A few months ago I bought a very weird tea, something that I’ve never tried before. It was from a small little shop in one of the shabbiest tea malls in Maliandao — the Beijing Tea Corporation mall. It’s a husband and wife team, renting basically a corner of a much bigger store that sells mostly teaware (especially those big wooden tables). I went in there because I was looking for dancongs, and they only sell dancongs (a doomed business in Beijing, pretty much). I tried two things, neither of which I particularly liked because they were too light for my taste, but then the husband showed me one tea, brewed it up…. and it was weird enough for the weird factor for me to have bought 150g of it. The other reason I bought it is because I think they really don’t get much business and I felt a little bad.

That’s usually a recipe for disaster — it’s usually those moments when you buy the worst tea in your inventory. I left this tea on my shelf, unopened, for the past three months. After the aged Wuyi two days ago though, I thought I should try this weird tea out.

I say it is weird because it is a genre that I’ve never had before — aged dancong. I’ve seen aged Wuyis or aged tieguanyin, but never an aged dancong. I think mostly because dancongs tend to be lighter in flavour, and aging a lightly roasted tea is not a good idea — the flavours will deteriorate into nothing. When I tried it at the store though, an overwhelming sense of — get this — puerh hit me. It’s not quite puerh like, but smelling and tasting the tea, it definitely reminded me of some puerhs I’ve had.

The aroma is hard to describe. It’s… old. It smells most similar to the mixed, low grade old puerh from Best Tea House, but the old puerh has a musty old puerh smell that this dancong doesn’t. Instead, it just retains the clean, old smell. I don’t know what to call it….

I brewed it up… and the initial two infusions were rather bland. The tea is, shall we say, subtle, but not unpleasantly so. The colour is light:

I increased infusion times, and it became stronger, with more of the “chen” taste that I found in the old Wuyi I had two days ago. However, it is not sour at all, which is a testament to good storage.

There were notes of dry dates again, the taste I found in the old cooked puerh brick. It’s a very subtle note, almost a flash. In fact, drinking this tea makes you work really hard trying to find the various flavours, but it’s quite complex and changes a lot between infusions. This time I only used about 4g of tea. Next time I will add more to make it more punchy and accentuate the flavours a little more.

The wet leaves are very large….

A pretty fun tea to drink, and it’s really quite cheap…..

Now that we have the 10,000 hits thing out of the way… back to the teas

Yesterday, along with the scale and the bags of Wuyi tea I got, I was given a small sample of an aged Wuyi tea from the store. Since it’s a small bag, I figured I’ll brew it.

Since I got my new electric scale, I figured I’ll see how much tea they gave me.

It turns out it was 10g, almost to the dot. 10g of tea… that sounds like a lot.

So I warmed my pot, and started putting leaves in it. When I filled it to about what I normally would use… I realized that about 3/4 of the tea I got from the sample is already in the pot. What do I do with the rest? Keep it? It’s too little to do anything with it. Throw it? It’s a waste… so…. I “turned my heart sideways” (a rough translation of a Chinese phrase meaning “to do something with determination”) and threw the rest of the dry tea in there. It just fit in the pot, with a bit of space to spare… 10g of tea in this pot, and the pot is almost filled to the brim with dry leaves.

Yes, yes, tea addict.

In my excitement I forgot to take pictures of the dry leaves. I can say they are rather small and broken, and quite dark — black. It’s broken because it’s obviously been roasted fairly heavily (for storage) and perhaps re-roasted after some years of storage. Anyway, as I remaked yesterday, Wuyi teas are hard to tell apart when dry anyway.

The first infusion brewed a very promising looking liquor — doesn’t this look like aged puerh? This is what happens when you put 90% dry leaves in a pot….

The taste… overwhelmingly the first few infusions has a taste of chenpi (dried mandarin peel). This is what they would call the “chen” taste in tea, usually applying to oolong, as the “chen” taste in puerh is different. The first infusion came out a bit sour. It wasn’t terribly unpleasant in its sourness, but a little sour. Of course, with that much leaves in a small pot…. it’s hard to control. I then decided faster infusions will help, and indeed, the sourness subsided in the second infusion onwards, giving way to more of the “chen” taste. There’s a nice, soft, supple feel to the tea that is usually more obvious in aged Wuyi teas (or aged teas in general). Younger teas tend to be harsher, no matter what you do. Poorly stored aged teas, of course, can also turn bad on you.

Then after about 4-5 infusions, the chen taste subsided, giving way to a lot of sweetness. The brew also got considerably lighter. I increased the infusion time, but the chen taste didn’t come back. Instead, the sweetness persisted. I drank about 10-12 infusions of this. Needless to say, I was pretty worked up by the tea, despite its age and the fact that it’s a roasted Wuyi. It’s a comfortable feeling, not the nervous energy that you get from a young, qingxiang tieguanyin.

I might get more of this…. but I really, really have too much tea already. Then again, it’s hard to come by decent aged oolongs that are not sour or bland. This tea is neither. I should at least go back to the store and try it with less leaves.

The wet leaves…. don’t reveal much.

Weekend Maliandao excursion.

I was originally not going to go today, but then I remembered I promised a vendor there to bring her some of the old loose puerh from the Best Tea House to try, so … I went. This is the same person who sold me the Quan Ji puerh a few weeks ago. I enjoyed talking to her, and I think it’s probably rare for her to get a customer who likes the stuff she sells. A lot of times people just come in, browse, and then leave. Since none of her teas are name brand, it’s difficult business, I think (and as far as I can tell, her livelihood does not depend on it).

After drinking that supposedly 30 years old loose puerh, I tried two of her teas. One is a cake of Lincang puerh, using old maocha (2-3 years old) but pressed this year. It’s not bad, tasting like Lincang tea — a bit like the Mengku stuff, with its odd aroma that is rather unique. It’s bitter, but Lincang tea tends to be that way.

The second one is a Jingmai tea. Her store, interestingly enough, has LOTS of Jingmai teas of various kinds. She said it’s because she likes the taste and aroma of Jingmai teas, so she keeps a lot of them around, and will in fact go to Jingmai next spring to press some cakes. She has at least four or five different big tee Jingmai cakes, a few Jingmai bricks, Jingmai tuo… you name it.

The cake I tried was actually pretty good. Very nice aroma, mellow, not bitter, got some nice cooling sensation in the throat. Not bad, and I might consider it, but… the Quan Ji is better, I think. I’m still debating if I should get a second tong of them…

By then, I was feeling the tea. It’s been a long parade of young puerhs the past few days, so I think my tolerance has been lowered. Also, the Jingmai tea was brewed with an incredible tea-water ratio (i.e. very high), so …. it was strong.

I excused myself from their store, not having bought anything. I’m sure I’ll go back there again. The owner is nice (unlike the manager).

I then thought I should stop by the Wuyi rock tea store before heading home (as it was already 6pm). It’s nice, and I thought I should buy some other kinds…

I went there, and they were, just as I was walking by, ready to go out for dinner. I ended up eating with them at a local shop that specializes lamb shoulders, stewed. It’s quite good, and did a good job of restoring my stomach, although one of the guys eating with them kept pressing beer on me, which I really wasn’t in the mood of (especially just bland Tsingtao)….. but I obliged.

After dinner we went back to the teashop, and had three different teas. We also had a nice long chat about different kinds of Wuyi, how to differentiate them (basically, you can’t tell by looks unless you’re in the tea making business, and even then, it’s not easy), and some of the processes that they do to make the tea. I find my education in Wuyi tea pretty lacking. Although I can, on a whole, appreciate what is a good and what is a bad Wuyi tea, I cannot, for example, tell apart some of the more similar varietals by taste. The spectrum of possible tastes that a Wuyi tea possesses is quite wide, and I’m afraid I’ve only scratched the surface of it. Sadly, I can tell puerh apart better than I can Wuyi teas. That’s a shame.

So I need to fix that.

An interesting side note… while the first two months I was here I was always asked the “where are you from?” question, nowadays, I get more the “do you sell tea?” question. I’m not sure why it is that people started asking me this all of a sudden, but there have been at least a dozen different people who asked the same thing — if I sell tea one way or another, and when I tell them no, I only drink for myself, it’s usually met with some skepticism. I suppose someone who asks a lot of questions is going to prompt that comment….

Lastly, I got an electronic scale. No more caffeine overdose when I do a double-tasting

I thought about continuing the Yiwu parade with two 2006 spring Yiwus, but then….. my senses got the better of me. I will probably die of overdose if I tried that today.

So instead, I did two dancongs.

These are both purchased in Beijing. One’s the overpriced one, the other is the cheapo one. The price differential is about…. 5x.

As you can see, the L sample has smaller leaves. The colour is also a little more uniform. The R sample has bigger leaves, but if you look closely there are some leaves that are quite green, while others are quite dark.

The first two infusions:

L brews a slightly darker tea than R, although the difference is quite small and is a little more obvious to the naked eye than to the camera. Either way though, in effect the colours are the same.

But tea’s not for looking. Tea’s for drinking. L tastes… smooth. It’s quite fragrant, a little sweet, and not bitter. R is a little more bitter, less sweet, a little rougher. I tried long and short infusions, and the smoothness of L is always a little more evident when compared directly with R. In terms of fragrance… they are quite similar, with slight variations, but neither is exactly better. A close call, actually.

Given the price however…. it’s hard to justify buying the more expensive one (L) than the cheap one (R). The differences aren’t great enough.

The leaves, when wet, actually look quite different

L:

R:

L’s leaves unfurled easily, without any sort of human intervention, whereas R doesn’t really unfurl and is more tightly rolled. As I’ve mentioned before, I was told that this means that L was machine rolled, while R was hand rolled. I don’t know if this is true, but the guy who told me this doesn’t even sell dancong (a puerh guy), so he has no reason to lie to me. The extra rolling might also account for some of the bitterness. Extra rolling, in puerh at least, is supposed to make it a little more bitter. Maybe the same is true here.

L is still the better tea, but it is not anywhere near 5x better. Oh well. At least I only bought 50g of it.

I thought about using my new teaset to do a tasting that I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I decided to wait, because I want to try my new cooked puerh first.

Cooked puerh, for those who are not familiar with the genre, is basically a form of processed puerh, and is generally considered the opposite of raw puerh. Raw puerh is essentially compressed, sun dried Yunnan tea, processed only with a few steps, namely picking, frying, rolling, and then drying (under the sun, ideally). Then you steam the tea and compress it, and you get something that looks like this:

(This, by the way, is a tea I have yet to write about on my blog and is the first candidate for the two-gaiwan tasting)

Which will then age over time into a browner, looser version of the same tea. The fermentation that occurs takes place on its own, and you just have to wait and keep it away from nasty smells and extra dampness (but too dry is no good either). So raw puerh is, really, quite simple. If you know how to pick tea, fry it, and press it, you’re basically in business. There are subtle points of interest and technique in this, of course, and a misstep can cause the tea to be less desirable, but on the whole, the level of technology is quite low.

Cooked puerh, on the other hand, involves something extra — a manually triggered/encouraged fermentation process before the compression into cakes/tuos/bricks. Basically what happens is you have leaves that are left in big piles, with water sprayed on, temperature turned up, etc (I’m not sure exactly how it’s done, and I suspect different factories have different specifications as well, down to the size of each “pile”, the depth, the temperature, the amount of water, etc). As you can imagine, a lot of wet leaves in a pile…. will lead to decomposition. That’s sort of what happens, and the tea basically ages very quickly into something that tastes very, very roughly approximately like aged puerh (but really, not the same at all). This process was developed in the early 70s, so cooked puerh hasn’t been around for that long, relatively speaking. It provides a kind of tea that is easy to drink now. On the other hand, aging potential is much more limited, as the leaves are exhausted of materials that can be aged into something else. Some factories, like Menghai, are famous for their cooked stuff. They have done it for so long that they know exactly what they’re doing, and will mix and match different grades and different levels of fermentation to bring together a cake that is complex, interesting, and tasty. Newer factories tend to have more problems with the cooked stuff. Shuangjiang Mengku, for example, kept making cooked puerh that’s sour (I haven’t tried enough to judge). They have upgraded their facilities, brought in water from far away (with a new pipe guiding water from miles and miles away, apparently) etc, trying to make their cooked pu taste good. It’s big business.

I usually don’t like cooked puerh (in case that’s not obvious by now). It’s usually thick, but with a flat taste, sometimes unpleasant aromas, little aftertaste, etc. I don’t feel too comfortable after drinking it. Yesterday’s purchase, however, is one of a very few exceptions that I’ve encountered. I liked it at the store, so I bought one, figuring that 1kg of tea will last me a long time.

A closeup of the brick reveals what looks like something you can find in your yard on an autumn day, after some rain and a few days of rotting:

I broke a corner of the brick, which includes this mysterious looking thing…. the big black round thing in the middle. I don’t know what it is. There’s also a human hair you can’t see here, but you didn’t need to know that.

Infusion 2, looking a little intimidating:

Less intimidating in the fairness cup:

How does it taste? Thick, silky smooth, sweet, aromatic…. without the ricey or the pondy taste that I don’t like in cooked. After some infusions you can feel a bit of the cooling effect on the throat, something that happens sometimes with cooked puerh, but only usually with the better stuff. No sourness, which is a big no no. The owner of the store claims this is aged a bit, and I think i agree. It doesn’t taste like those fresh off the factory floor cooked, which are generally a little harsher and a little uglier in taste. Instead, it’s mellowed out a bit, and quite comfortable to drink on a very cold winter day.

The leaves of this brick are also quite large, more so than your normal cooked puerh (but not unheard of)

I unfurled some leaves that came unfolded easily… still retaining some flexibility and texture

And then there’s the really black, charcoal like stuff. The thing on the left is the black round thing, which I broke into half. There are two seeds in there. The colour of the inside is reddish. I still don’t know what I drank.

Not the most appetizing images, when you think about it…. but it tastes quite decent, and I don’t mind drinking it, which is more than what I can say for most cooked puerh….