A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘aged puerh’

Luk Yu Teahouse

December 30, 2006 · 3 Comments

Seems like the internet is back to normal faster than I thought. Give it another day, and I can probably start uploading pictures again. Right now it’s still quite slow (think…. 28.8k slow with lots of packetloss)

I went to Luk Yu Teahouse 陸羽茶室 with family today for lunch. It’s a fairly famous old restaurant in Central, best known for rude waiters who only treat you well if you’re a regular, and a murder case a few years ago where a guy was gunned down in the middle of the dining room. Either way though, it’s a bit of a landmark and is not bad for food.

As many of you probably know, going to eat dim sum in Cantonese is “yum cha”, literally “to drink tea”. When we first sat down at the table and mom started looking at the food menu, the waiter commented “so fast?”. The expectation is that you will first sit down, drink some tea, talk, slowly look at what kind of food there is, wait for everybody to show up… and have a very, very leisurely lunch (or brunch, as is usually the case). A lot of Cantonese families I know would go at 9am and stay until well past 1. They sit, chat, read newspaper, etc, and it’s a time for the whole family to get together. Dim sum, the focus of this activity in the West, is only what fills the belly. It’s really a time when you are catching up with family, and tea serves as a lubricant for the conversation.

I think the kinds of tea that are ordered are often jasmine, shuixian, nongxiang tieguanyin, or puerh, with lighter teas being less popular (although I think they are also gaining in popularity). We got a puerh today. There’s no specific thing you order. You just tell them what tea they want, and they give it to you in a pot. There’s no asking of vintage, raw or cooked, or anything. It comes in a big pot where the water stews the leaves. It’s what’s called “cow-drinking”, which basically means drinking in big gulps rather than small cups for fine tasting. They also have gaiwans, if you prefer that, although with 10 people at the table gaiwan is quite impractical.

Usually, the puerh that is offered at these places are cooked or raw-cooked mix puerh, low quality, and quite nasty. The stuff at Luk Yu, while not fantastically good, is not bad. It’s all raw, at least the sample leaves I pulled out of the pot when we were done were definitely all raw puerh. It’s got some age. I can’t tell how long, but it’s not short. Drinking it from a big pot of stewed leaves also doesn’t help. After all, the tea’s just there to help you eat and talk. My family all commented though that the puerh there was better than the usual puerh you get outside, which is often dark and bitter (when overbrewed). I think for what it’s supposed to do, Luk Yu’s puerh is quite good.

I think tomorrow’s a tea shopping day 🙂

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Hung Chong Tai loose pu

December 20, 2006 · 3 Comments

I went to the old, wet storage tea store today to pick up the tong of tea I ordered back in the summer. Now that I think about it, I’m overpaying them for it. However, a search through Taobao showed that nobody sells this tea. There’s one item that’s similar, but it’s not the same thing.

I only have a vague memory of the tea I tried. I remember it being somewhat bitter, and quite “strong”. Mainly, I bought it because I want to see what these people pick as a good young puerh (since this is the ONLY young puerh they sell). I think I might just leave it in the tong here and let it sit in Hong Kong. It can use some moisture to age.

I also bought a little of this:

Some wet stored loose puerh (raw), packed in a pretty little bag…. kinda retro

Below the Chinese name of the company, it’s written on the leaf that this place is a “hub for famous teas”. They sell mostly wet stored stuff. Quite a cute place though. I might go back and see if I can find a cake or two of wet stored cooked pu and try it, and maybe take a pic or two of the place itself.

I made my tea:

Mellow, sweet, definitely raw tasting, although somewhat flat as the storage was pretty wet, I think. It’s not nasty though, just flat. I made many infusions, although since I was adding water when it reaches about 40% full, I don’t know how many infusions I can actually count. For the price (40 USD for 600g) it’s not too bad. I’d drink this regularly over a very young cake. It’s probably better for my body.

Some of the leaves… you can see how some are browner, while others are blacker (and stiffer). Did I say wet storage?

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More Best Tea House

December 19, 2006 · 1 Comment

I went back today to the Tsim Sha Tsui branch of the Best Tea House. When this was closed, it was a trek to go all the way out to their main store, so I didn’t go very often, but now… it’s much easier.

A younger tea drinker, B, was there, and they were just about to brew a 1975 old tree tea. The cake itself looks somewhat unappetizing:


Yes, that’s white stuff on the tea. It’s been pretty wet stored (or just pretty poorly stored). You can smell it.

The tea brews a dark brown/black liquor. The first two infusion has a “wet store” taste to it, quite prominent, and somewhat unpleasant. However, it does clear up, as they usually do, after a few, and the resulting brew is still pretty reasonable, and nice to drink. I think wet storage really gets a lot of bad rep, but when it comes down to it, I think I might prefer this cake to the 88 qingbing, which was just a bit bland and flat. Of course, it’s got another 10-15 years extra aging, but still…. in terms of prices they are very close to each other.

The wet leaves:

Then some Japanese customers came in and they tried some tea, and bought a bit. After that, I pulled out my Mengku 2002 cake for them to taste. They all liked it — thought it was pretty decent and tasty, especially given the price. I told them that the Beijingers don’t really like this when I brew it for them, and they were surprised. I think the Hong Kong palette and the Beijing one are so substantially different. They look for different things, different tastes, different feels, and I’m not sure which one’s the right one. The Hong Kong one places heavy emphasis on how a tea feels — whether it’s soft, round, smooth or not. The Beijing one, although also taking these into consideration, is very particular about whether or not a tea is clean — something that Hong Kongers rarely consider. When they say clean, they mean whether or not there are traces of wet storage, and if there is, they generally don’t like it, even if it’s just a hint. I personally think that’s great, as it means that I can usually say “this cake was wet stored” and try to get a discount on the tea in question in Beijing. Can’t do it here.

We also tried the water experiment with this tea… and the tea tasted softer with more mineral water involved. Mark this down in the “mineral” column.

In the middle of this, two guys walked in, one being a famous calligrapher/painter and the other his friend (and host, I think) in Hong Kong. They sat down and tried some tea, and the calligrapher got very happy and wrote some words for Tiffany & Co. After they left, we drank a few more cups, and I took my leave.

On my way back to home, waiting for the Star Ferry, I am reminded of how nice it is to spend Christmas in Hong Kong

It’s good to be home.

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Reading tea leaves

December 15, 2006 · 2 Comments

Today I drank the pieces I broke off yesterday from the cheap brick that I got in Hong Kong:

The pieces in question:

I realize that now that I have a scale … I am actually using less leaves. I never realized that sometimes I was putting upwards of 10g in my teapots/gaiwans. I ended up with about 7g of tea in my puerh pot.

Anyway, so I brewed it, but this time without the two long washes that I subjected it to last few times I made this tea. I originally did it because I was worried about my health (the tea looks a little nasty, with little white bugs on it). Now that I’ve been airing them out for close to 4 months here in this rather dry weather (I’ve kept it out of the tea closet, figuring this is better to get rid of the off taste/smell), I feel more confident with the tea.

This time the off taste is basically gone. Whereas the first infusion when I first tried it was a slightly odd, and uncomfortable, aroma of something sort of medicinal, now it is a more orthodox “somewhat aged” puerh taste. There’s still something off about it though… but the tea goes down smoothly and nicely enough. It’s very soothing for the throat… doesn’t feel dry at all, and there’s a sense of coolness that I like that extends down the throat. This is mainly the reason why I bought the tea to begin with.

Looking at the leaves… I think I am learning a little more about the particular variety of tastes in this tea

Look at them…. tell me what’s wrong

Some closeups

Basically…. I think the tea is a raw/cooked mix. The picture of the pile of stuff in a corner are the big, beefy leaves that look like this when unfurled

And then you have the other stuff… skinny, black, dried up looking things, that disintegrate when touched. I don’t think it’s bad storage, but rather, I think it’s just cooked puerh. This might explain the slightly odd mix of tastes. There’s that nice sweet, mellow, smooth nature of cooked puerh in the back, coupled with the punch of the raw. The cooling sensation produced by this tea cannot be a product of cooked stuff. The leaves also are not, mostly, cooked leaves. There are, however, a scattering of the black pieces that fall apart when I try to unfold them. If the tea is uniformly like that, then I’d say it’s probably bad storage, but it’s not… some of the leaves are incredibly green (as you can see) and a lot of it are brown…. I think it’s just a mix.

It might also be the case that this tea is recompresed maocha mixed in with cooked puerh. The bad thing is that this is probably done to cheat people (i.e. saying this is well aged tea). The raw leaves have some years, as most of them are some shade of brown. But it’s not all old… but then, maybe the stuff that are more green are the ones in the middle of this very tightly compressed brick, and thus having had less aging done to them?

I really don’t know, and it’s a bit of a mystery — a mystery that I can’t pinpoint for certain beyond what I’ve just said. However, I enjoy drinking it, and I think it will get better with age. After all, one of the favourite puerhs I’ve tasted… the Zhongcha Simplified Character from YP, is a cooked/raw mix. That one is very good……

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30 years aged loose puerh from Jabbok

December 2, 2006 · Leave a Comment

When I was rearranging my very messy tea cupboard in anticipation of ZH’s visit, I found something that I totally forgot about — a small bag of loose puerh from Jabbok Teahouse that I bought when I was in HK over the summer. That’s what I had today.

Jabbok claimed that this loose tea was 30 years old, just like the Best Tea House stuff. I remember I had a try at their store, and didn’t think that it was quite that old. I remember it being a bit on the light side, flavour wise. I got basically the bottom of the pile — it was about the last bit that they had that I took. In total, it was something like 30-50g of tea, not a lot.

This is how it looks. Doesn’t look too old, does it?

So, I went through the usual motions and brewed it up… the first infusion looks weak. It’s an orangy red, not too exciting…. gulp… the tea is perfumy. Very perfumy. Incredibly perfumy. I don’t quite know what to make of this taste. I think Phyll said before that this is what he describes as talcum powder… a woman’s makeup… that sort of perfume smell. The aroma is wonderful. If I had a hint of this in other teas, this is the perfect sample of talcum powder taste in tea, I think. The brew is quite thin, actually, very slightly drying, not a whole lot of huigan, but a lot of coolness and mintiness. The “throat-feel” is very strong and immediate. There’s a hint of the spicy aged taste in the back of the talcum aroma — you can detect it when the talcum fades away, but it’s not very obvious. This tea is pretty good stuff.

I drank infusion after infusion of it. The tea stays more or less the same throughout, without much variation. They say that’s one problem with loose tea versus cake — that loose teas tend to be more uniform and less complex than compressed tea, but at the same time, they age faster — which is why i didn’t believe the claim of 30 years. Nevertheless though, the aroma of the tea is so delightful, it makes up for the problems, such as the thinness.

Infusion 2

Infusion 7

Infusion 12 — I think?

It lasted about 14-15 infusions before I gave up on it.

The leaves, after they are brewed, look thin. Lots of stems, with some whole leaves to boot, but on the whole they feel flimsy and don’t open without breaking seriously. There’s considerably rolling that took place when the tea was processed. It seems like nowadays puerh tend to be rolled less. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. You can also see the rolling in the dry leaves picutre — they look almost like Wuyi teas, if you just take a glance at it. These days, loose puerh tend to show a much more big leaf look.

One very big leaf

Some of the leaves don’t look quite like Yunnan big leaf tea. I’m no expert on this and can’t tell, but they don’t feel like the usual stuff. I wonder if there are other varietals mixed in this, which gave it the unique flavour. Whatever it was, it was pretty interesting.

Tomorrow’s my weekly trip to Maliandao 🙂

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Drinking tea with ZH

December 1, 2006 · 5 Comments

It’s my birthday today, which is part of the reason I invited ZH over for tea. Of course, I would’ve invited him over anyway. I like other tea nuts.

We didn’t waste too much time and got down to business. First up was my Yiwu maocha that I got almost two months ago. I thought I would ask his opinion on the tea.

The tea, I have to say, changed a bit since it was picked. Now, the bitterness is coming through a little stronger. It’s a little more bitter, the colour’s a little darker, and the overall profile has changed slightly. I remember it was sweet, fragrant, and all that. It’s still mostly that, but turned slightly more like a regular puerh. The Yiwu taste is very obvious, and ZH agreed with me on that. He also noticed some sort of numbing bitterness in infusion 3 or so, but only slightly and not very obvious. By infusion 4-5, the bitterness went away and turned into a smoother, rounder, tea.

We were puzzling over the tea’s origins, because while it tastes largely like a Yiwu, it doesn’t taste exactly like a Yiwu old tree tea, because of the current presence of the bitter element (a little much for a Yiwu — very low standards). He also thought the colour of the maocha is a little dark, and some of the leaves didn’t look like old big tree. I suggested perhaps it’s partly plantation tea mixed it… which could be the case (or just teas that are plucked from trees in the same area but of younger age — after all, you have to have young trees in a forest!). The mystery remains.

The next tea we tried was a free sample given to me by Hou De. It’s the Xizihao 2006 Taiji series Lao Banzhang. The one I got is the Yang. I broke some of the tea, and brewed it up. I have to say that having just had the Lao Banzhang maocha from ZH two days ago…. the Xizihao pales in comparison. It’s not nearly as good, and doesn’t have that requisite profile that only Lao Banzhang has. The taste is mixed, and ZH thinks that some of the tea is from other areas in the Bulang mountain. Sigh. I will try it again, next time with more leaves.

Then after debating over what to serve next, I decided to use the remaining bits of the 95 Zhenchunya Hao that YP gave me. There’s not a lot left…. only enough for basically half a brew, so I filled the gaiwan halfway up with water to brew the tea, resulting in two small cups each infusion. Still the same as last time…. a very odd flavour for puerh, and now that I’ve had a whole bunch of older Yiwu recently, I have to say this one does NOT taste like a typical aged Yiwu. There’s a bit of that older taste, but a more prominent trait of this tea is that it is a little fruity with a bit of a plum note. Last time when I had this with BBB, I didn’t think much of it, but now… I am starting to think that this might be a tea that went through pre-fermentation before the pressing, during the processing stage of the leaves, and thus the tea is not strictly speaking puerh, or not pure puerh. What I am tasting here is a mix of older puerh taste, and more importantly, of older oolong taste.

Of course — a big caveat — this is all speculation on my part. However, having had that oddly fruity and sweet aged red tea a few days ago… I feel like I have connected two dots. This will explain where the fruitiness of the Zhenchunya Hao is coming from (which, by the way, I don’t really detect in the version on sale at the Best Tea House now — they are different batches). Older oolongs do have a note that tastes somewhat similar to what I had. That, and an old puerh shouldn’t be so light in flavour and aroma. The typical Yiwu aged taste (detectable now in the Yangqing Hao 2004, and the Jingye Hao 2001, for example) is just not really there. This is not to say this is bad tea — far from it, it’s very interesting, if a little odd, and the tea is very pleasant to drink. It’s just a different kind of taste, and if you buy something like this, thinking it will turn into your typical Yiwu (for example — not that this is available for sale) you will be surprised, but probably not nastily surprised.

The leaves look nice:

I saved the best for the last, but this also made sense in terms of age progression. We had the Zhongcha Traditional Character that was given to me by YP. ZH sat up when he too the first sip, realizing that this is good tea. The tea, as I’ve said last time I brewed it, looks awful. If you just look at it, you’d think it’s a cooked cake. It looks like one, it smells like one, but it does not taste like a cooked cake, or at least not entirely. It’s a raw/cooked mix, at least that’s what YP told me, and I think you can tell that the cake was mixed because during the infusions some obvious “cooked tea” notes come through. Yet, there’s an unmistakable presence of aged raw puerh in the cake. There are more plum notes this time, and a very soothing mouthfeel — round, moisturizing, sweet, huigan… it’s all there. The throat feels cool after drinking, and stays cool. A beautiful tea, and I’m really, really glad that YP gave these pieces to me. I still have enough of the sample left to brew it one more time. I’ll have to save it for some other occasion.

I decided to take some pictures of the wet leaves of the Zhongcha

Closeup

Even closer

This leaf is a little odd — the lone leaf that unfurled easily and that is particularly light compared with everything else

A nice meeting over tea, and I’m sure we’ll be meeting over tea again. It’s obvious that he is not nearly as expereinced as, say, some HK tea people, but he makes up for it by his enthusiaism. If I can go to Yunnan with him next year, that’ll be nice.

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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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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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