A Tea Addict's Journal

One of the problems I find quite common these days is what I’d call “green tea puerh.” This is stuff that, basically, have been through too much/too hot a kill-green process, and the tea has consequently turned into green tea. Some of you might ask “well, isn’t puerh basically green tea?” Well, yes and no – greens, such as Longjing, have been through higher temperature firing than things like puerh. Whereas puerh will age into something because it’s still alive, teas like Longijng are cooked – fixed in form, and need to consumed as soon as possible.

It’s not entirely clear what the reason for the proliferation of green-tea puerh is, but as Scott of Yunnan Sourcing recently described, it’s as if all the farmers bought a tumbler machine to help them fry the tea leaves, and nobody learned how to operate it properly. So what happens is that they do it too hot or too long, and the tea gets cooked.

The result of such cooking is bad, very bad. Initially, it will yield a pleasant tasting tea with good floral or beany aromas, sweet, and perhaps smooth. What hits you though is if you try the tea two, three, or four years down the road – it’ll be bitter, nasty, thin, sour, all the things you don’t want in an aged tea, because it’s aged green tea. I recently tried a sample given to me by a vendor two years ago. At that time the tea tasted a bit off – but it’s called “honey sweet.” Well, honey sweet has now turned into massively bitter. It’s terrible, and it’s a shame, because the raw materials were good.

I just had a tasting with some friends of five newly made teas. Of the five, three were of the “way too green” variety. This is not a regional thing – this is a processing problem. Two of the teas are fine – one is from Xishuangbanna, while the other is from Menghai. The rest were all green teas in disguise, and no doubt, in a few years, the people paying good money for them (and good money it is – one is selling for 5000 RMB on Taobao a cake) will regret it. Or, they can keep fooling themselves and say it’s aging well.

Pictures were taken with the phone, so pardon the varying lighting.

As I was sorting through old files today, I ran into this

For a few years Hou De was the suppler of choice for a lot of people in North America and Europe as well. He sold a lot of tea from Taiwanese puerh producers. In the last few years his sales of puerh has really slowed, and he hasn’t brought over much from that side anymore. I think he continues to do some business in yixing and Taiwanese oolongs.

I can’t seem to find any of my notes for the 2005 sample. I do have my notes for the 2004 version. I was in Beijing at the time, and I don’t think I really knew what I was doing. I did, however, like the tea. The 2005, if I remember correctly, was not nearly as good as a tea. I think back then each cake was selling for $70-80 USD a cake, which at that time was really high, but in retrospect, it’s not that bad.

I’ve been trying to go through some old samples, some of which are from Hou De that I have kept in little glass jars. Some were labeled, others not. There was one, the 1999 Yiwu Zhengshan from Dayi (not Green Big Tree), that really tasted good. Now if I could only find the thing without costing an arm and a leg…

When I was in China in 2006 doing research, I was a poor grad student and generally couldn’t afford to buy a lot of tea. I sampled a lot, and tried as many things as I could. I bought some things that I thought I liked. Looking back now, the biggest regret from those days is probably me not being able to buy enough of what I like. Some of the teas I bought obviously turned out to be crap. Others, however, I wish I have more of. A more experienced tea friend in those days told me that whenever she was buying stuff, she liked to “hit hard with the hammer,” meaning buying lots of the tea. Otherwise, you run the risk of not having enough of it when you want it.

Having learned that lesson, these days when I run into a tea I like, I tend to buy a lot of it. There are a few teas like that that I have. This is why I recently ended up with 50 of these.

This is a tuo that is supposedly from 2003, 250g each. It’s something a local store sells here for a measly $10, which is an impossibly low price in this day and age. The tea is naturally stored, and when they open that little cupboard storing the tea you can smell it – as you can also when you open the wrapper. With these early 2000s teas one’s never quite sure exactly what it is, but at least the wrapper and neifei suggests its Dayi, and it does taste like Dayi. It’s still a bit sharp, but that’s mostly because it’s a tuo – tuos tend to be slower to age, and it also has that nice, robust Menghai area taste. It’s a little similar to the Menghai early spring, but minus the smoke and a little bit lighter. I like these teas that have a bit of age on them – you’ve weeded out the ones that are going to turn bad. Usually within two years you can tell if something is going to be bad or not – if it’s already getting bland, yellowish, or just bad. If it gets past that point unscathed, then it’s probably going to be all right. If it’s good ten years down, then it’s going to be just fine to age. Finding these at an attractive price – it’s a gift. I can’t let this gift go.

It’s risky to buy a lot of the same thing when one’s not sure, but if you are sure, don’t hesitate. Hit it hard. Otherwise you’ll regret it.

Or, more accurately, no new puerh, for the last few years and from the last few years.

I was going through what I do have and what I have bought, and what I have found is that I have bought very little new puerh in the last few years. This is not to say that I wasn’t buying tea – quite the opposite. I have bought quite a bit of tea in the past few years (probably too much, as usual) but much of that is stuff that pre-dates 2007.

Among the full cakes I’ve bought that are younger than 5 years, most I purchased as samples – through Taobao, for example, where sometimes the smallest sample size is a full cake. Almost all are single cakes, with two exceptions, a tong of old tree tea from a local outfit that makes decent tea, and also two tongs of Yiwu teas from various villages. That’s it.

Instead, I’ve been buying things that are older – in many cases, about ten years older. I don’t know why, but I seem to be running into these 2003 teas a lot, and I have purchased a bunch of them for what are seemingly ridiculously low prices. In fact, they are cheaper than newly made, 2013 Dayi teas, such as the purple Dayi and the Year of the Snake cake. And the thing is, these are not crazy, empty prices – there are actual buyers buying these things, as indicated by the sales record of the shops. Mind you, I didn’t buy the 2003 teas because they’re cheap; I bought them because they’re cheap, and because they’re good, and they have exhibited good aging already and will do so further as they sit there longer. There’s just no good reason to jump into unknowns that may or may not age well, at what looks almost certainly like inflated prices, when there are older, big factory stuff that are a much better bargain.

From the perspective of someone who is buying tea for drinking, there is almost no good reason to chase after these special editions of this or that. They are often touted as being a unique recipe, but the fact of the matter is, big factory tea is, more or less, big factory tea, and after the initial fervour dies down, people forget about them and start chasing the next big thing. The tea, if it turns out to be good at all, is not going to be consumed for at least a decade or so. Meanwhile, you run all the risks of storing them, and there is always the not-impossible chance of it turning out to be, basically, a dud. The key is to flip them and make a profit, but that’s not easy to do.

Whereas for something that is 10 years old or so, you already have a pretty good sense of whether or not the tea is going on the right or wrong path – if it’s aged badly, or if it has no aging potential, you’d know. 10 years is not old yet, it’s just starting to become drinkable. But at the very least it removes all the risks that comes with storing a newborn tea – the possibility that it is going to turn out to be awful, or not ageable at all. Given my needs and wants, I cannot bring myself to buy teas that are new and expensive – it just doesn’t work in terms of the price/quality ratio.

Of course, there are people who buy it for “investment” purposes, which is probably what’s really driving demand. If you’re doing it from areas outside of Asia though, the ability to turn that investment back into cash is going to be a seriously difficult proposition, and one that needs to be considered carefully before you try that path. Even friends in Hong Kong who try to sell their aged tea back often encounter prices that they deem unacceptable – because the middlemen are the ones who actually have access to market, and very few buyers are willing to pay independent collectors the market rate for a tea. So, buy your tea for yourself, and spend the rest of your money on something else – or save it, invest it, and buy the good stuff ten years from now. 

Before I talk about them, let me show you the pictures first.

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So… what about them?

I should preface this by saying that the perceived darkness of the cake on the right probably has more to do with lighting than anything else. In person, the cakes are very similar in colour. The right hand cake may be a tad bit darker, but only just.

What these two cakes are: two 2006 Douji Gushu blends. The left one is from the spring, the right one from the fall. From the packaging, you can’t tell at all – the only difference is the production date on that silly sticker that they put at the back of their cakes, which ruins all wrappers and therefore has been peeled off. Aside from the sticker, there’s no discernable physical difference between the two cakes.

Not when it comes to the packaging, anyway. You can see that the leaves look a little different – The spring leaves seem to be a little broader, and rolled perhaps slightly less. But that can just also be the inevitable variation between one cake or another – neither of them are screaming “fall” or “spring” at you by just looking at them. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s no good way to tell the difference between the two if you only examine them physically.

Nor is the difference between these two cakes obvious when you look at the brewed liquor. I used 4.5 grams for the test, with the left being spring again and the right being the fall tea. There may be the tiniest difference in colour, but again… nothing that will really tell you anything.

Even price wise, they’re not that different. On Taobao, where I bought these two, the spring tea is going for about 600 RMB, and the fall one about 500 RMB. Slightly cheaper, but not much. I bought the fall one for 300 RMB, but I think the vendor quickly realized he mispriced the cake and revised the price almost immediately after I placed my order.

Yet, difference there is. In fact, the difference is so obvious that anybody with a tongue should be able to tell them apart. The spring tea and the fall tea behave differently in the mouth. The spring tea is round, soft, full in taste, has a nice, long lasting aftertaste. The fall tea, in comparison, is more watery, sharper, more hollow in the middle, and most obviously, more bitter, in a not-very-pleasant way. The fall tea does have a more obvious aromatic component than the spring, but it is not nearly enough to compensate for the flaws. In other words, if given the choice, I’d pay 100 RMB extra and buy the spring version of this cake any day of the week. If the price difference is 300 RMB, then one must consider how much 300 RMB is worth, but when the difference is only 100 RMB out of 600, the decision is a no-brainer.

I do not think that all spring teas are superior to all fall teas, but I do think that, given comparable trees, processing, etc, spring teas are better than fall teas, nine times out of ten. The fall version of this tea is not bad per se, but is not nearly as good as the spring one. Appearances, however, do not yield any information. So next time if you are tea shopping and you are given the choice between fall and spring for two teas that should be comparable, and if you can only buy one – go for the more expensive spring one. It is probably worth it.