A Tea Addict's Journal

Well, I tried something today, but not too successfully. I wanted to take a series of picture of the changing colour of the tea I brewed, but, due to the fact that 1) I don’t have a tripod and thus the position of the camera changed, and 2) my light source was a little unsteady today, since I was relying on a sun that sometimes hid behind clouds, the pictures didn’t come out very well.

But nevertheless… this was the attempt. The tea was Iwii’s sample 1b. Hou De’s big character zhong…. rather sour in the first two or three infusions before turning a little better. This tea needs to wait.

I tried Iwii’s sample 4 today, despite my earlier statement that I would not drink young stuff in a while….

Pretty normal looking young stuff, a bit of silvery buds, otherwise mostly just green leaves. The liquor (no picture, sorry) is orangy… in line with teas that are probably 2-3 years old. The taste is interesting — when I drank it I thought “Hmmm, tastes slightly, ever so slightly, Yiwu-ish, but I think this is one of those fake Yiwus, maybe a Lincang that sometimes can appear to be like a Yiwu or something”. It’s a little sweet, but has more bitter than a Yiwu, and is a bit more minty in a slightly negative way. It has some qi, not a lot. Aftertaste is a bit on the weak side. Turns out, after I talked to Iwii, that this is a Jiangcheng tea from Wisteria in Taipei. Jiangcheng, as many of you may know, is where a lot of fake Yiwu leaves come from. This is not to say Jiangcheng tea is bad in its own right, but just that Jiangcheng teas are often not that great compared to Yiwu stuff (at least, the best of Jiangcheng don’t compare to the best of Yiwu). Since Jiangcheng teas are far cheaper, using those to fake Yiwu can yield healthy profit margins, and is a well known tactic of unscrupulous merchants.

This is a Jiangcheng tea that is advertised as Jiangcheng, so no problems there. It’s a solid tea, nothing fancy, nothing too bad, but compared to the Longpa that I had a little while ago that’s also from Wisteria — that tea beats this one by a mile. No contest.

I did manage to take a picture of the wet leaves

Good spring leaves. Smallish buds. If given the choice, I don’t think I’d buy this tea — since there are far better teas that are offered under the same roof, not because this tea is bad.

Another sample today, this time Iwii’s sample 5. The tea is distinctly younger than the other stuff I’ve tried so far from him. The leaves are green!

Looks more in line with maybe a 2-3 years old tea than a 5-7 years old stuff that I’ve been sampling from him.

The liquor looks similar

In fact, looks more like yesterday’s tea. The taste is a very potent yet subtle one, good mouthfeel and strong minty effect all around, nice throatiness, good qi, some hints of sweetness in the back, but it’s not a very obvious one at this point and is quite subtle, but there…. all in all, very good. It is better than yesterday’s tea, no offense to the Douji folks. Not leaps and bounds better, but definitely better.

If I remember correctly, Iwii said this is Wisteria’s Longpa from, I think, 2006? Zhou Yu has my respects, and this tea, anyway, is very good.

The wet leaves are uniformly plucked, good processing, mostly whole leaves… did I say this tea’s good?

Too bad his teas cost an arm and a leg. I guess a few cakes are ok, but anything more can really cost your wallet…

Another sample today, courtesy of Bill at Ancient Tea Horse Road. This is a cake from Douji, although the factory name is actually a very long and clunky “Yunnan Xishuangbanna Yiwu-Mountain Tea Industry Co. Ltd”. Spelling errors fixed.

The cake in question is best translated as “All Natural” big tree tea. “All Natural”, because the Chinese used here, “shengtai” denotes something that is in between normal farming and organic. This is the sort of nebulous area where a lot of products these days advertise themselves as “all natural” without really meaning much, so I am going to use that term here. The tea is supposedly blended, and as with any blended cakes these days, that means teas coming from all sorts of places you’ve never heard of. Funny enough, even though the production date of the tea is 2007, on the wrapper they note that the tea received a silver award at some tea show in 2006. I am guessing they are referring to the 2006 version of this tea (which means it has really not much to do with the 2007 one), but the date thing is a little wacko.

There isn’t much that is interesting with the dry leaves. Just standard better-looking raw puerh fare. The colour of the liquor isn’t too exciting either

I used a fairly generous amount of leaves, and the tea came out pleasant. It has a nice huigan, a decent set of aromas, and a good coating of the mouth with a feeling that you’re drinking a good tea.

Douji makes decent tea, at a price. I personally think they’re one of the more reliable brands out there for quality young puerh, and will heartily recommend their products to anybody who is trying to buy tea in China without wanting to get into the minefield of fake or poor tea. They are expensive compared to some other factories, but I find their quality consistent. It’s not bad for a one stop shop if you can find them cheap. Why some vendors of puerh in the West haven’t picked up on this and try to source their teas is beyond me. I think their products easily best the sometimes dubious stuff made by Xizihao. All they need is somebody to promote this stuff over here. This cake probably costs about 200-300 RMB a cake for retail in China. At today’s exchange rate (the RMB rose above 7 to 1 against the USD today, a historic high) it means about $30-40, roughly. For a vendor to make any money it will probably have to be in the same price range as the Xizihao stuff, but if one can buy it in bulk, I’m sure it’s cheaper. The business case, I think, is there. The matter is to find the tea.

Solid tea, thanks for the sample Bill. I still owe you a few samples, but am trying to figure out what to send you 🙂

Samples continue

Sample 3, the bag says. One big chunk. Nothing too notable about the chunk. I threw it all in after breaking it up a little.

Brews darker than I expected. Then again, maybe the amount of tea (a lot) was a little much…

Tea is somewhat darkish tasting, bitter, but not too bad, a bit sweet, sort of nice. It’s pleasant enough, although, now that I think about it, given the massive amounts of leaves, it is probably slightly underwhelming.

But then again, it’s hard to say. I was told that this is actually the 2003 Henry HK “serious formula” cake. For $80 it’s a little steep, but then, it’s not that bad of a tea.

Sorry, the tasting notes must seem slim, but there isn’t a whole lot to say about this tea….. or, now that I think about it, many of these youngish puerhs. They all taste very roughly similar, especially to someone like me who doesn’t do a very good job of describing flavours (which, at any rate, are rather subjective and difficult to make much sense of).

So I will just let the pictures talk, although my hands are a little shaky these days it seems under poor lighting condition. I really ought to buy a tripod

I just got another shipment of samples today, this time from Northern California, and I haven’t even gotten through the stuff that Iwii sent me yet… so back to those Iwii samples first to try to clear something out. This time, it’s sample 1b.

1b, I gathered, means that it’s probably the same thing as 1a, but from a different source, or in different storage conditions, or some such. I did not know what it was at the time. Pulling out the leaves though, I did notice that it was largely broken leaves, even though the pieces I got were big chunks

Broken leaves probably means a big factory recipe cake. It didn’t smell like much.

The tea, on the other hand, smells rather strongly of a youngish puerh. The colour, as you can see, is obviously changed. The taste of the tea is still quite strong, somewhat bitter, not too astringent, but has a bit of sweetness, especially in the later infusions. I think this is one of those teas that are better when weaker than stronger — early in the infusions they are a little rough, in the sense that the bitterness and the slightly unpleasant taste is a bit overpowering. Then it gets better, but it takes a while.

Then I asked Iwii what it is… and it turns out to be a big Zhong yellow label cake from 1998 (I think?). I believe this sample is from Hou De (correct me if I’m wrong, Iwii). Still too young to drink, I think. Not the most pleasant right now, but it will probably improve over time into something better. Give it another ten years?

I just got a big shipment of samples from Iwii yesterday, so it’s time again to do some sample cleaning.

I randomly picked out this, sample 2, to drink. Looks rather normal, smells slightly musty, and really nothing identifying about the tea when dry.

The liquor tells me it is a little aged, smells that way too, probably Taiwan stored, since it smells somewhat similar to the 2004 Gan’en Yiwu that I tried a few days ago. Oddly enough, it tastes sort of similar too. A bit mellow, but not too mellow, a bit sweet, but still retaining a bit of an edge…. Yiwu as well, perhaps? At the very least, it tastes like a softer tea that has been stored a few years in similar conditions. Not too bad, nothing too exciting either.

Turns out this is the 2000 (or is it 2001?) brick of Chen Guanghe Tang Yiwu. If I remember correctly, it is one of those things that sold out rather quickly. I don’t understand why there is sometimes a mad rush for teas that appear on some vendor’s website, while other items languish forever, looking for a buyer that never shows up. Other than perhaps the reputation of some of these people or brands, there is really nothing to go by when buying these cakes, for there isn’t even time for samples to arrive, I believe, before they are all gone. Why the rush? It’s not as if the teas will never show up again, or that they are the very last of a production. Good tea is everywhere; you just need to find them. Just because something isn’t “famous” doesn’t mean it’s not good, and also, just because something IS famous doesn’t necessarily mean it’s really good, or, in some cases, good enough to justify the price (88 Qing bing comes to mind). Besides, one can always try to find a friend or two in Taiwan or China to help locate such things, digital communications being what they are today.

Anyway, digression aside, I think this tea, for what it’s worth, is not too bad. Certainly better than some of the more recent stuff I’ve seen floating around. I don’t think Chen Guanghe Tang was producing stuff back then, so this was a cake that was made by another factory and re-labeled with his private mark. I do wonder if there’s any connection with the Gan’en factory, because the teas do taste quite similar.

I am starting to revisit some of the puerh I bought at various points to see how they taste now. Living in a rural area actually means higher humidity, as I noticed. It seems like the soil traps moisture and slowly releases them, so that there’s actually less of a humidity fluctuation from day to day. I wonder what that does to tea.

What I drank today is a cake I bought in Taiwan

From Gan’en Tea Factory, made in 2004, and supposedly Yiwu leaves.

Looks quite dark. Shipping cakes out of their tong wrapping really isn’t a good thing unless they have ample padding. Otherwise… it results in much grounded down leaves, as this one has suffered after coming here from Taiwan. I just used a lot of those scarps plus a small chunk from the cake.

The tea is also quite dark, and when drunk, there’s a definite sense of age in it. This is, I think, from the Taiwan storage it received. While it’s not quite wet, it’s definitely not dry dry. It does taste like Yiwu, with a definite tart edge to the tea. Not quite sour, mind you, but tart. I find a lot of these slightly aged puerh have a similar sort of feeling to them. The tea is ok, but not great. It leaves some throatiness, but not a lot. Compared to the Zhangjiawan, which I re-tried two days ago, this tea seems less refined. A bit heavier, but also a bit less fun to drink.

The wet leaves are actually quite solid, if you ignore the fannings that are the result of rough treatment in the slow boat. Beats those paper thin leaves I see quite often these days.