A Tea Addict's Journal

As you can see, I have two cakes of this tea.  One, the left, I bought very recently — about a few weeks ago.  The one on the right, on the other hand, is from about 5 years ago when the tea first came out.  I’ve had it in my collection ever since then and it’s been mostly sitting on the shelf.

I obviously cannot convey smell and sight, but it is very obvious, when you have the cakes in hand, that the one on the left is of a duller complexion, while the one on the right has much shinier leaves.  The smell is also very obvious – the left one smells of a slightly moldy storage, just like any traditionally stored tea would.  The one on the right was also traditionally stored a little before I bought it, but it does not smell of the storage at all.  Instead, it smells fragrant, like a youngish puerh would.  On the other hand, if you rely on the stains on the wrapper and neifei, you might think the right hand cake has been traditionally stored, but you would be wrong.

The reason I bought another cake of this is purely for comparison purposes.  I wanted to see how different my cake is compared to what has been stored at the merchant’s all these years.  Also, I want to compare a cake that has been through the “tuicang”, or “removing storage” process, versus one that is more or less fresh out of the storage.  By smell and sight alone, the difference is already enormous.

I had thought that the difference in colour for the brewed tea would be very different too, but I was wrong on that.  The colours are, surprisingly, more or less the same, and remained so with the second infusion (both 3 minutes long).  The tastes, however, are quite different.  The left one is duller, rounder, less bitter, smells/tastes more of the storage.  The one on the right is very much sharper, more bitter, but also retains more of the “high” fragrant notes and lingers a bit more.  The one on the left is closer to consumption, but in the process, has lost something.  The one on the right is still pretty feisty.  There’s slight evidence of traditional storage, but that’s only if you know what you’re looking for in the wet leaves and what not.  Otherwise, it’s really not that obvious.

The second brew yields something that’s more differentiable in that the home stored tea is a little more interesting still, whereas the merchant stored one yields more of the same – the traditionally stored taste with a bit of green edge in the end.

The next step in this comparison would be to let the recently purchased cake to air out for half a year or a year, and then revisit and see how different they are now.  By then, it should’ve lost the storage taste and develop something more fragrant, but it will most certainly be a fragrance that’s different from the home stored one.

The retasting continues, although in this case, it is also a cake that I haven’t tried since I had it in the store.

Yiwu Shunshixing is an outfit headed by Zhang Yi, who was the village head in Yiwu in the mid 1990s and who was instrumental in the making of the cake Zhenchunya Hao, which now sells for an obscene amount of money.  The cakes he makes correspondingly cost a lot, relatively speaking.  I bought this cake in 2006, and I’m pretty sure this is a 2004 or earlier production, although I no longer remember what year it’s from.  Anything older than 2004 is pretty expensive on the market, and quite hard to find, as they were made in small batches.  I think mostly collectors have them.  I bought the last two cakes from the shop, if I remember correctly.

I should also note that Chinese shop names are confusing, because the same characters get used repeatedly in various combinations.  This is mostly because commercial enterprises of the old style all want names that mean something along the lines of prosperity, smooth-sailing, stability, etc, and so they stick to the same words.  When two outfits sound about the same, it does not, in any way, mean they are related.  In fact, assume they’re not unless you know otherwise.  I sometimes see people confusing names of tea makers thinking it’s some typo of another name they’re familiar with already, when in fact they are completely independent productions.

The tea is stone pressed and looks pretty nice.  The neifei is “submarine”, meaning it is hidden inside the cake instead of being affixed on top of the cake.  I haven’t found it yet.

The tea itself is quite interesting – it has a typical Yiwu taste, probably from somewhere along the lines of Mahei or Luoshuidong.  The tea is still somewhat bitter — more so than I expected, really.  It has a very light tartness, but the bitterness dominates, even though it does fade fairly quickly.  The tea itself is not bad at all, but neither does it blow your mind.  It does remind me a little bit of how the Zhenchunya Hao used to taste some years back — that’s not exactly the nicest tasting tea back in the day either, and is now famous mostly for the wrong reasons.

The tea does withstand a lot of repeated infusions, but I think I have better tea than this one.  Back in the storage it goes and I doubt I’ll pull it out again for a few years.  Maybe it’ll surprise me then.

This cake is something I first obtained with BBB in Beijing back when he visited me.  I eventually ended up with about a tong of this, and he took a few cakes, I believe.  I don’t remember how much exactly we paid for this tea — I am sure it was below 100 RMB a cake, probably more like 80-90.  Taobao now quotes about 220 for a cake of this, and considering the appreciation of the RMB in the past few years, the price increase in the tea has been probably about threefold.

The wrapper, as you can see, has taken quite a bit of beating in the years since I got this cake.  You can see though that this is the same cake that I took a picture of five years ago by the arrangement of the leaves (on the neifei, for the most obvious point)

I’d say the leaves have gotten a bit darker, but by and large the change isn’t particularly obvious.

As I drink it, I think the tea is nice – nicer than when I first got it in the sense that it is now mellower and also a little cooler in the back in ways that I didn’t really notice before when I tasted it soon after my purchase.  The colour of the liquor looks a bit darker, but that could easily be a product of lighting, depth of cup, and other uncontrolled factors.

I do like it though, and I think at the price when I got it, it was a great deal.  Would I pay 220 for it now?  A few cakes, perhaps, if I happen to like it.  If I have to drink this tea everyday, I won’t mind it one bit.  I guess that’s a good endorsement.

Before I go on, I should explain my parameters for this retasting project.

1) I’m going to be using gaiwan for all these, because I used mainly a gaiwan back in the day to try these teas.

2) I’m going to be using the same Kamjove kettle that I always used back then as well.

3) The water is Hong Kong tap water.  I can’t really control for this and have no way of using the exact same water I did in Beijing or Taiwan, so this will have to do.

4) I drink till the tea is exhausted, or, in case of horrendous teas, when I can no longer take it.

Now taht that’s out of the way, let’s move on to #2 – a Yiwu cake that I bought in 2006 and whose store I revisited on this trip.  If I remembered correctly, this tea was in the vicinity of about 80-100 RMB back in the day, give or take.  I could be wrong.

My impressions back then was that it was decent, but not awesome — that the leaves were ok, but the cake was made with care.  I think I must’ve given a cake away, because I only see one now, and it’s never been opened.

You can see that the leaves are a bit stemmy.  The owners at the time I think told me that the cakes were arbor trees, but the trees were not particularly old.  I thought they should’ve used nicer material to make cakes — which they certainly have done this year (and in the past few years, it seems) but back then they were starting out on making puerh and so had less access to good materials, I believe.  2006 was also a pretty crazy year.

The initial infusion or two had a hint of the same taste as retaste project #1 — the same nasty young pu turning older taste, but it isn’t nearly as strong and obvious.  There’s something else going on here, a hint of the same fragrance that this tea had back when it was young.  I remember it was a bit astringent and rough when I tried it at the store five years ago, leading to my decision to only buy two cakes and not more.  As I kept brewing, the initial nasty taste went away, and turned into a slightly nicer, sweeter, lightly aged puerh taste.  It’s not fresh anymore, but neither is it really aged yet.  It’s in that 5 years old, awkward phase.

The tea is not very strong.  It doesn’t have qi that knocks you out, and it isn’t really going to be a long term winner, I think.  Compare this to, say, the Yisheng purple, and this is clearly an inferior tea.  Having said that, it’s not bad, and offers a pleasant tea to drink.  I think give it some more time, and it can age into something reasonably good.  At the moment though, I’m in no hurry to drink this, so back into the storage it goes.

As a way to get started — I thought I’ll try a cake that I have actually never tried before.

I bought this cake more or less randomly in Beijing early during my travels — within the first few months of me having arrived there.  It was insanely cheap – if memory serves, it was somewhere in the vicinity of 15RMB, which, at the time, was about $2.  The cake, like so many others, claims to be thousand year old wild trees from Jiangcheng area, but a lot of cakes claim that and such names are essentially meaningless.

The leaves actually don’t look terrible.

I remember when I bought this cake, the woman who sold it to me looked like a single mother trying to raise her son and running this corner shop in Maliandao eking out a living.  She had at least a dozen cakes, and I just randomly plucked one and bought it on the premise and the theory that very cheap things may age well if given time — and it’s worth the experiment given the exceptionally cheap price of the tea.  Now, as you can imagine, my expectation for this cake is low.  I don’t really expect much of anything out of it, and if it turns into anything drinkable, that’s already a good outcome.

When I brewed this tea the taste that I got is a familiar one — it tastes like some of the other cheap cakes I’ve bought off taobao before.  Not having tried it may be a bit of a mistake, in that I don’t know where it started, but I can more or less guess, having tried teas that are similar.  What it essentially comes down to is that the tea has now acquired a slightly medicinal, but not entirely pleasant taste, while having lost much of that “young puerh” flavour.  I think teas like this will not age well in the long run, and turn out to be quite thin and boring.

Just looking at the pictures though, they look quite ok.  In fact, if you smelled the cake in person right now, you’ll think it’s quite ok.  It’s only when you drink it does it become obvious that the tea is not particularly good.  Maybe I’ll try this again in ten five years and see what happens to it then.