A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘young puerh’

Taobao Lottery: “1995” “Cheshunhao”

November 2, 2012 · 2 Comments

Tea, unless it’s a gift, costs money. So when we talk about tea, like it or not, we have to mention the cost of the tea. When we say a tea is “good”, do we mean it’s good, full stop? Or is it good, for this price? Or good, at any price?

I am guessing when most of us are writing or reading reviews, we read “good” as being “good at this price”. So when someone writes about how a tea is very interesting, stimulating, multi-faceted, etc, and is really good, I suspect s/he is saying that it is really good at the current prices at which the tea is obtainable. It may also be written with no reference to prices at all, and may simply mean that “this tea is good in comparison with others of this type I’ve tried”. There are probably some teas that fall into the category of “good at any price”, but those teas, I’m afraid, are few and far between.

So when I am writing about tea, even when unspoken, I tend to be writing with the idea of “good, at this price” in mind. Some are unequivocally good, others need to be qualified, and when such qualifications are necessary, I usually state them clearly so that there is no misunderstanding or inflated expectations, especially if that’s a tea that can be had easily.

Such is the case with a cake I found recently on Taobao, and then I have briefly recommended on Teachat. This supposed Cheshunhao is basically a white-paper cake, which means that it provides almost no info on the maker. Sure, it has a name, and the seller claims a date, but as far as I am concerned, I’m buying the tea on its merits alone.

When I picked it it was almost a pure gamble. The vendor has a lot of impossibly cheap cakes. This thing’s claim of 1995 is, at best, questionable. Then again, it’s offered at a price that, at worst, represents a loss of $25 USD. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I were still in the US, but since I now own a magic card that lets me buy direct, $25 isn’t the end of the world.

What I got was a cake that tasted old – old enough, anyway, for it to be more than worth the cost of admission. It has had some traditional storage, but that storage was a long time ago – at least 8 -10 years past. The cake takes like some similar cakes I’ve had from early 2000s, so while the claim of this being from 1995 may be a bit exaggerated, it’s not terribly far fetched – certainly not a three year old tea claiming to be 17. In Hong Kong, if I find a cake like this, it might cost me $80-100 USD. So, this price is very, very good, and the tea, while it has its flaws, is quite drinkable.

Is it the best tea out there? Heck no. I told TwoDog about this cake, and he bought a cake (or more?) for himself to try. He reports the tea also as being more than worthwhile, but he also found a lot of foreign objects in it. I haven’t yet – only a bit of human hair, which is almost de rigueur for older cakes that are cheap. The leaves are long and big – too long, in fact, and has a lot of woody stems. That aside, it’s not too bad.

What I would recommend this cake for are the following: 1) quaffing at the office, 2) drinking if you want something that tastes aged and does not break the bank, and 3) getting acquainted with something that has had a touch of traditional storage without an overpowering sense of storage mustiness. I think this cake fits the bill for those jobs, and I would strongly recommend it – based on the cake I tried and so long as it stays at this price.

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Aging puerh

October 22, 2012 · 21 Comments

Why do we store puerh? Why do you store puerh?

Let’s say you consume 10g of puerh a day. That’s a pretty generous amount for most people, since you’re likely to drink other kinds of teas, and 10g for personal consumption, assuming you don’t drink with others on a very regular basis, is quite a bit. So in a year, that’s 3.65kg, or just around 10 cakes of 357g each. In other words, to satisfy your annual puerh consumption of 10g a day, you need 10 cakes. If you are sitting on 100 cakes, and quite a few of us are, you are sitting on a ten year supply of tea. Clearly, that’s not tea meant for immediate drinking.

So many of us, if not almost all of us (shu drinkers who buy one or two cakes at a time and only re-up their supply don’t count) are buying puerh to age. There are of course a few possible reasons why that’s the case. The first, and is probably the most often cited one, is because we want to drink aged teas, but don’t want to pay aged tea prices. If we look at what the aged tea price involves, I think we can break it down to the following components

Aged tea price = original tea cost + time value of money + storage costs + scarcity premium + additional value of aged taste

So, naturally, a cake of tea that cost $100 in year 1 should, theoretically anyway, cost a little more in year 2, because the opportunity cost of forgoing the investment income from the $100 plus the storage cost should be worth something. In this current environment, the opportunity cost is pretty negligible, unless you happen to be a financial wizard. Storage cost, depending on your location, is always non-zero, but is also relatively negligible. So in year 2, your tea might be worth $102, and in year 3, $104, so on so forth. Of course, you may feel that a fairer measure would be inflation-indexed, so maybe you should benchmark the opportunity cost to inflation, rather than the returns on treasury notes. That might bump it up another percent or two, but still, not a whole lot.

The other things, however, are the kickers. The first, scarcity premium, is a real problem. For example, for teas that are well known but which were relatively limited in production, the price of the cake can be driven almost entirely by this premium. The Yuanyexiang that was made famous by a bunch of magazine and other writers online took off that way, and the prices are now something like 1000 RMB, for a tea that really isn’t all that great, even now, ten years later. When I bought them, it was almost 200 RMB. That was six years ago, and I thought it was pretty expensive. Has the tea improved so much that they are now worth 5x as much? No. It’s all about scarcity, and the fact that there are more people chasing the tea than there are teas available, so the prices keep going up and up, even though in recent years folks have started chasing other things and its price rise has stagnated.

We see similar movements in teas from regions that are considered good and low in production volume. Lao Banzhang old tree teas, for example, are in that category. There isn’t much of it to begin with, and so now anything that has a whiff of Lao Banzhang in it is priced astronomically, even when new. A lot of times they’re not even very good, or simply fake (using teas from neighbouring villages, etc). While the quality is there for the real stuff, a lot of it is not of that quality and is instead something inferior, but the scarcity premium is applied anyway.

Then there is the aged taste term, which I think is what we are all actually looking for when we store our own teas. We want our teas to age, and to age well, so that twenty years from now we have nice aged teas to drink. Many of us, especially those of us from or live in Asia, got started in this hobby because we tried incredible aged teas, and want to replicate that experience. The problem with this is twofold. The first is, in a lot of cases those aged taste may not be what you’ll end up getting in the end. Storing crap is not going to land you with a well aged tea, because crap only age into aged crap, not aged nectar. Picking out teas that will age well is not easy, and there are conflicting theories as to what will make a good aged tea. That’s a difficulty.

The second problem is that there are lots of risks with aging, and it has real costs disassociated with the time value of money and the storage costs. For example, you run the risk of ruin – mold, fire, flood, mice, children, among many other possible bad things that can happen to your tea. Some are recoverable, others not. A kid drooling on your cake is probably ok; the same kid decorating your cake with permanent marker, not ok. I know of at least a handful of friends who stored teas and have met unmitigated disasters during the process. It’s a real threat, not imaginary.

There are two other problems related to this. The first is one that I think will start manifesting itself in the coming years – some areas of the world just aren’t very good for storing tea. Kunming, for example, falls into this category, and I think some places, like Los Angeles, will as well. Hster’s samples from the Bay Area are not promising either. However, these things don’t show their colours until you’ve tried storing it there, for years, before they become apparent. Also, exact locations in the house, where the house is situated, and other micro-climate issues may affect the tea, positively or negatively.

The other problem is more fundamental – that the aged taste may not be to your taste. This, I think, is a real risk among many who come into this hobby not through the old tea way, but who start out drinking young teas and then only occasionally have access to one or two samples of older teas. Such drinkers might have a great appreciation of what younger puerh offers, and may very well be a very sophisticated drinker of young puerh. However, if they buy lots of tea, by definition not all of it will be consumed, and when aged, they might not be to the taste at all.

I’ve encountered folks like this in China. Some can tell me, with great precision, which village a tea is from. However, for the most part, they drink younger (10 years or less) teas on a regular basis, and have little experience with older teas, regardless of provenance or type. So they can get confused when presented with something older, aged in a more humid climate (not traditionally stored) or not of single village origin. For drinkers like this, I think the fun is in trying to figure out where things are from, in learning the different characteristics of the villages, etc, and not so much in the aging process. I’m not sure if it’s such a good idea for them to buy a lot of tea to age, because, frankly, they might not end up liking it.

To many, this is of course anathema to what puerh is about – puerh needs to be aged, and I generally agree with that. We do also need to recognize that the hobby is changing a bit, first from traditional storage to the proliferation of home natural storage, and now, to a different way of enjoying the hobby – trying to figure out origins, terroir, etc, things that are generally absent from the older teas because they were almost all big factory blends, unless you go all the way back to pre-1949 teas. I do think there’s a need to recognize and perhaps even separate the different sides of the hobby. When we say a tea is good, do we mean good now? Good later? Good to age? Under what conditions? For whom? I’m pretty sure a bitter, smoky tea stored for decades in, say, Alberta, is probably still going to be bitter, smoky twenty years hence. How many twenty years does one have in a lifetime?

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Taobao lottery: 2011 Douji “Yudou”

October 1, 2012 · 9 Comments

A recent development in my tea consumption is the fact that I got a new credit card that allows me direct access to Taobao – whereas previously one needed a mainland bank account to pay for things on Taobao, which means dodgy bank transfers and annoying paperwork, with this card I can use it directly without any hindrance and get a bill at the end of the month. This, as you can imagine, is a very bad thing.

Among the things I bought recently is a total surprise. It’s a surprise because I didn’t buy it – I was buying something else entirely, but somehow the vendor sent me the wrong thing – something he doesn’t even lists as being sold, but he obviously has. The cake in question is the Douji 2011 Yudou (jade dou).

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The dreaded sticker – which, I’m happy to report, is no longer as sticky as their 2006/2007 teas, which means less damage to the paper when you try to peel it off.

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And a complete surprise when I opened the wrapper – you can tell where a major market for Douji tea is, and it’s not China.

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The Yudou is a blend. Any of Douji’s “xdou” cakes are blends. Whereas prior to about 2008, they listed clearly what their teas were, starting around then they came out with a large series of “xdou” which were various blends of various things. I believe Yudou is one of the higher grade ones. I’ve never had any of these, mostly because ever since about 2007 Douji’s prices have slowly crept up as they got more famous, and also because there’s just such a dizzying array of them. I’d rather spend my time drinking some of their higher end products and so never actually tried these things.

The cake, as I discovered, sells for $47 at eBay through China Chadao, which is about the same price as the Taobao prices. Douji is an outfit that has been able to maintain a fairly good grip on its secondary vendors, and keeps the prices of everyone’s teas about the same – if you go to Taobao and search, you’ll find that most of their products are sold in the same tight range of prices, as there’s a clear floor under which you’re not allowed to sell. I talked to one of these guys last year when I went to Beijing, and he said if they discover you’re selling under the floor, your franchise as a Douji distributor will be immediate revoked. So you don’t risk that.

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It’s not a bad looking cake, and it smells ok too. China Chadao claims it’s a blend of four teas – Mengku, Hekai, Mengsong, and Youle, probably in that order.

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The tea tasted that way – a lot of high notes that reminds me of Mengku tea, with some Menghai undertones and maybe just a hint of Youle. It has a decent throatiness, but somehow, at the end of the day, delivers a relatively unsatisfying cup – it’s nice and all, and has a lot of bells and whistles, but after a few infusions, it’s a bit thin and boring, and doesn’t leave me wanting more. This is quite unlike a lot of what I’ve been drinking recently, which are mostly supposed gushu samples from a few different Taobao vendors. Even the bad ones are interesting, at least. This tea checks the boxes, but isn’t that interesting.

I was lucky, since I got this tea at 49 RMB – the cake I paid for was 98, and the seller gave me half refund for sending me the wrong thing. I only realized afterwards that he probably lost money on this trade. At the price I paid, this tea is quite fine. At $47 though, I’d have to think about it. That, unfortunately, is the larger story of a lot of newer teas these days – they are expensive, but often without anything to show for it. A friend recently bought a 2012 Douji “Banzhang” cake recently to try at a not-very-low price, and the tea is all Laoman’e – bitterness to infinity. That, unfortunately, is not really what you want in your tea, and certainly not if you’re paying good money for it. It’s hard committing to new productions of puerh this year. We can always hope that prices will come down again after a few years of nonstop rises, but hope, alas, does not make it happen.

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The retaste project 13: 2005 Fuxing zihao Youle

September 23, 2012 · 2 Comments

Back in 2007, I was doing research in Taipei for half a year after having spent a year in Beijing. It was there where I discovered good aged Taiwanese oolong, and also drank a fair amount of puerh of various kinds while there. One of the stores I loved visiting was Fushen, with a very interesting laobanniang who runs the shop. It mostly sells teapots, but has some tea on the side. It was there where I picked up a few tongs of this tea.

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This was a tea made by some Taiwanese guy who went to Yunnan to press his own cakes, and who used the name Fuxing and then now switched the company’s name to something else entirely. I bought two of his cakes – the only two available – one of which is this Youle, and another is a Zhangjiawan. I remember the Youle being stronger, but the Zhangjiawan seems a little more interesting. I haven’t tried either cake since late 2007/early 2008. The last time I wrote about this tea was in September 2007, right after I bought it.

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This is the exact same cake that was pictured in my 2007 post. I think it got a little darker, but that’s it. Not that one would expect earth-shattering changes in five years.

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The tea’s liquor is way darker than I remember – I remember it coming out a golden yellow type colour, for something about two years old at the time. It’s completely lost the youthful aggressiveness that it had – the tea was, if I remember correctly, pretty strong and a bit bitter, even though it had lots of overtones of fruitiness. The notes are also darker and deeper now – sweet, more mellow, a bit more savoury. The wet leaves (still brewing) are also darker and no longer lime green like in the old pictures. I like this tea as it is, and certainly do not regret buying it then at what I remember to be a pretty reasonable price. I’d imagine my cakes in the tongs are a bit different – perhaps aging a little slower, but might also retain more flavour. I look forward to drinking more of this tea in the future.

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2011 Fall Tea Urchin Guafeng zhai

August 22, 2012 · 1 Comment

I’m a slow sampler. Since I normally only drink a tea a day, and since I am no longer in the mode of drinking new teas I don’t know every day, it sometimes takes quite a while for me to get to samples that I intend to taste. A few months ago, Eugene of Tea Urchin did a sample trade with me – I sent him a bunch of teas, he sent me a bigger bunch of teas. I’ve tried some of them so far, but I still have a few that has been left unopened. One that I tried recently is the Guafeng zhai 2011 Fall tea that he made.

There’s been a general trend in the past six years of increasing specificity Guafeng zhai is one of those villages in Yiwu that popped out of nowhere and, over the course of a few years, gotten really famous. Nowadays, you even have sub-regions of Guafeng zhai that are showing up as single-estate regions – Chawangshu, Chaping, and Baishahe. Other places, like Wan’gong, Tongqinghe, etc, are all appearing these days as places of good quality. So, increasingly, we’re talking not only about regions of tea (Yiwu) but down to specific villages, often of relatively small sized areas. I guess this is the beginning of appellation claims.

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Tea Urchin gives generous sized samples. It smells like Yiwu when you open the bag. It also smells like Yiwu when the leaves hit the pre-warmed pot, and it, again, smells like Yiwu when I pour out my first cup after the wash.

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Guafeng zhai has a very strong umami taste to the tea produced there, and it tastes a bit more “wild” than some of the cleaner, brighter villages of Yiwu, such as Gaoshan zhai or Mahei. I find teas from Guafeng zhai to be a bit darker generally, and with lower register notes than areas that used to be considered Yiwu proper (Guafeng zhai is basically on the outskirts, right next to Laos). This tea is no different – deep, a bit dark, with notes that remind you of Yiwu, but also has that spicy/umami note that sets it apart a bit. The throatiness comes and goes in this one, but it has good qi that persists. It also suffered a good many infusions. It reminds me of the nights I spent drinking new Yiwus in my Beijing apartment back in 2006.

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This is good tea. This is, I think, tea that will do well in the future, fall or spring. Just because something’s from the spring doesn’t mean it’ll be good, and likewise, just because something’s from the fall doesn’t mean it’ll be bad. Yes, side by side, from the same trees, the spring might be indeed better, but so many other factors, including weather, processing, etc, go into the production of tea that relying solely on season is probably not the best approach.

There’s been a few reviews of this tea by others already, and aside from Hobbes, the reviews have been positive. There is, however, the matter of price – and I have heard complaints, almost universal now, about prices of new tea in general and, if the comments on my last notes on Tea Urchin were an indicator, specific to this vendor. What, exactly, is a fair price for newer teas?

Many of us remember the days when new teas can be had for $20 a cake or less. In fact, I remember in 05 or so, a cake of Haiwan’s Laotongzhi was under $10 USD when new. It was almost free, considering you’re getting 357g of tea from it. Those days are long gone, especially when you are talking about higher end boutique made teas claiming old tree status. I was at the recent Hong Kong Tea Expo, and prices were uniformly high – a decent new cake would cost no less than about $40, and that’s sometimes very average quality stuff. Teas claiming to be from old trees (not all of which tasted like it, mind you) are often sold for $80-100 USD, or more. I bought a cake that was priced at $80 for a new, 2012 spring Yiwu. I also went to a shop a few weeks ago in Shenzhen that sold new 2012 teas at almost $200 a cake. Granted, these are spring prices, which are a bit higher, but high prices are here to stay and they’re not going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to get worse. The supply of old tree tea is relatively limited, and there’s no good way to scale production – you can’t just make more. So, as the market for such teas expand, the prices will keep going up until it reaches that equilibrium where prices no longer go up because it’s already so high that it knocked everyone else out of the market. That day is coming, and not too far either.

Does that mean you should throw all your money in now to buy these things before they get even more expensive? I’m not advocating that, since I can’t read the future and don’t want to give investment advice. One thing I have learned though from 10+ years of tea drinking is that when I see a tea I like, I now tend to buy a lot of it, as long as I can afford the purchase. Some things are going to be there forever, and cannot keep, so there’s no point in buying lots – fresh Longjing, for example. In other cases, however, the teas that you like will go away, and you’ll never see it again, ever, anywhere. I recently tasted a nice sample of a tea from 2006 that I’d love to get my hands on, but I haven’t even seen it on sale after searching high and low, while the 2007 version is over $250 USD. Chasing teas is a dangerous and expensive business.

So, back to the point, I like this tea, but I’m not sure I want to buy lots of it. In the meantime, I’ve just ordered a sample of every 2012 tea that Tea Urchin has made. Given the large sample sizes, I guess I have some time to make up my mind.

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Perils of shopping online

August 14, 2012 · 13 Comments

One of the perils of shopping online for tea is that you don’t get to try the stuff you’re about to buy. A little while ago I recommended the 2005 Chenguanghe Tang Menghai Yesheng to Hster as something worth buying. The only place online that sells it is Hou De Asian Art. I recently procured a number of this cake from Taiwan directly, and I’ve always like this cake. Since I am fairly sure Guang from Hou De sourced his teas from the same place I bought mine, I was rather confident in recommending the cake.

Well, Guang, rather unhelpfully perhaps, doesn’t offer samples. So when I sent Hster a bunch of teas recently for her to try, I included a sample of this 2005 tea for her as well. I didn’t realize that another tea from, Ira, also sent Hster a sample of this, but his sample is from a cake he recently purchased via Hou De. The result is this rather interesting post. Seems like while the two cakes are from the same batch, they are not quite the same after all.

So now, time for some pictures to compare the two. First up are Ira’s pictures of his cake, published with permission.

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Other than the first picture, I didn’t white-balance them because it’s difficult to do without any good reference point, and the picture looks like it might have two light sources, one natural and the other one not. Ignoring the colour of the leaves, there are a few things you can notice from these pictures. The first is that the surface of the leaves look dull, and not very shiny. The leaves also seem to have copious amounts of white dots on them, a sign of mold, perhaps, unless it’s an artifact of the camera. More importantly, the dots seem to be present on the leaves that are inside the cake, not just on the surface. All this is slightly difficult to draw conclusions from, but it seems as though this cake has seen a lot of moisture and perhaps some mold grew on it. Whether or not it is controlled in a traditional storage environment, or bad storage that caused mold, is harder to say.

So I took some pictures of the cake I used for Hster’s sample as a comparison

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What you can see here are a few things: the leaves are shinier, without the slightly furry look of the other cake. The sheen on the leaves is indicative of a drier storage, although I think the cake should best be termed as having undergone natural storage – just left around in a relatively humid environment generally, such as that of Taiwan. More importantly, you also see no obvious indication of mold growing on the cake – there are a few stems that are slightly white, but generally speaking, they are absent.

I obviously cannot comment on what happened – who knows. There are possibilities – perhaps the cake at Hou De was poorly stored to begin with, due to excessive moisture or some such, during a part of its storage somewhere. Sometimes it is quite possible even for cakes within the same tong to develop somewhat differently, especially the cake at the top or the bottom of a tong – they can get moist easily and grow mold while the other cakes are fine. I don’t know if Hou De’s entire batch was bad, or if it’s just one cake out of many. I also have no way of knowing if this problem developed before or after Hou De acquired their cake.

It is quite possible that even Guang himself doesn’t realize there is a problem (if he considers it a problem at all, that is). After all, a customer might feel weird if they receive a cake that was opened prior to purchase, but that is in fact sometimes what must be done to ensure that you’re getting something decent. Just yesterday I bought two cakes from Sunsing, and before taking the goods the employee there actually encouraged me to look at the cakes to make sure they’re ok. For teas that have been aged some years, it is usually a good idea to do so, because you never know what’s happened under the wrapper. It doesn’t help that this 2005 Yesheng has a particularly thick and inflexible wrapper – the thickness of the wrapper may also trap any moisture and cause higher likelihood of mold than otherwise. So you can’t even see through the wrapper to see what’s going on underneath.

Obviously, sampling wouldn’t have helped either, because the samples come from one cake, and the full cake you receive is another one. They could very well be the same, and very often they would be more or less the same. There is still, as always, the risk of something wrong having happened. I suppose this is not too different from corked wine that you end up with once in a while at perfectly well meaning stores. The important thing there, I guess, is to make sure they have an ironclad return policy. Although, in the case of tea, a bit of moisture often doesn’t kill, and if aired out sufficiently and properly, the tea can actually taste quite good.

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Poof! It’s gone

July 20, 2012 · 9 Comments

Back in the heady days of 2005/2006, when everyone was getting interested in puerh, there was a plethora of new workshops, tea merchants, and factories that sprung up around this new craze. Everything from tiny workshops of a few people, to individuals going up the mountains, to big investments in big factories were going on at the time. There are actually two levels of manufacturing puerh tea. There’s the farmer who does all the pre-processing, and then there’s the presser, who collects the tea and then gets them pressed into whatever shape s/he fancies. When we talk about producer of a tea, we’re really often talking about the presser, whose function is basically that of a middleman – they collect maocha and then press them into cakes. Technically speaking, there isn’t a lot of skills involved, and the amount of involvement a presser makes in his or her cakes is entirely up to them. They can spend months living in Yunnan and hike four hours every day to go to the forest where the trees are and watch the farmers harvest, making sure everything is right. Or they can just stop by the side of the road, try two or three maocha from a farmer, and pick one they like and just press those without having actually any idea what’s in the bags. As you can imagine, the former type is rare, the latter is common.

So when we look at the market structure of puerh, there are actually two kinds of markets involved. The first is the market between the farmers and the pressers. The farmers don’t generally directly see the end consumers – they sell, primarily anyway, to the pressers. The presser then resells what s/he buys to the collector/consumer (via intermediaries, or not). Back then there was really only one kind of farmer – the smallholding farmer who has a plot of land that he controls, and who sold to whoever they wanted, usually for the best price they think they can get. The pressers, however, are much more varied, and ranged anything from Menghai factory to the individual tourist going in for a few tongs.

It is pretty obvious where the value added for the farmer was – s/he tended to the trees, harvested the leaves, and processed them to the point where it became maocha, ready to be pressed into cakes. Some did the pressing themselves with what they had, other sold their tea by the bag in loose form. The pressers’ value added, on the other hand, is much more varied. As I mentioned already, some really do provide a valuable service, while others are nothing more than people who got the goods from A to B, a typical middleman, with the added step of hiring someone to do the pressing and the transportation. There’s no real skill necessary for pressing – it could, but it need not involve any. The most skillful are the ones who can discern what’s good and bad tea, who took careful steps to ensure that their tea was exactly what they thought they were getting, who protected the process to make sure nothing went wrong, and who, in some cases, blended the tea and created new things from a collection of maocha. That’s what factories like Menghai make their money too – they have the know how to blend teas, and also the ability and skill to amass large quantities of tea so to achieve their blends’ unique tastes. Production of cooked puerh, of course, involved another set of additional skill and input, but we’ll ignore that topic for now.

One of the most interesting thing about this market dynamic is that the chief producers of the tea, namely the farmers, don’t really get a lot of direct feedback from the consumers, at least not in 2005/2006. All they saw were the prices that the pressers were offering, as well as, sometimes, specifications from the pressers. The farmers varied in their skill in processing, the tools they had at their disposal, and also their experience in handling tea. Some have been at it for decades. Others were relative newbies who, until the mid 2000s, were living off their family’s rubber trees. All of a sudden, the influx of demand for young, raw puerh outstripped supply greatly, so prices went through the roof, increasing more than tenfold within the space of two years. As farmers rushed to meet this demand, as you can imagine, a lot of things were done that were not necessarily good.

One of the things I remember the most about trying new cakes back in the day was that out of every three or four cakes, at least one was intensely smokey. They can smell and taste like someone just lit a fire under the cake and roasted it for hours. The smoke can be so intense that even after many infusions, you can still taste the smoke and not the tea. This was a really regular occurrence back then, and there were always issues surrounding whether or not these teas can indeed age into something decent. The belief is that over time, smoke will dissipate and what is underneath will shine through. The question, of course, is how, and how long.

I am reminded of this because I tried a sample today sent to me from Hster, of the 2004 Tailian Youle. She drew a cigarette on the label she provided me, because, well, the thing does taste like cigarette. You can’t tell by looking at the leaves though

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The tea looks great on the surface, but when you brew it and sniff the cup, there’s an unmistakable smell of smoke. The taste confirms that. Ten cups later, smoke is still in your mouth.

It really struck me today when I drank this, because I haven’t had a smokey tea for a while, certainly not a new tea. It seems like the transmission mechanism that I talked about a little earlier does work, in a certain way – consumers don’t want smokey tea, and so over time, smokey teas get phased out. Obviously, farmers now also have better skills and more practice, and are oftentimes equipped with machines that they did not possess back in 2006, so that they can do things to the tea that wasn’t possible before. Chief among the reasons for smoke, at least from what I have seen, are either bad pan frying process so the smoke from the stove was getting in the way, or they used fire to dry leaves because the weather was too wet, causing it to be smokey. Whatever the reason, the technical issues that led to smokey teas are no longer present, or smokey teas are selected out because the market no longer wants any of them, so that these days, of the teas that make it to market, very few, if any, are smokey.

Smokey tastes do indeed fade, but the problem is they can take a long time. Hster’s cake has been in Bay Area storage since 06, I believe, and 6 years hasn’t really done much for the smokiness of the tea. I’d suspect another 20 years won’t do much either, maybe only dissipating it slowly. Is it worth the effort? Probably not. People have said that many of the older, classic recipes from the 80s or earlier were often somewhat smokey, but I think people no longer tolerate that. I can tell the tea underneath this Youle cake is pretty ok, but when there are better, non-smokey alternatives out there, it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for this tea. In more humid or wetter climes, the smoke might go away faster, but maybe not.

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The retaste project 12: 2003 Fengqing zodiac minibings

June 19, 2012 · 1 Comment

Sometimes it’s fun to try things that you have written about before, and it’s even more fun when other people have tried the same thing. I was recently reminded by hster‘s post that I have two tongs of this 2003 Fengqing zodiac minibings sitting at home. The last time I tried this stuff was 2007. It’s time to give them another spin.

The storage of this tea was mostly in the United States, actually, and only came back with me to Hong Kong last year. Before that it’s been through Boston, Ohio, and Maine – all cold places, one worse than the next. Visually, the tea hasn’t changed all that much – it’s gotten maybe a little darker in tone when you inspect the dry leaves.

 

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I threw a small chunk in the pot and brewed it up. It did get darker, and it did lose some of the fresh/young notes that I may have found back in 2006. The tea isn’t great by any stretch of the imagination – it’s ok. A boring, bland okness that isn’t broken up by any surprises, up or down.

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I should note that cup depth, more than anything else, provides the greatest variable in liquor colour as you see on blogs. Unless and until we all use the same cups, liquor colour comparisons are pretty much meaningless.

I also poked around Taobao and found that this thing is sold by at least one vendor for a whooping $50 a cake (100g). I ought to go sell these, as I think I paid a total of $50 for the two tongs, totaling 2.4kg of tea. You’ll notice the age of the cake also got inflated to 1997. This just goes to show that if you try your luck on Taobao, you better know what you’re doing. In the meantime, back in the storage this thing goes, and I don’t think I’ll see it again for quite some time.

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Purchases

June 14, 2012 · 6 Comments

Taiwan Beer is so good, I had to buy a whole case and had it shipped express to Hong Kong

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Just kidding

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Drinking with your body

May 23, 2012 · 17 Comments

My friend L from Beijing has come and gone for a quick visit to Hong Kong. I took him around town to take a look at various older shops here, and drank some interesting things along the way, such as an aged baimudan that’s quite good and some 40+ years old tea seeds that have an interesting fragrance to them. If you look hard enough, you can find interesting things in all kinds of places.

L also brought some things himself, including a cake that he sells, made by the same people who were behind 12 Gentlemen cakes that I tried in 2006. They have now moved to a different philosophy of tea making, and L recently went on a trip in Yunnan with them, visiting their own maocha production facility (they only buy fresh leaves, not maocha) and talking to the producers. The idea behind the cakes is that the cakes are produced with the intent to minimize the aroma and fragrance. As L quotes the maker of the tea, “beginners drink tea with their nose, experienced drinkers drink with their mouth, and the connoisseurs drink with their body”. They’re taking it to the next level, so to speak, by trying to make teas that don’t possess fragrance or aroma, and in so doing taking out the distractions. More on their tea another day.

This is by no means a unique insight -  I have both heard similar things from others, and have also witnessed this myself. It is indeed true that beginners tend to drink with their noses – fragrance, above all, is what they focus on. This explains why jasmine is a perennial favourite of so many casual tea drinkers, and why a light oolong or green teas tend to be “gateway” teas that get people in the door – they’re fragrant and they’re nice to drink. Then, as you progress through the collection of more experience and the like, you start learning about the nuances, and the mouth comes into play – the body of the tea, whether it stimulates the various part of the mouth, the tongue, whether it is smooth, etc. Then finally, you get to the point where you are drinking the tea with your body, where the taste, the fragrance, etc are all less important than how it makes you feel. You can call it qi, even though I dislike the opacity of the word because it means little to those who hasn’t experienced it, or you can call it energy, or whatever you fancy. Yes, every tea has qi of some sort, although I don’t think many will actually be strong enough for you to experience it. In fact, any time a vendor talks too much about qi it is probably a sign that s/he is up to no good, and the tea is really not very good at all, which is why I prefer not to use the word at all – it needlessly adds to the learning curve and there’s a high potential for the Emperor’s New Clothes here.

Yet it is true that beyond a certain point, what distinguishes between a good tea and a great tea is the energy the tea has. Fragrances can be manufactured – they’re mostly the product of the post-plucking processes and can be easily manipulated by the tea processor who’s skillful enough to do the deed. It is much harder to fake energy. The best teas will give you a sensation of a current running through your body, but not in a way that makes you nervous, jittery, or uncomfortable. The 1997 brick I tried recently that made everyone at the table feel jittery was not a good tea in that sense – it was not something I’d consider drinking any time soon, if ever. On the other hand, genuine, good old tree teas tend to provide that energetic sensation in a way that is pleasing and comfortable. It’s hard to describe it, but once you’ve tried it you won’t forget it.

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So with that in mind L brew me some tea. We tried a number of things over the course of two days – one of the produced cakes, some maocha they collected (with him seeing in person the entire process from plucking onward) and also a number of other things. The cake that they produced was, indeed, very bland in the “no fragrance, no taste” sort of way, but it does interestingly enough have some decent energy. He insists on drinking the tea quietly, without comments, which of course helps you focus on the tea in question, but once again, might cause an Emperor’s New Clothes problem.

I think in general this is a good idea – experimentation, even failed ones, are probably good for tea in general. Someone who has a new idea and who wants to produce a tea based on it, and actually having the ability and the skills to do so, should be encouraged to do his best. I still remain a bit skeptical of the end product, but I certainly applaud the general direction in which they’re going. I would also much prefer to drink their bland tea than a newly produced tea using boring old plantation leaves. Now, if someone can figure out how to satisfy all three parts, then you’ve got the perfect tea.

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