A Tea Addict's Journal

No tea today

January 30, 2007 · 3 Comments

Yes, you heard that right.

So to feed my caffeine addiction, I decided to take some pictures of a cake that I got with the 3 tongs of “Banzhang Zhengshan” (which, by the way, I think only has a small % of actuall Banzhang leaves in there, but the price makes that irrelevant). Not that it will cure any headache that might be incoming, but it provides for blogging material, if nothing else.

This is a cake that I basically got as a freebie along with the 3 tongs.

“Jiangcheng Thousand Year Wild Growth Old Tree Cake”. Right….. Jiangcheng tea, as some of you know, is often used to make fake Yiwu cakes. Supposedly, the leaves look similar, although I’m not sure about the taste profile. When I opened up the wrapper it smelled fruity. I couldn’t pinpoint which fruit, but fruity is not a bad description of what I was smelling. Trying it for taste and seeing what a real Jiangcheng tea tastes like is the primary objective of getting this cake. It will give me some basis for comparing against other teas. After all, there’s very little reason to fake a Jiangcheng.

Looks good enough, and if someone else told me this is a Yiwu cake selling for $20 USD, I might believe you. Except that it’s not… it’s only $4.

Categories: Old Xanga posts · Teas
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3 responses so far ↓

  • runrabbit6 // January 30, 2007 at 10:44 am | Reply

    Yep. I had to take Thursday and Friday off last week after the effects of the two of you being in town at the same time.  Raging headache (the first really I’ve had since drinking tea) and I think part of that pain was sinus cold.  Usually, when I travel, I don’t take tea with me.  I always forget to bring my own, the stuff where I am sucks, whatever…but I also don’t caffine cheat with chocolate or other substitutes.  I only remember that I haven’t been drinking tea when I come back home and make the first pot. 

  • MarshalN // January 31, 2007 at 11:45 am | Reply

    I normally will start feeling something funny after about 24 hours of tealessness. In about 36 hours it’ll hit me. When I went for two days without tea the result was a headache at 4am that woke me up. Not pretty.

    Supposedly you can quite caffeine painlessly by reducing the dosage day by day, even quickly. As long as you get some caffeine it will tide over the headache, and once the dosage is pretty low, then it’s a minimal effect.

    But of course, it’s tea to which we’re addicted right? Right?

  • Adrian Loder // January 11, 2021 at 5:33 pm | Reply

    Apologize for posting on such an old item, but I’ve only discovered your blog recently. I’m enjoying reading through the archives.

    I have to say that as someone who’s only in the last few years started drinking “good” tea, and puerh specifically, it blows my mind to read something like this entry as neither the fake nor the real would go for $4 or $20 or anything even close these days. Maybe $40 for the fake and hundreds for the real thing.

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