A Tea Addict's Journal

I’ve been drinking a lot of drain cleaners these days, or in other words, puerh that are between 3-7 years old.  These are often the nastiest tasting things.  Whereas very young puerh (1 year or younger) are often quite pleasant to drink, and older things (7+) are usually fairly mellow, things that are in between can be disgusting.  They also begin to show their true colours.  Whereas younger puerh are often quite fragrant and light, once you’ve given the tea a few years, it can develop all sorts of flavours, from citrus to mint, and every conceivable taste in between.

The good thing about drinking something of this age is that you begin to have an idea whether it is any good or not.  If it’s already losing strength, as some do, then chances are it’s not going to get any better.  There are also ones that are intensely bitter without any sort of huigan, or just taste foul, strange, or, worst, hongcha-esque.

The linkage between a good tasting tea when young and a good aging tea when older is one of the biggest problem for those trying to evaluate and buy tea to press, and of course, the customer who eventually purchases them for storage.  Too often a good young cake turns out to be horrible after a few years, with no redeeming features and simply fades away.  In the puerh boom (and the post-boom world of today) there were many tea makers who popped out of nowhere to make tea.  Many of them used to be makers of other types of tea, be it green (guys from Shanghai area), oolong (a lot of Taiwanese tea guys), and hongcha (Fengqing factory, among others).  Then you have people who really didn’t know much about tea at all, or who never really made any tea, who jumped into the fray.  I have met a car dealer who became a puerh maker/merchant, and was selling some premium maocha pressed Lao Banzhang for a pretty price.  They will all tell you that they have had many years of experience in drinking tea (very often untrue, or including the time they had tea when they were three) as if it means anything.

Drinking, as we should all remember, has nothing to do with making.  A guy who can tell you if a shirt is well made or not probably has no idea how to start making one from scratch, unless he also happens to be a tailor by trade.  What makes tea any different?  A person who’s been growing tea for twenty years will, no doubt, have a pretty good sense of how it should be made.  A person who’s been drinking tea for twenty years will have some idea of how it ought to taste, and in the case of puerh, perhaps also how it ought to be stored.  Even to this date, very, very few people have actually taken a cake of puerh from its inception, through storage, to its mature state, and can attest to knowing how all these stages ought to be.  Many of the people whom I’ve met in Beijing and elsewhere who went and pressed their own cakes had, at best, mixed results.  Some of them had cakes that were obviously flawed.  Others had cakes that seemed all right, but after a few years of aging, turned out to be quite questionable.

It’s a pretty depressing thought, but I am increasingly of the belief that only those who live and work in Yunnan full time, year round, or those who have had a long working relationship with some of the farmers or factory owners there, will have access to good tea.  When my friend L visited Yiwu and spent a few weeks there with some contacts he had from CNNP, he said that all of the old tree farmers in one village were binded to long term contracts with this one person from Guangdong.  Everything else that goes on the open market as tea from this one place were all either “imported” from somewhere else, or were simply from inferior, plantation teas masquerading as better things.  If you’re a visitor who they don’t know, the farmer will show you a few bags of different teas.  You will try them all.  You will find that one of them is better than the others, with a suitably higher price.  All is well until, of course, you realize that there’s a vastly superior tea out there that you never got to try because the farmers won’t sell it to you.  The price will be right for an old tree tea (otherwise you’d think it’s too good to be true) but the tea won’t be.

Which is why I’m subjecting myself to the drain cleaners and trying to pick a winner among these, instead of going with the lottery of brand new teas.

Through the randomness of the web I found this teashop called Zhizheng Tea. They seem to specialize in high end puerh, and claim to be a Sino-British venture of some sort.  There are some cakes listed, but with awfully little description — many of them are simply described as “pressed with high end maocha” or some variation thereof.  The pictures of the cakes look nice, although with a touch of sharpness that only really comes with too much photoshop or editing, and are not likely to reflect how they actually look in person.  I was curious what this shop is all about, and seeing that the cakes are priced far out of my reach, I opted for the relatively cheap samples.

The first thing about the samples is that they are indeed very cheap when compared with how much the cakes cost.  In fact, per gram, the samples are almost half the price of the cakes.  Of course, buying lots of samples in order to get 400g of tea is a rather perverse way of buying puerh, and may very well affect the aging process, but I suppose if one’s goal were simply to buy tea to drink now, that’s not entirely a bad way.

The samples come in these bamboo cases (you see one on their home page).  I just happened to have ordered three samples, which means I got one of these three pack pouch as pictured.  They look nice.  They’re not terribly practical, however, as tea bits do end up in the crevices of the bamboo weaving and when you try to open it after they’ve taken a long flight… you can imagine what happens.  I had a lot of tea bits on the table.

Packaging is not that important, at the end of the day.  The tea is.  I tried each of the samples once already, but I thought I should only write something about it on the second try.

Today’s tea is the Hong Yue, red moon.  There is no information about where this tea is from other than that it is maocha from 2005 that’s pressed this year.  I am guessing somewhere in Menghai county, possibly from one of those rather strong-tasting mountains.  If I have to make a guess I would say Bulang area, without making any claims about its precise location.

Now, the dry leaves don’t look all that remarkable, but then, they rarely do.  Looks, after all, are rather deceiving.

Taste, however, is not, and this tea, I can safely say, is strong.  There’s a bitter edge to the tea, only very slightly tempered by time and age.  It has lost the greenness of the young puerh, and is moving into that 5-7 years old taste profile.  The tea has body, strength, and character, and is the kind of stuff that I like to find in a younger puerh.  It also has energy, which is very nice.  The bitterness can easily turn off some of the less hardcore of puerh drinkers.  This time I made the tea a little weaker.  The taste is still strong, although not quite as punchy, but that may be a good thing.

I find it interesting how they suggest using a relatively large gaiwan, rather than a Yixing pot.  While I used to subscribe to the idea that using a gaiwan gives of more of the “true” taste of the tea, without the compounding effect of the Yixing pot, I no longer think that’s relevant.  After all, if I drink all my young puerh with the same pot anyway, then the problem of teaware affecting the tea is no longer an issue.  If a certain tea doesn’t work with my wares, well, too bad, I will just drink something else.  Besides, I think great tea will be great no matter what ware you use.

Needless to say, this isn’t much of an issue here.

The leaves are somewhat broken here, but that’s partly because of the sample effect.  They are nice and sturdy, without being tough, and has that feeling of stickiness on them.  Overall, I find this tea to be quite enjoyable.  Whether or not it is worth the price of admission is really dependent on the individual.  Personally, I find it hard to sink that amount into a cake of new tea that I don’t plan on drinking for a while, but as with all consumption, only the willing buyer pays.

Haven’t done this for a while

I have a box of samples sitting around. I have, until very recently, forgotten about them. They serve no real purpose sitting there, and aging samples really isn’t an ideal way to go. So instead of letting them just rot in the box, I figured it’s time to dig some out and drink them.

There are still a few pieces in the bag, and juding from the bag I used, I haven’t touched this thing since Beijing, which means the last time I tried this was probably sometime in early 2007, if even. That’s two years ago. How did it change, if any?

The tea came out rather meek, a little tart, and somewhat boring. I must say right now, it’s not a very interesting thing to drink. It’s not really supposed to, as teas that are a few years old tend to be a little awkward, and this is certainly in that zone. However, I do wonder if it didn’t taste a little weak. I remember I was not a particularly big fan of the 2005 anyway. It seems like almost four years of aging hasn’t done a thing to change it.

The leaves are still rather green. It’s not as if the tea is bad. It’s just not that exciting at this point in time, especially considering the fact that it was not very cheap.

I was digging through my box of old samples and that sort of thing yesterday, and came across a bag of loose leaves that I have been holding on to for a while. It’s broken leaves from another cake that I had from China, and which I thought was quite interesting and bought a few. I figured I can try out the remaining sample and see how it might have aged since then.

The curious thing is that this cake is only about 4-5 years old

And it looks very dark. It’s certainly a lot darker than what I remembered it to be, and also less bitter. The tea is now relatively sweet, and still has a very strong taste. Good find, and I wish I had bought more. Too bad finding things like these are hard if you are only looking for one specific cake from a small producer.

Well, a new year is upon us. May everybody have good tea for this year!

I spent the last day of the year of the rat drinking a sample of the Yangqing hao 2006 Yiwu that I have left from Taiwan

Using new (cup) and old (gaiwan) teaware that I almost never use, mostly because the gaiwan is quite fragile and the cup, well, is new.

The tea though, isn’t that exciting. It’s ok, but not great. I personally think stuff like Yangqing hao might actually be better fresh than they are now. Of course, maybe it’s just going through the nasty period — the first few years after harvest. Those of you who own this tea — how much of this do you have left, and what do you think of it?

BBB already posted this up, this link came byway of Action Jackson

http://shanghaiist.com/2008/11/27/video_used_tea_repackaged_and_resol.php

The video is purportedly of some workers in Guangzhou who were drying out large bricks of “puerh” that were pressed from used tealeaves.

These are cakes that say “Puerh Tea Brick — 1958” on them. They look like this. I’m not saying this store’s tea is the same — at least the number is diffierent.

There’s, of course, no way to know for sure if it’s just some tea sitting on some concrete out in the middle of nowhere. There are a few things that are clear —

1) the place is rather dirty
2) tea is sitting outside
3) the guy narrating is speaking proper Cantonese, saying pretty much that this is some guys drying out pressed tea and then reselling it since they are right at a tea market. This is all fake, etc.

Anyway, there’s been a comment on BBB’s blog that this is nothing more than a shaky video with unverified claims. True. But, in the land of melamine filled milk and fake salt (yes, using industrial salt to fake table salt…. with dire consequences, of course), anything is possible.

The solution? Buy from reputable sellers, and try your very best to educate yourself. Teas that are faked often have very telling signs — a flavour that is rather off, or strange, or too intense. The leaves will look funny. It’s difficult, of course, if you don’t have all that much experience or have a lot of opportunities to see different kinds of things, which is also why it is important to diversify your suppliers — don’t just buy tea from only one or two stores, and see the variety of stuff out there. The people I’ve met in China who were most screwed by their tea suppliers are usually the ones who stick with one or two because they thought they could trust them.

Which is also why I don’t drink things like jasmine, which are often flavoured with some kind of artificial flavours — they might smell great, but you have no idea what’s going into your mouth.

Unfortuantely, that’s the world we live in now.