A Tea Addict's Journal

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“Home stored puerh” from Best Tea House

November 19, 2006 · 3 Comments

I wanted something mellow today for a change. Yesterday was a little much, as usual. I can only take so much tea before feeling a little uneasy.

So I opted for the cheap puerh from the Best Tea House. It’s called “Home Stored Puerh”. This is one of the grades in the traditional Hong Kong gradations. Home Stored is the lowest grade, usually, with “carefully stored” slightly better, and “unknown year” usually the best. In the old days, nobody cared much about vintage and make and all that, so puerh were just called by these names and they were all formula teas — mixed together for taste and price from different kinds of teas. The tradition lives on.

Home stored puerh at the BTH used to be about half the price of what it is now, and I have to say the quality actually went down while prices went up 🙁

It’s mostly some cooked puerh with some wet stored puerh, and a little bit of dry stored mixed in for flavour. Yeah, doesn’t sound that great does it? The brew that comes out of this tea is mostly dark brown. The taste is mellow, earthy, approaching that of cooked puerh, but I think a little more complex, and lasts a bit longer in terms of infusions.

You can see evidence of mxing in the leaves

With raw puerh — some looking like dry stored raw puerh of decent age

And then the black, charcoal-like stuff that is more commonly seen in cooked puerh

Not terrible for regular drinking. I did, after all, start drinking puerh with this kind of thing.

Incidentally, I am thinking of running an experiment with the Longyuan Hao cake I got that I don’t think i will drink very much. What I am going to do is going to go through a mini wet storage with it… using it as a sample. I will put it under the stream of vapour that comes out of the humidifier everyday, and then let it dry overnight, and then repeat this pretty much everyday, and see how it ages. It should, I’d imagine, age a lot faster with this kind of process. Will it produce something drinkable (and recognizably puerh) by the end of my time here in Beijing? Or will I just end up with a cake of mouldy tea that I don’t want to touch?

I guess we’ll find out.

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Chayuan walkthrough

November 18, 2006 · 5 Comments

Maliandao it was today. When I was walking to Chayuan, I saw this

Which means “demolition”. Apparently, the Jingdinglong Tea Market is scheduled for demolition, no doubt to make way for a newer, shinier, better tea market. It is sort of odd to see all the stores being open one week, and when I came back you see storefronts like this

Nice eh?

I thought it will be good to do a thorough walkthrough of Chayuan, instead of just hitting random stores like I used to, so I walked around methodically. Basically, Chayuan is a grid, and most of the hallways look like this

Which makes it rather difficult to find any particular store in there, unless you already know where it is.

I stopped at one store today, selling a cake called “Gold Yiwu”. It was an interesting store — very large premises with very few cakes on offer. This was the only thing that remotely looked interested. I sat down, tasted it… and thought it tastes like something like the 0622 with a bit of age, as it is aged 3 years. Nothing interesting, although the taste was proper puerh….. except it sells for $100 USD. I balked, and just left. They must’ve been joking.

I then walked around….. until I hit the Pu Chazhaung. This is a store that sells mostly Changtai stuff. I’ve been here a few times, but never sat down to taste anything, mostly because they were always busy with something…. shipping stuff, or organizing stuff, or whatever. This time, nobody was in the store, so in I went.

I sat down, and ended up tasting four cakes and buying two. These two were the best in terms of quality vs price. While there was one that was better (and more aged), it was also more expensive and I wasn’t quite willing to dole out that much. I might go back to get something like that that’s a bit more aged, but I also can probably find something in that quality bracket minus a few years age and for a lot less money.

Interestingly, everybody today thought I’m a tea merchant of some sort, and kept telling me which ones they have a whole jian of and how many jians they have left. I don’t know why I seem to be giving that impression today… but the quoted prices at Pu Chazhuang were very reasonable to start off with, so I didn’t need to bargain down very hard (nor was there a whole lot of room to do so, I think…)

What I got were:

An 2005 Yichang Hao Mangzhi, and…

Two 2005 Yichang Hao Mengsa.

Neither are the greatest things ever, but they weren’t very pricey. The Mengsa is obviously a little more punchy than the Mangzhi, which is a little more fruity and mellow. They were decent tasting puerh that seemed to have been made with proper craftsmanship, and should have aging potential, I think.

I think the girl was disappointed I only got three cakes, and seemed a little disinterested at the end. I wonder if she was just hungry for food, or if I was annoying her for my small purchase. Whatever. I might go back again and see if there are other things worth considering. Then again, I really should slow down my purchases. I have too many cakes.

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Expensive dahongpao

November 17, 2006 · 3 Comments

I thought I was going to go to Maliandao, but jetlag and errands held me up. Since I basically didn’t sleep the night before, and since Paris time is 7 hours behind Beijing time… I woke up pretty late, too late to go after I ran my errands. Oh well, tomorrow.

I opened up another bag of tea today, one of the Dahongpaos I got with the Lapsang Souchong. This is the expensive one (I just grabbed one of the bags without looking).

By the way, I realize my photos have been pretty utilitarian — not much in the way of embellishment, decorations, nice settings, little kids, that kind of thing. Hope you folks don’t mind. I figured this way we’re only focusing on the tea and is more uniform, making for better comparisons and documentation, which is the point of this blog anyway.

This is how the tea looks in liquid form

The colour is fairly uniform throughout. The tea… is quite delicate, for lack of a better word. It’s not a strong, heavy kind of Wuyi, but rather the soft, supple kind. I didn’t buy it so much for the taste, which I am only ok with, but rather the mouthfeel and, most importantly, the cha qi. The mouthfeel is smooth, soft, much like the flavours of the tea. It’s very “round”. I found a very strong cha qi with this tea, at least in my reaction of it. I felt it again today.

I think this tea might be good for aging a bit and then trying again. It might just get better.

The leaves are still quite wrinkled after about 10 infusions, which, according to somebody I talked to, means that this is hand-rolled. He said the machine rolled stuff unfurls quickly, whereas the hand rolled stuff stay rolled. I don’t know if that’s true. I put the lighter there to give it some scale. No, I don’t smoke. This is for lighting the water boiler.

Maliandao tomorrow. I probably shouldn’t buy anything though…. I just bought two cakes online today….

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Paris tea gathering

November 14, 2006 · 2 Comments

Tea brings together lots of people. From the vendors and salespersons whom I have met throughout the years, to tea friends I meet in teahouses, to internet bloggers and other active participants on communities like the one on livejournal, I have met lots of people through tea — people whom I otherwise will never have met because our lives have almost no chance of crossing.

Today was a meeting with one more such person. I met up with a reader of my blog who lives in Paris. We went to his house and tasted some of his collections — which is way bigger than mine.

After browsing through his stuff a bit (which includes a lot of teas from Maison de Trois Thes or M3T, more on them later) we decided to start off with tasting the 2005 Yangqing Hao Yiwu to get warmed up. After all, I haven’t had good teas for a few days.

I remember the reviews for the 2005 Yangqing Hao was mixed. Some liked it, others panned it. Now I get to taste it for myself….

We brewed it, and the first two infusions….. the liquor is slightly orangy. Then I thought we should do a more systematic way of tasting, so we brewed it according to the Sanzui method — 30s, 60s, 30s, and pouring the water low, touching the rim of the gaiwan and causing no ripples.

The tea…. tasted like green tea. It smelled like green tea, and tasted like green tea. This was especially evident in the last 30s infusion. There’s some huigan, and some “throat-feel”. However, the green tea taste is unsettling. I think this is why BBB told me this cake is fickle to brew…. it’s got problems. I don’t like it, and neither does my host. He is drinking it as a “drink it now”. It’s not bad for drinking now, I think.

Next up was an oddity, something I’ve never seen before.

My host said this is from the M3T, and that they claim it’s a special order batch made for them in (IIRC) 04. This is a mini-cake.

The tea is not bad. It is starting to age a bit, and I think it probably has some wild tea mixed in. One thing was interesting, however. Using the 30/60/30 method…. the tea is BITTER. It is VERY BITTER. It was bitter through and through, and the bitterness doesn’t go away for a good while…. which is a bit odd. I’m not sure what to make of it, and rarely do I taste something like this. Quite interesting, I have to say, and it has nice notes. The bitterness throws me off a bit. Maybe eventually it will mellow out a bit to become less bitter and more sweet?

This brings me to my gripe about M3T. Although I haven’t been there, I have heard from more than one source now that the place is rather nasty. This is not to say their tea is bad, but rather, that the store has bad practices. First of all…. it doesn’t let you sample teas, so if you want to try something, you must pay the single-tasting fee at the store to drink it there. They also, apparently, are rather secretive about their teas. They don’t tell you any sort of real information, such as manufacturer, storage condition, etc. They are also rather snobbish about their tea, supposedly. I don’t know for sure, as I’ve never been there, but I can imagine.

While I don’t have a problem about this, necessarily, if they are honest about their teas, but it seems like they might be a little less than honest. For example….

This is a cake that is, I think, claimed to be 85 that my host owns. The tea, from what little research I’ve been able to do since I got back, seems rather to be a 90s production. That makes sense, because this Tongqing hao brand was revived by a Taiwanese merchant, and in the mid 80s puerh was not a known quantity in Taiwan yet, as far as I’m aware, so dating the cake to 85 would seem pretty problematic. It’s also gone through obvious wet storage, which in and of itself is not a sin (after all, they didn’t claim it to be dry storage). We didn’t end up drinking this.

Why do people still buy stuff from vendors like this, who refuse to tell you things and who seem to lie about their teas? Because, as my host says, “it’s like you’re a heroin addict — this is the only dealer you can buy from”.

On with the tastings.

We drank this next

This is, if I’m not mistaken, the 1999 original Yichang Hao Jipin cake. 1999 was when Yichang Hao first made some cakes, and became famous (and grew to be the Changtai Tea Group it is today). I didn’t take a picture of the cake itself… but it looks good. No obvious white stuff, etc, seems fine.

We tried the tea… it’s quite nice. Using the 30/60/30 method, the tea is quite tasty, with lots of camphor notes and other pleasant tastes. The tea does not have any of those unpleasant things like closing up your throat or drying you out, instead it feels like it’s a rounded tea that moisturizes your mouth. Overall, very nice, and I can see why Changtai got famous making this cake. Too bad not all their cakes are like this.

We ended with a Yiwu tuo that is also from M3T…. it brewed up a ricey tasting tea. It’s gone through some wet storage, and I’m not sure how old it actually is. I’ve seen the wrapper, but can’t remember for the life of me what or who made them. I need to do a little more research.

We ended with cheese and dinner. It was a very nice day drinking tea in Paris, and I have made one more tea friend 🙂

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Jinxuan oolong

November 12, 2006 · 2 Comments

I had some Jinxuan tea yesterday at my sister’s after dinner (coffee’s really not my thing, more on that another day). The Jinxuan is stuff I bought her before she moved here, so we’re talking a year old tea that’s a little stale now. One interesting observation — the brewed leaves are 100% green, no red at all, but this is, after all, an oolong. This makes me think that even when you look at puerh leaves that are brewed…. colour is not a good indication (or not a foolproof one anyway) of having or lacking pre-fermentation.

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Lapsang souchong in a bag

November 11, 2006 · 2 Comments

I had a break yesterday between all the museum hopping and eating around, and my girlfriend and I sat down at a cafe to get a drink. I saw a lapsang souchong on the menu, so I decided to try it and see how it compares (since I pretty much never drinks this tea). It was a tea bag, but of a somewhat premium kind, I think, using a silk bag instead of just a regular paper bag.

The taste…. well… the water was thin, the tea was a tad sour in the aftertaste, overwhelmingly smokey, not very fragrant…. mine’s so much better :p

So now I know I didn’t buy the wrong thing. Yay.

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Lapsang souchong

November 8, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Well…. teas today consisted of bad sencha at a Japanese restaurant, and then I drank the Lapsang Souchong I got in Beijing here.  The bad sencha was bad because it was kind of stale.

The Lapsang Souchong is this:

I like it because it’s very smooth.  There’s the smoke smell/taste, but there’s also a nice, smooth, rich red tea flavour to it.  It’s sweet…. got a good huigan, and not astringent or bitter.  I rarely like red teas, but this is something that I actually find myself enjoying quite a bit.

And it doesn’t hurt that it’s dirt cheap. 🙂

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Sour aged tieguanyin

November 6, 2006 · 2 Comments

I realized I’ve had puerh for many days in a row now, so today I opted for something else. I got a small packet of tieguanyin from the guy who sold me two cakes of those ok Yiwu. He claimed they are from 1992, aged, but selling for a ridiculously cheap price. I asked for a sample to bring home to brew myself, and he gave me some (along with the maocha I brewed up yesterday).

The dried leaves… look like medium to low grade tea from way back when, lightly rolled, not tight like they make them now (thanks to those Taiwanese). Looks good enough. Let’s see how it brews up.

Yum

Sip….. wow…… it’s sour. It’s really sour. It’s so sour. Wow. Hmmm

Another infusion…. still really sour.

One more, with me having taken some leaves out….. still sour.

The rest got thrown into the garbage, but not before I took some pics

The leaves felt a bit rough and stiff, almost plasticky. Other than sourness, the tea did have a nice aged taste to it that I recognize from other well aged oolongs, but the sourness was all pervasive. It was really, really sour. Tasted like Chenpi, the aged Chinese mandarin skin. You’re supposed to get that taste in an old oolong … but only the aroma and not the sourness. Sourness is a no no.

I drank my usual tieguanyin (the medium fired one) to wash out the taste after this.

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Luoshuidong Yiwu maocha

November 5, 2006 · 3 Comments

I should really be quite happy that I am in China. Despite the nasty air, bad water, horrible traffic, terrible food, awful service attitude, there’s lots of tea. If I were in Shanghai, life might be a bit more interesting, but the variety of tea I can get there is lower, mainly because puerh hasn’t really caught on there yet, since it is still the heartland of green tea, the last bastion of longjing drinking. Although, from what I can gather, that’s changing too.

Anyway, on the plate today is a maocha from Yiwu, given to me by the guy who sold me those two Yiwu cakes. I asked him for it when I was looking around his store. There are some curious pieces there, and among them is a jar of this stuff. This is from 05, and according to him, from Falling Water Grotto 落水洞 of Yiwu. Different areas of Yiwu produce different tastes (albeit only slight differences), so I figured I’d ask where these are from.

They are keeping it because they didn’t get a lot of it, not enough to press cakes with anyway, and figured that they will experiment with putting them in jars and aging them as maocha. These are the same people who pressed a few hundred cakes and stuck them in a storage space in the NE of China, hoping to see how they age over there in the cold weather. Wish them luck.

Anyway, the tea brewed up a tasty Yiwu brew. It is the same as usual, not bitter, a bit sweet, quite mellow and nice, and a bit fragrant. The fragrance is not as obvious as the autumn maocha I’ve been drinking, and neither is the sweetness as prominent. The liquor feels a little thinner, and while there’s a minty feeling, it’s not as strong. I think this might’ve been a mix between old tree and newer trees materials, so not top grade.

Infusion 1:

Infusion…. 5?

The tea is also slightly, only very slightly, astringent, compared with the other maocha I’ve had, which sounds a little like what Falling Water Grotto should produce according to one Sanzui guy who told me about the different characterstics of the different villages. Ugh. This is hard.

I drank about 12-13 infusions before stopping and deciding to take pictures.

The leaves are less red than the autumn picked ones that I’ve had, which would normally mean slightly better processing, although that’s debatable. The tea consists of more younger shoots and such, as you’d imagine from a spring tea. However, the leaves are a bit less thick, and the veins not always as prominent. I don’t know quite what to make of that. All in all, not a bad tea though, and I still have a bit of it left, enough for a side by side comparison with the other Yiwu without knocking myself out. I might do that tomorrow. I also need to buy another white gaiwan so that the tests can be done with as little variation as possible…. and maybe an electronic scale too, just to be precise.

I’ll end this entry with a picture of two fairly complete pickings… one has four buds, the other has five!

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Dayi and others

November 4, 2006 · 2 Comments

I’m a bit worried. Both Blogspot and Livejournal seem to be blocked off. I hope Xanga won’t get the same treatment.

If it does…. I might ask my girlfriend to post updates for me.

Anyway, I went back to Maliandao today. This wasn’t scheduled. Basically, I made a few tea friends on Sanzui, and I was going to go to Maliandao with one of the guys on Sunday morning. However, he wanted to push it up to this afternoon…. so off we went.

This guy is an artist of sorts, but he also doubles as a buying agent for his friend’s teashop in Beijing. So I met up with him, and we started roaming Chayuan. The first place we went to is one of the Dayi 1st class distributors in Beijing.

What does that mean?

Well, Dayi these days operate in a somewhat complicated manner. Since their stuff is so popular (mostly speculative buying) what happens is that there are a number of 1st class distributors in various regions/cities, and what happens is that you basically are given whatever the Menghai factory decides to assign to you. You, as their first line of distribution, oddly enough do NOT get to choose what goods you get. You also have to pay for all of them, and try to sell them on your own. All risk is yours, while the factory has already made all the money they need by selling to you.

So this places enormous burden/risk on the distributors.

Amazingly enough, the prices of Dayi stuff and the circulation of goods are still quite impressive, and in general Dayi does lack buyers. In fact, prices are sky high, IMO, especially given what I’ve tasted today.

We first tried the 0622 mini-bing. This is the same formula as the bigger 0622 that I tried with BBB. This time, the tea didn’t turn sour, but also because the sales person brewing it did not add nearly as much leaves, and did not brew them nearly as long. The stuff is…. ok. Good for drink it now, but I can’t imagine it tasting good in a few years’ time. One such mini-bing approaches 100RMB. Expensivo.

We then went to another 1st class Dayi distributor and spent most of our afternoon there. We tried a bing that has been rather famous recently, and which is basically all sold out. Nobody in Beijing got the goods (even for the 1st class distributors) — this shipment was taken via Guangzhou. The taste…. ok, so so, but my oh my, it died on us in the 8th infusion. That’s a pretty big no no for puerh, I think, as young cakes should almost never die on you so early if it’s raw. You can taste the water by then, and that’s just….bad. I also think there are some craftsmanship problems.

We tried another cake, this one suggested by my tea friend. It’s not a Dayi cake, and is quite all right. It’s an 03 Bulang cake. The taste reminds me of the Mengku 2002 cake that I bought, maybe this one is slightly better/stronger. However, the price is also 5x “better”, which makes the cake….. not worth the money.

Then I asked to taste a Yichang Hao cake from Qianjia Zhai. It’s quite good tasting…. until the 5th infusion, when the tea started showing signs of dying. By the 7th infusion…. it was gone. Almost no taste. This is from I think 02, and a raw tea, again, shouldn’t die so fast. Something’s wrong. And they want 400 RMB for it. No way!

We left the store shortly thereafter. Had dinner at a local hot pot store, and then, upon my suggestion, went to the Mengku store to compare the 2002 cake with the Bulang. My friend thought they did taste a bit similar. The 2002 is slightly inferior, but the price differential was so substantial that it’s hard to justify getting the Bulang one. He’s basically scouting teas out for his friend, so he said he’ll tell his friend to go taste the cake himself and see if it makes business sense.

We then wandered around Chayuan a little more, and then came to this one store that sells this puerh from a no-name factory. We walked in, and I started picking up cakes to look at.

And then something I hate happens…. the owner, a middle aged woman, was of the “you must know nothing” variety. By that, I mean, she just assumes that we know nothing about puerh. When I asked “what cakes are these”, meaning what mountain, make, etc, she told me “this is a Qizi bing”. DUH! As if I can’t tell. These storekeepers who assume you know nothing piss me off to no end. I mean, while I do not claim to know a lot, I do think I deserve the minimum amount of courtesy and any storekeeper — any good storekeeper anyway — should assume their customer know something about what they’re looking at. Qizi Bing tells me nothing.

Anyway, I looked around, this factory makes cakes that are 400g each. The shape of the cakes are not terribly appealing. They look a bit fat and stunted, but the leaves looked good. I wanted to try one — the Mengsa cake.

Then the owner gave me the “here at Chayuan we only let people sample tea by the gram”, which is technically true, except that NOBODY ever follows that rule, or even so much as mention that rule. Annoying. I ended up trying the six mountain cake (i.e. tea from all six) instead of the Mengsa one. The tea is actually quite good, real big tree tea, nice overall. Asking price is not so nice, and annoyingly, all the cakes from this same factory are selling at the same price, which is ridiculous (because the cost of the materials should be different). When I came back to check on taobao, I can find some of them online, for about half.

I like those cakes. I think they can age well, but I don’t like how much they want. I’ll see if I can go back and get a better price, or find them somewhere else for cheaper on Maliandao. It’s possible…. although somehow I don’t think too likely.

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