A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries from February 2008

2005 Green City Peak Arbor Puerh

February 9, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Ok, so with my last shipment from puerhshop, I also got a sample of this puerh. It has this clunky name because the brand, “Qingcheng Feng” is literally “blue-green city/town peak”. Rest assured, Green City Peak is not a peak in Yunnan…. as far as I can tell anyway.

So they say this is the best Mengku cake they’ve gotten this year. I got a 5g sample, which is, truth be told, a little less than what I normally use for one session, but it’ll have to do. One cannot complain about free samples.

The leaves look normal. Actually, they are brighter coloured than the picture on the site suggests. At first I was a little nervous about this being one of those “wild wild” puerh out there which can be fairly disgusting, because of the dark coloured picture. Thankfully, that’s not the case. The tea brews normally.

The tea…. is interesting. It is bitter, but not really. It is strong… but not really. It is flavourful and active… but not really. The only thing I’m sure about is that it hits the throat and leaves a mark there. The reason I said “not really” three times is because it is one of those teas that seem strong, but yet the strength seems a little elusive. I definitely feel that there’s a sort of coating around the mouth when I drink it, but then, it is almost ethereal, sort of there, but then you question yourself as to whether it is really there or not.

Instinct tells me this is a good tea, but I need to try it again to be more sure — preferably with a little more leaves so I am not feeling like I have to juggle amounts of water in order to make the water/leaf ratio be closer to my “normal” amount. As is usually the case these days, whether it is worth its price or not is really up to the individual, although I can say that it impresses me more than some more expensive teas I’ve tasted recently.

The leaves are big

Which might indicate that some, at least, are not spring leaves, but summer, or whatever, pickings. There are, however, no wooden sticks in there or extremely long and old stems, which is good. The leaves are well done.

Interesting tea, at the very least.

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Happy year of the rat!

February 7, 2008 · 2 Comments

Happy Chinese New Year to all of you — and I hope the coming year will bring you many, many cups of great tea! 🙂

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Reading old texts II

February 7, 2008 · 15 Comments

I was flipping through the collection of old tea texts again, and something caught my eye. This is stuff that I saw a few times today with some Ming dynasty (1368-1644) texts. It has to do with water.

Remember those lessons you’ve learned, on or offline, that you should use water that is at “shrimp eye” or “crab eye” meaning that the water hasn’t reached a full rolling boil yet because once you do, the water is “old” and isn’t good for tea anymore?

Well, it seems like people who wrote about tea in the Ming dynasty didn’t agree. In fact, they say that the only water that should be used for tea is stuff that reached a full boil. You shouldn’t brew tea using water that is anything less than a full boil, they say, because in those cases the water would still retain a “water qi” that interferes with the tea. If you boil it out with a rolling boil, then the water becomes fully cooked, and is suitable for making tea.

So who’s right? After all, Lu Yu, of all people, said water should not reach a full boil!

Well, one of the authors explained that there’s a reason for this discrepency. It has to do with, you guessed it, the way tea was brewed. Whereas in the Tang and the Song, tea was ground down and powdered, etc, and sometimes with added incense or other things to enhance the flavour of the tea, water that has reached a full boil will mess with the powdered tea’s texture and taste. That’s why it’s no good. Whereas with the switch to full-leaf tea in the early Ming dynasty, the whole bit about water not reaching a full boil no longer applies. If you leave it underboiled, what you end up is a mixture of water and tea that isn’t quite harmonious. Full boil, with a fire that is “open” (in this case meaning a live fire with charcoal, not a bunch of flameless charcoal that is just very hot) is the way to go. Anything less is not good.

Interesting food for thought. It is important to keep in mind that most of these later tea texts are generally ignored by current day “tea masters” who tend to go back to the few famous ones, such as Lu Yu’s Tea Classic, the Daguan Chalun that I talked about last time, and a few others that tend to be more often quoted. However, the fact that there was this change in these rather short and relatively unknown treatises on tea means that there are other theories out there, and given that three or four different texts I read today all say the same thing about water needing a full boil means that this idea probably had wide currency among Ming tea drinkers — even if they were copying each other, the only reason they’ll commit it to paper is if they thought it was right.

Another thing to keep in mind — the teas they were drinking were green teas, maybe slightly roasted, but largely speaking, what we now call green teas. Full boil water anyway. Yup.

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How fast do you drink your tea?

February 5, 2008 · 4 Comments

I brewed up the tieguanyin that Toki sent me a while back again. It’s a nice tea, a bit roasty, but soft and mellow and not really bitter at all. These days, I’m using mostly my black teapot, but today I pulled out my old (and small) tieguanyin pot. It’s a smaller pot that really only pours out one cup, and it works fairly well for teas like this

It’s a joy to see pots season over time and gaining a sheen that it didn’t use to have.

But something came to mind today while I was making this tea — how fast do you drink your tea?

The reason I ask is because there’s always this constant concern with brewing parameters, specifically how long each infusion lasts. I think readers of my blog probably know that I generally don’t pay a lot of attention to exactly how long I use for each infusion, and instead I just brew as they come. Yet….. how long you take to drink your tea matters. Why? Because while you’re drinking your cup, the tea is still brewing, sort of. The leaves are wet, and they are stewing in that little bit of water that you have left in the pot/gaiwan. Today, for example, in between a few infusions I took a little longer because I was a little occupied with other things… and the infusions after those are inevitably a little sour with a little more tartness.

So what does this mean? If you’re really serious about keeping time, then you ought to keep time you spend drinking your cups (i.e. time between infusions) as well. Otherwise… my parameters of 5, 5, 5, 10, 10, 15 might work for me because I am only brewing one small cup and drinking them, but not for you because you take longer to drink your two cups… something like that.

Which is again why I think it’s better if you just experiment with various times and figure out what works for your style and what doesn’t

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Manzhuan laoshu 2004

February 5, 2008 · 3 Comments

I spent a year and half in China and Taiwan, and during that time, it seems like many online shops have opened that sell all sorts of tea, most of which were not even in existence when I left for Beijing. Being there, I obviously had no reason to buy anything from any of these shops. Now that I’m back, I thought I can give things a try.

The first one I decided to try my luck at is Puerh Shop, which, as I just noticed, has a sales going on right now (I wonder if I can get a retroactive discount?).

They shipped the tea very quickly, and within a few days it landed here, since they’re only one state over in Indiana… the tea I bought to try is a 2004 “Manzhuan Old Tree”. I bought the last one, so don’t bother looking for it 🙂 The reason I thought I should give that one a try is because I’ve found myself liking Manzhuan tea given past experiences. There’s also a bit of calculation at play here — Manzhuan, at least a few years ago, is something that you don’t really advertise. Unlike Yiwu, which is everywhere (and most of those are not really Yiwu), the likelihood of somebody falsely advertising a Manzhuan cake was much, much lower. So, given that this is a few years old, I thought my chances were pretty good at getting the real deal.

The cake looks unremarkable

And it smells and feel a little dry. I wonder what kind of storage these folks have. I used mostly the shavings from the cake that are already loose in the wrapper, plus some leaves that I pried off.

The tea brewed a darkish liquor

It’s quite thick and strong. There’s a hint of sourness in there somewhere, but it’s in the back end, reminding me of a bit of the Manzhuan fruity taste that I have experienced a few times. There’s definitely strength in this tea — I can feel it strongly in my mouth and body. The taste is not the most enjoyable, but it reminds me of the feeling I used to have (and don’t have as often these days) of puerh that feels very raw and strong when young. These days, a lot of the younger cakes taste more like a mixture of green tea and oolong, without that punch that I used to associate with young puerh. This tea had that, but not in a nasty Xiaguan way. I actually liked it… and rate it above yesterday’s tea, even though yesterday’s was surely more refined. I’m not even sure if yesterday’s tea was any better than this in terms of raw quality — there was something too refined about yesterday’s tea. I didn’t feel that coating of my mouth that I do today.

Of course, this might have to do with the fact that I used more shavings and thus stuff came out faster as I brewed, but it easily lasted 10+ infusions without significant drop off. If anything, it lasted longer than the tea yesterday…. probably not a good sign for the Xizihao.

As you can expect, the leaves look broken

Not a very pretty tea at all, but one that I think can keep well over some years. I’ll probably pull it out again in a year or two and check on its progress.

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Return to Innocence

February 3, 2008 · 4 Comments

Today’s tea is the last of the three samples of Xizihao that I acquired, the Puzhen Yuancha. Puzhen is actually a reference to the Chinese idiom, “Fan Pu Gui Zhen”, which means “return to innocence”. According to Hou De, this tea and the Daxueshan “Diangu Yuancha” are the two limited productions for this season, with, of course, a price tag to match. I haven’t had a chance to try the Daxueshan, and since the thing sold out in a flash when it came on the market, I didn’t see a reason why I should. I do, however, admire those with the courage to buy teas they’ve never tried before.

Looking at the poster from Xizihao, it seems like there were only 999 cakes of this tea produced, and so it’s even more limited in quantity than the Daxueshan cake. Hmmm

The dry leaves don’t look too remarkably different from the other teas, at least given the bits and pieces that a sample necessarily entail

The liquor also don’t look drastically different

How does it taste? Compared with the Xishangmeishao, it has better strength, more pleasant, less of the weirdness, thicker, and just overall a better tea. It does, however, remind me of some of the Mengku stuff from a few years ago, tasting like they did when they were very young. Back then, of course, those cakes were quite cheap.

The wet leaves also don’t look quite so mangled

If the Xishangmeishao was a 5 out of 10, then this is probably a 7.5 or maybe an 8, depending on my mood. It’s quite a bit of an improvement over the Xishangmeishao (the nu’ercha is quite different and I won’t really compare them). These days, it seems like one needs to pay big bucks for what is really just ok quality. I’d definitely pay the few dollars extra if I have to get one of these, but I really don’t know if either of them are that interesting. As I think I’ve said quite a few times already, I haven’t really found anything from 2007 terribly exciting, and this is, unfortunately, no exception. A return to innocence this definitely is not — if it were, it would be back to the prices that such cakes charged 2 or 3 years ago. Alas…

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The value of a cheap tea

February 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

From time to time I drink something that is truly pedestrian, or even sub-pedestrian. It sets you straight.

Today is one such day, with a loose, wet stored raw puerh in my pot. It’s still got some bitterness in it, despite its storage condition. The thing was quite cheap when I bought it in Hong Kong, and to me, the incremental benefit of drinking good 10 years old raw from a cake, which will cost many times the price of this tea, does not make the compressed stuff worthwhile. It’s the market forces at play here — whereas compressed tea have a clear provenance and history to go by, loose stuff that have no packaging of any kind simply cannot command high prices in a place like Hong Kong, where this sort of tea is everywhere.

Yet, when you take such things to, say, parts of China where they don’t have much old tea to begin with, all of a sudden the value of it shoots up. Instead of just “random wet stored loose tea” it suddenly becomes “preciously stored aged sheng puerh” with a price tag to match.

Then you have the polar opposite…. I remember bringing some old puerh to a shop in Beijing, only to have it mistaken as cooked puerh, because, well, they’ve never had anything older than maybe 10 years that’s not stored in the bone-dry weather of Beijing. They thought my tea was fake.

Which once again goes to prove that one should only “drink what you like, like what you drink”, and not worry too much about price, hype, or any of those things.

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Republic of Tea

February 2, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I was out and about today, and on my way home, got a teabag just so I have something warm to drink while driving. The place where I went uses, like many others, Republic of Tea teabags. It brought on a bit of nostalgia. I still remember the first time I encountered RoT way back when I first got to college. My school’s bookstore sold RoT teas, and at that point, I was still a not-very-discerning drinker who mostly drank longjing and some occasional jasmine pearls. The first teapot I bought for myself is actually one of those English style RoT pots.

Over the years though, it seems like they have somewhat faded from view. They’re definitely still there, but many other companies have sprung up in the meantime, and RoT seems to not have really kept pace. Most of their new offerings, as far as I can tell anyway, are heavily flavoured stuff, or tisanes, or the extremely overpriced Chinese tea series.

I suppose it’s a good thing that so many other offerings are now available. Yet, in some ways, it’s nice when a decent cup of Earl Grey was enough to make me happy.

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Reading old texts

February 1, 2008 · 5 Comments

I was reading, among other things, an old tea text by the Song Emperor Huizong called the Daguan Chalun (The Treatise on Tea in the Daguan Reign). That dates the text to 1107-1110. In it, he talks about making tea, processing tea, and brewing tea. Tea, of course, was not what we now know as tea. Back then, they were steamed, then pressed (to get juices out of the leaves…), roasted, and then eventually grounded and mixed with water to drink. Yet, it’s all very strange sounding. I was reading the text, and was having trouble figuring out exactly how the whole brewing process took place. It seems like you do have multiple infusions of the same tea, or, at least, add water multiple times during the process of brewing tea. I’m not exactly sure if before each additional water injection you drink the stuff you just made, or if you just keep making it until all the water’s added and drink in one go. That must be obvious to him, but not to me. Maybe I didn’t read the text carefully enough, I don’t know.

That would, I think, mean that it’s very different from how, say, Japanese matcha is made. So much is often made of how Japanese matcha is a direct descendent of Song period tea drinking, but the fact of the matter is that there’s almost nothing similar between Japanese matcha and Song tea, at least as described in the Daguan Chalun. While the tools used do sound more or less similar, with the use of a chawan, chasen, etc, the whole processing of the teas (they are steamed, pressed, and then roasted) and the way of making them (multiple infusions of water) don’t sound anything like what the Japanese would recognize as their matcha or tea ceremony. The steaming is ok, but roasted?

So perhaps next time somebody tell you that matcha is just like the way they made tea in the Song dynasty, you can tell them they’re wrong, because an Emperor of the Song said so (he was a very accomplished artist, poet, Daoist, painter…. but he did lose his country).

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