decent leaves, and also, decent conditions — not too dry and not too airy

I’ve been rethinking the whole “buy it now and store it for later” idea.  I’m not sure if it’s really wise to do so, or if the end result is really going to be that desirable.  For certain people who live in certain places (Hong Kong, for example) that can definitely be true.  Nevada?  I’m not so sure.

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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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Yunnan Sourcing Gedeng 2010

September 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought a bunch of samples from YSLLC recently, with the intention of trying out some of the lesser known cakes, some of which are of the YSLLC label.  The first I tried among these is the Gedeng, which is one of the six famous tea mountains in Yunnan, but one which has almost no tea trees left because they were decimated over the years (mostly growing rubber trees now).  Gedeng, like some other mountains (such as Youle) have generally small leaf tress.  This is in contrast with Yiwu and Manzhuan, for example, which have large leaf trees.  The teas behave somewhat differently because of that.

Initial impressions of this tea is that it’s quite decent.  It’s got some strength, but not overly so, and lasts a while.  It seems to be processed decently, and the price is not terrible.  However, I find myself not used to drinking fresh puerh anymore.  I much prefer the taste of something a little older, preferably stored in somewhere desirable.

Tomorrow maybe I’ll give the Yiwu a spin.

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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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Puerh poker

August 30, 2010 · 1 Comment

While I was in Beijing my friend L gave me two decks of cards.  One has these — leaves of various places — printed on them, while the other has pictures of various villages that produce puerh.  I find it interesting how the ace of spades is from Longpa, while my favourite, Yiwu Gaoshan, is only a mere ace of clubs.  The other two are Yibang (ace of hearts) and Yiwu Guafeng zhai (ace of diamonds).

There’s the rest of the deck too, all with leaves from different places.  You can see that someone spent a lot of time collecting all this, documenting them, and then putting them to good use.  There’s a scale next to most of the cards too — you can see faint lines here in the scan where they say “5” “10” etc.  I think that’s cm, to give you a sense of how small (or large) the leaves are.

It’s not necessarily of any real use per se, but it’s definitely interesting.

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Korean and New Zealand teas

August 14, 2010 · 5 Comments

I just went to the Hong Kong International Tea Fair yesterday.  It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a tea expo, and this one was a bit different from when I went to the one in Shanghai during the height of the puerh boom.  Partly perhaps also because it’s Hong Kong, the kind of tea merchants who were here were much more international, and also quite diverse in their offerings.  Most of the sellers were, of course, from China, but very often from provinces that are lesser known, such as Guizhou or Hunan.  The selection of green tea was very diverse, whereas the more popular things, such as various types of oolong from Fujian, were fewer.  As for puerh, there were a smattering of makers there from the big factories, such as Menghai or Haiwan, but even Xiaguan was not there.  There were some producers from Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and other places as well.

I think much of this was a product of the fact that many of the better known companies or types of tea simply don’t need the exposure at a tea fair, so they’re better off not coming and paying the expo fees instead of actually showing up.  For the lesser known, this is a great way to get some exposure that they otherwise won’t have.

I saw a few things that I know relatively little about.  The first is a company called Zealong, which makes oolong in New Zealand in the Taiwanese style.  The taste of the tea is very clean and crisp, and reminds me of decent Taiwanese high mountain oolong.  The company, according to their reps, was started by someone from Taiwan, and now has a few different teas.  It was interesting, although not terribly cheap.  I can imagine some place like New Zealand growing some interesting teas though.

I also met two Korean tea makers, and bought some of their products.  Korean tea tends to be green tea of various types, but one of them also made a white tea that had higher levels of oxidation, much akin to something like a baimudan with some age.  I bought some for personal consumption.  More on those later.

Another stop in Beijing before heading home on this trip.  Seeing some old tea friends from up north should be pretty interesting.  Stay tuned.

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How fast do you drink your teas?

June 24, 2010 · 7 Comments

I just read a blog post about rating wines based on how fast they’re drunk.  It’s actually a pretty good idea, and I noticed the same about my tea drinking habits.  I bought, for example, a few cakes last month from Taobao.  I judged them completely by the cover and nothing else — just the listing, description, with some pictures, and that’s it.  It’s a risky way of buying tea, but when they are not expensive, it’s not bad.  I’ve already talked about the Dingxing, which is not bad at all.  This and this turned out to be quite nice.  This, however, was horrid.  It’s one of those cakes that is very bland, probably poorly processed and stored in a dry environment (Kunming) and just all around uninspiring.  You can’t tell from the looks, however, as all looked somewhat promising.

Now, a few weeks later, the first two cakes are almost all gone — I sent parts of them off, but I drank a fair bit too.  The last cake is almost entirely intact other than the two times I tried it, and honestly, I probably won’t try it anytime soon again.  It’ll stay around, probably for a few years, and I’ll hope and pray that by then, it might have done something, but generally speaking if a tea is weak, it’s going to stay weak.  “How fast do you drink it” seems to be a good metric for measuring a drink’s quality.  I do the same for my oolongs as well — the better stuff get drunk faster, and the worse ones stay around forever.

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