We are always told that older teas are, somehow, better. Imagine if your old tea came from here though
This is a tea display from a grocery shop not too far from my home. They sell some pretty dubious teas, not sourced from this little display, of course. Nevertheless, if you ever need convincing that storage environment matters, this is it – it’s exposed to the sun, probably really hot, and hasn’t been cleaned in decades. God forbid you end up with a cake from here.
A few months ago a reader of the blog emailed me with a problem. She is newish to puerh, and has been buying some cakes since 2011. She bought some clay jars to store the teas in, and in the hopes of speeding up the aging process, decided to try to add a bit of humidity to the jars to make things go faster/age better. This much sounds familiar – lots of people do similar things, especially if they live in drier climates, because, well, they worry about the tea not aging properly. These are the jars.
Then the inevitable happened – first, signs of yellow mold, which can be dusted off easily and stopped the addition of humidity to the tea (by some method of adding water to the clay and let the clay soak it up, I believe). Then, a more invasive problem appeared – bugs, little bugs, that were all over the cakes, especially one, but it was showing up on others too. She threw out the most heavily infested one, but now almost all the cakes have bugs in them, and they move fast and run away from light, what to do?
In desperation, she emailed me to ask – what’s a good way to handle them? She threw one of the cakes with bugs away, but there were more. Another she put in a freezer, hoping that it will kill the bugs. Was microwave a possible way of killing them? Something else?
I think a little perspective is useful sometimes, because I’ve met others who have had similar reactions before. Puerh, when you buy them new, are, well, an investment of sorts. If your plan is to store them and drink them in the future, chances are your time horizon is years, if not decades. If that’s the case, even momentary infestations of all kinds of nasties will go away. Some, like mold, may leave a permanent mark on how your tea tastes. Others, like little bugs, will barely make a dent in your tea, if you manage to get rid of them. So, when you run into problems like this, the first thing to do is not to panic, unless you spent your life savings on the tea and your life depended on it. If it’s just a hobby – there are ways to fix the problem. What not to do is to overreact and put the tea in, say, the microwave and permanently destroy it. That will really end the tea’s aging potential and cause irreparable harm.
Since in this case it was obviously the wet jars and the attendant humidity that was causing the problem, I suggested the reader to take all the cakes out of the jars, and then separate the cakes into two piles – ones with bugs and ones without. The ones without, just store them on a shelf or something. The ones with the bugs I suggested perhaps putting them somewhere, spread out, and just let them air out. Usually, bugs like these that live on puerh cakes tend to love the humidity, and are mostly after the paper. Once it gets too dry they will go away, especially if it’s not a dark humid space. I had bugs like this on some bricks I bought some years ago, and after a few months all the bugs were gone, and I didn’t even do anything special to get rid of them.
So, happily, the reader wrote back to me a few weeks ago saying that the bugs were, indeed, all gone. No more problems, and the tea is probably a bit dry, but certainly better off than in some uncontrolled humid environment with a high risk of mold and bugs. They’re going back into the jar, but without any added humidity this time. I think the aging will be slow, but there’s only so much you can do with natural climate.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered folks with storage problems that were man-made. Usually the root of the problem is the desire to somehow replicate a more humid, hotter environment so the tea will age faster, but that is not so easy, and the risks of failure also increases dramatically when you pursue such projects. I am an advocate of simple solutions, such as, say, adding a bowl of water to a storage cabinet, but anything more and I’d be weary. If you do pursue such projects, monitor the changes very closely. Mold can grow on all kinds of places, but on tea cakes, they generally start at the end of the stems, so watch those carefully. They can also be in some corner of your storage unit in that long forgotten tuo sitting in the back – and that can fester and kill your whole stash.
You can never really replicate the storage conditions of a giant warehouse with hundreds of jians of tea. Just today I was walking by Lam Kie Yuen and saw them loading up a truck for delivery. There were probably 200 jian of puerh in that truck, meaning there were close to 17000 cakes in there. Storage that amount of tea and storing 20 at home are not the same thing, and they have decades of storage management experience to back them up. So, proceed carefully, and if anything goes wrong, don’t panic. Airing out the tea for six months will solve most of the problems.
I was going to meet Tim from the Mandarin’s Tearoom today at this place, but by the time I got there Tim had to go already, so missed him. On the menu today:
1) Some random, new puerh that’s pressed into these chocolate shaped squares. Awful, awful tea. Tastes like green tea, and completely lacking in any sort of real aftertaste. It’s probably Lincang tea. Not sure of its cost, but this isn’t going to end well. Avoid newfangled pressing techniques, really.
2) Chenyuanhao 07 Laobanzhang – this tea is a disappointment. After last week’s pretty awesome Yiwu, I was expecting quite a bit, but this tea, well, isn’t that good. It’s not awful, but it doesn’t compare to the Yiwu offering. Well, I guess Mr. Chen does spend all his time in Yiwu overseeing his productions there, because clearly he wasn’t in Lao Banzhang.
3) Mid 2000s private pressing Yiwu from some shop in Macau. This is a private pressing, made with probably Yiwu materials. It’s nice, expensive, but also a bit off – it’s a bit rough and thin, and not very interesting. The person who brought the sample said this is not how it usually tastes, and we suspect the prolonged wetness in the weather recently has something to do with it. I wouldn’t buy it based on this one tasting, but maybe there’s more to it than that.
4) 2003 Henry Trading “Serious Formula”. Hou De had this tea for a little while. This is not a bad tea. It’s punchy. This is a naturally stored version. It’s still relatively cheap, I believe, for a lightly traditionally stored version, but I’m not sure how much it is now for the natural storage ones, but I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper than some newfangled gushu cakes from 2012. It’s nice, but there are lots of teas like it and so if it’s expensive at all, might not be worth the trouble.
5) 1992 Brick, unknown origin. Nice, decent aged taste. Not the best thing in the world, and considering it’s a brick… not much you can ask for. Supposedly a private pressing, although seems a little early for that sort of thing. I only got to try the tail end of the tea, so my comments on this is skewed.
6) 1950s Red Label. It’s hard to comment on something like this, since it’s THE benchmark for all subsequent teas. This is probably the driest stored Red Label I’ve had – no hint of traditional storage. It’s very refreshing, still, and quite nice. Reminds me of some of the gushu stuff that you can get now, but of the best quality – really a tea that is worth drinking, but maybe not at the price that these things now go for. It was brewed a bit weak. Nevertheless, good tea, obviously.
For the past few months I’ve been spending some Saturday afternoons with a couple who run a small tea shop and who press their own cakes every year. The wife is the 3rd generation from a tea family, and they have been in this line of work for a long time, with the tea to go with it, I should add. I enjoy drinking tea with them, partly because unlike lots of people in the tea business here, they’re quite willing to share their thoughts on particular teas frankly. I drink a lot of samples of various things with them, since it’s always good to get second and third (and sometimes more) opinions on teas.
Yesterday I went as usual, and had five teas, in chronological order of when the teas are supposed to have been produced:
1) 2010 Youle, producer unknown, private pressing – nice, strong, a bit rough, but pretty good tea, if it weren’t so damn expensive (something like 700 RMB for a cake)
2) 2008 Chenyuanhao Yiwu Gushu mushroom – awesome, juicy, thick, very Yiwu, maybe slightly too soft in approach, but very good and full. Stored in Malaysia throughout, it still tastes young, probably because it’s a mushroom, but it’s going to turn a corner soon and it’s going to be a good tea.
The Henglichang in a cup
3) 1997 Henglichang Bulang. So we meet at last. This is a sample from a friend, and I believe the whole cake is now sold out. There are lots of reviews online, so colour me prejudiced. The tea is bitter, very bitter, without the bitter transforming into anything sweet. It is not traditionally stored, as some have suspected – it has the colour, but none of the taste. Something is weird, and my friend commented that it might be a mix of different teas pressed together to make something look more aged. We stuck with it for many infusions, although the later ones we only had a small sip each. There’s no real complexity and offers none of the surprises of a well aged tea. After trying this, now I know why this tea is a complete unknown this side of the Pacific. There are lots of options for late 90s teas, and this one isn’t a representative example of a good one.
4) Early 90s Yiwu from David Lee Hoffman. David Lee Hoffman probably needs no introductions. I’ve had a few teas from him before, usually coming via friends who send me samples of what they bought, although the last time I tried his teas was before he started the Phoenix Collection. I can’t seem to find this on his tea list, and I think it’s this thing. This tea has very little taste, and what little it does have suggests something no older than 3-4 years. It has a very thin body, no aftertaste, and no real aroma to speak of. Calling this “tea” is a bit charitable. There are two possibilities – either you believe Hoffman’s claims that this tea is from the early 90s, in which case you should never buy aged teas from him because (judging from this and other examples I’ve had) his cave is where puerh goes to die, or you don’t believe his age claims, in which case you shouldn’t be buying this in the first place. Either way, the conclusions are the same. I don’t care how many years he’s been in the business, but I’ve never had a tea that tastes anything like what a puerh can be given his age claims. You’re better off buying something three years old from Yunnan Sourcing.
Top right – Henglichang, bottom right – Chenyuanhao, left – Hoffman
5) 80s 7582 cooked. This tea has been naturally stored, and frankly, not terribly interesting. It’s nice, smooth, tasty, and the leaves were originally relatively lightly cooked, but really, I’d rather pay $25 USD for a two or three years old Dayi that has lost its pondy taste than paying hundreds for an 80s cooked that tastes only slightly better. The value proposition is just not there for old cooked tea, especially if it hasn’t been through traditional storage. It’s for people who like to burn money.
6) 1960s Guangyungong. This is a tea from my friend’s family storage. Stored naturally throughout without ever having been in traditional storage, and it shows. The liquor is a golden colour, and aroma is quite nice and intense with a smooth aftertaste and good qi. Very elegant and pleasant to drink, and much more interesting in many ways than the usually heavily traditionally stored GYGs out there. Too bad it costs an arm and a leg, but it’s very nice tea.
Tea, unless it’s a gift, costs money. So when we talk about tea, like it or not, we have to mention the cost of the tea. When we say a tea is “good”, do we mean it’s good, full stop? Or is it good, for this price? Or good, at any price?
I am guessing when most of us are writing or reading reviews, we read “good” as being “good at this price”. So when someone writes about how a tea is very interesting, stimulating, multi-faceted, etc, and is really good, I suspect s/he is saying that it is really good at the current prices at which the tea is obtainable. It may also be written with no reference to prices at all, and may simply mean that “this tea is good in comparison with others of this type I’ve tried”. There are probably some teas that fall into the category of “good at any price”, but those teas, I’m afraid, are few and far between.
So when I am writing about tea, even when unspoken, I tend to be writing with the idea of “good, at this price” in mind. Some are unequivocally good, others need to be qualified, and when such qualifications are necessary, I usually state them clearly so that there is no misunderstanding or inflated expectations, especially if that’s a tea that can be had easily.
Such is the case with a cake I found recently on Taobao, and then I have briefly recommended on Teachat. This supposed Cheshunhao is basically a white-paper cake, which means that it provides almost no info on the maker. Sure, it has a name, and the seller claims a date, but as far as I am concerned, I’m buying the tea on its merits alone.
When I picked it it was almost a pure gamble. The vendor has a lot of impossibly cheap cakes. This thing’s claim of 1995 is, at best, questionable. Then again, it’s offered at a price that, at worst, represents a loss of $25 USD. I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I were still in the US, but since I now own a magic card that lets me buy direct, $25 isn’t the end of the world.
What I got was a cake that tasted old – old enough, anyway, for it to be more than worth the cost of admission. It has had some traditional storage, but that storage was a long time ago – at least 8 -10 years past. The cake takes like some similar cakes I’ve had from early 2000s, so while the claim of this being from 1995 may be a bit exaggerated, it’s not terribly far fetched – certainly not a three year old tea claiming to be 17. In Hong Kong, if I find a cake like this, it might cost me $80-100 USD. So, this price is very, very good, and the tea, while it has its flaws, is quite drinkable.
Is it the best tea out there? Heck no. I told TwoDog about this cake, and he bought a cake (or more?) for himself to try. He reports the tea also as being more than worthwhile, but he also found a lot of foreign objects in it. I haven’t yet – only a bit of human hair, which is almost de rigueur for older cakes that are cheap. The leaves are long and big – too long, in fact, and has a lot of woody stems. That aside, it’s not too bad.
What I would recommend this cake for are the following: 1) quaffing at the office, 2) drinking if you want something that tastes aged and does not break the bank, and 3) getting acquainted with something that has had a touch of traditional storage without an overpowering sense of storage mustiness. I think this cake fits the bill for those jobs, and I would strongly recommend it – based on the cake I tried and so long as it stays at this price.
Why do we store puerh? Why do you store puerh?
Let’s say you consume 10g of puerh a day. That’s a pretty generous amount for most people, since you’re likely to drink other kinds of teas, and 10g for personal consumption, assuming you don’t drink with others on a very regular basis, is quite a bit. So in a year, that’s 3.65kg, or just around 10 cakes of 357g each. In other words, to satisfy your annual puerh consumption of 10g a day, you need 10 cakes. If you are sitting on 100 cakes, and quite a few of us are, you are sitting on a ten year supply of tea. Clearly, that’s not tea meant for immediate drinking.
So many of us, if not almost all of us (shu drinkers who buy one or two cakes at a time and only re-up their supply don’t count) are buying puerh to age. There are of course a few possible reasons why that’s the case. The first, and is probably the most often cited one, is because we want to drink aged teas, but don’t want to pay aged tea prices. If we look at what the aged tea price involves, I think we can break it down to the following components
Aged tea price = original tea cost + time value of money + storage costs + scarcity premium + additional value of aged taste
So, naturally, a cake of tea that cost $100 in year 1 should, theoretically anyway, cost a little more in year 2, because the opportunity cost of forgoing the investment income from the $100 plus the storage cost should be worth something. In this current environment, the opportunity cost is pretty negligible, unless you happen to be a financial wizard. Storage cost, depending on your location, is always non-zero, but is also relatively negligible. So in year 2, your tea might be worth $102, and in year 3, $104, so on so forth. Of course, you may feel that a fairer measure would be inflation-indexed, so maybe you should benchmark the opportunity cost to inflation, rather than the returns on treasury notes. That might bump it up another percent or two, but still, not a whole lot.
The other things, however, are the kickers. The first, scarcity premium, is a real problem. For example, for teas that are well known but which were relatively limited in production, the price of the cake can be driven almost entirely by this premium. The Yuanyexiang that was made famous by a bunch of magazine and other writers online took off that way, and the prices are now something like 1000 RMB, for a tea that really isn’t all that great, even now, ten years later. When I bought them, it was almost 200 RMB. That was six years ago, and I thought it was pretty expensive. Has the tea improved so much that they are now worth 5x as much? No. It’s all about scarcity, and the fact that there are more people chasing the tea than there are teas available, so the prices keep going up and up, even though in recent years folks have started chasing other things and its price rise has stagnated.
We see similar movements in teas from regions that are considered good and low in production volume. Lao Banzhang old tree teas, for example, are in that category. There isn’t much of it to begin with, and so now anything that has a whiff of Lao Banzhang in it is priced astronomically, even when new. A lot of times they’re not even very good, or simply fake (using teas from neighbouring villages, etc). While the quality is there for the real stuff, a lot of it is not of that quality and is instead something inferior, but the scarcity premium is applied anyway.
Then there is the aged taste term, which I think is what we are all actually looking for when we store our own teas. We want our teas to age, and to age well, so that twenty years from now we have nice aged teas to drink. Many of us, especially those of us from or live in Asia, got started in this hobby because we tried incredible aged teas, and want to replicate that experience. The problem with this is twofold. The first is, in a lot of cases those aged taste may not be what you’ll end up getting in the end. Storing crap is not going to land you with a well aged tea, because crap only age into aged crap, not aged nectar. Picking out teas that will age well is not easy, and there are conflicting theories as to what will make a good aged tea. That’s a difficulty.
The second problem is that there are lots of risks with aging, and it has real costs disassociated with the time value of money and the storage costs. For example, you run the risk of ruin – mold, fire, flood, mice, children, among many other possible bad things that can happen to your tea. Some are recoverable, others not. A kid drooling on your cake is probably ok; the same kid decorating your cake with permanent marker, not ok. I know of at least a handful of friends who stored teas and have met unmitigated disasters during the process. It’s a real threat, not imaginary.
There are two other problems related to this. The first is one that I think will start manifesting itself in the coming years – some areas of the world just aren’t very good for storing tea. Kunming, for example, falls into this category, and I think some places, like Los Angeles, will as well. Hster’s samples from the Bay Area are not promising either. However, these things don’t show their colours until you’ve tried storing it there, for years, before they become apparent. Also, exact locations in the house, where the house is situated, and other micro-climate issues may affect the tea, positively or negatively.
The other problem is more fundamental – that the aged taste may not be to your taste. This, I think, is a real risk among many who come into this hobby not through the old tea way, but who start out drinking young teas and then only occasionally have access to one or two samples of older teas. Such drinkers might have a great appreciation of what younger puerh offers, and may very well be a very sophisticated drinker of young puerh. However, if they buy lots of tea, by definition not all of it will be consumed, and when aged, they might not be to the taste at all.
I’ve encountered folks like this in China. Some can tell me, with great precision, which village a tea is from. However, for the most part, they drink younger (10 years or less) teas on a regular basis, and have little experience with older teas, regardless of provenance or type. So they can get confused when presented with something older, aged in a more humid climate (not traditionally stored) or not of single village origin. For drinkers like this, I think the fun is in trying to figure out where things are from, in learning the different characteristics of the villages, etc, and not so much in the aging process. I’m not sure if it’s such a good idea for them to buy a lot of tea to age, because, frankly, they might not end up liking it.
To many, this is of course anathema to what puerh is about – puerh needs to be aged, and I generally agree with that. We do also need to recognize that the hobby is changing a bit, first from traditional storage to the proliferation of home natural storage, and now, to a different way of enjoying the hobby – trying to figure out origins, terroir, etc, things that are generally absent from the older teas because they were almost all big factory blends, unless you go all the way back to pre-1949 teas. I do think there’s a need to recognize and perhaps even separate the different sides of the hobby. When we say a tea is good, do we mean good now? Good later? Good to age? Under what conditions? For whom? I’m pretty sure a bitter, smoky tea stored for decades in, say, Alberta, is probably still going to be bitter, smoky twenty years hence. How many twenty years does one have in a lifetime?
The best and the rarest teas that you’re ever going to drink is most likely to come by serendipity, unless, of course, a few hundred thousand dollars to you is spare change that can be blown on tea. For those of us not in the 0.05%, that’s not really an option.
Thankfully, these chances to drink nice tea come more often than you think, especially if you hang out with the right people and get to tag along when someone with a lot of tea happens to invite you over. Or, you can get lucky.
During a recent visit to a friend’s place I was given a 3/4 of a puerh cake to examine. I was told that this was given to them by one of their moms, ostensibly for stomach issues. The cake looks like this
The center is loose because I had to pry it open to see the neifei. Unfortunately, the neifei decided to stick to the surface leaves that I pried open, instead of sticking to the leaves underneath. Either way:
And closeups
And the back
When I saw the cake, I thought this is something very old. There are traces of a bigger ticket on the surface of the cake that fell off. Everything about the cake, from the type of neifei to the leaves to everything, suggests to me that this is something quite old. I was tasked with taking it home and trying to determine what it is.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a back story for this tea, other than that this is a cake from a family that’s been in the US for decades, and that some member of the family (the grandfather, I think?) was a customs officer in Yunnan before the war. Ok, sounds good.
Now, I do not profess to be an expert in antique-era cakes, namely cakes produced prior to the nationalization of the tea firms post 1949. I’ve had somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen examples of these things, at various places in various conditions. Prices for these things these days are astronomical – a full cake, retail, would probably set you back about $100,000 USD. That’s not a cheap tea, and one brew will easily cost $1000 or more. These are not teas that mere mortals drink, not on a regular basis anyway. They also do not offer the greatest bang for the buck. But, you try them because they are what they are – rare teas that offer a glimpse to the past, because they offer unique tastes and qi that other teas simply do not possess. So many things have to happen for these teas to survive – and chances are, many of these aren’t even the best examples of teas, because the best ones have long been consumed. So, take it for what it’s worth.
It is in that spirit that I tried this tea. After all, I had no firm idea what it is. Searching around, I think the very faded neifei looks very much like the horizontal ones used by Tongqing hao, with the few characters that I can make out and the border decoration. The tea brews dark, very dark, like they are supposed to.
The taste is very hard to describe – the first few infusions have a very strong, unique taste that I find to be common among these very old teas. It’s smooth, and full bodied. The tea is still very slightly bitter, with a clear cooling sensation down the throat. The qi is strong, soothing, and obvious. Very often you see people bandy about qi as if every tea has it – well, not really. This is what you’re looking for when you drink a tea for qi, and when someone tells you that the 10 years old cooked puerh they were drinking has qi, well, please take it with a grain of salt. This is what good, strong qi should be. There’s no faking it.
It’s really rather luxurious drinking this tea by myself. The only other time I had an antique tea mostly for myself was when I had Tongqing at Wisteria, but there their tea was loosened up years before, so the qi and the taste were both less immediate. This tea, for some reason, is slightly more compact than other antique teas I’ve seen – possibly because it’s never changed hands in the past decades and has been stored in a drier environment than Southern China. The leaves are very brittle, and break on command. In retrospect, I probably should’ve been more careful peeling the leaves away to check the neifei, but at that time, I had no idea what this was.
Teas like this fade quite quickly – within about ten infusions the initially intense taste will die down, but what replaces it is a very consistent tea that lasts much longer, with the same throatiness and soothing sensation. In some ways, I think these antique teas have gone over the hill a bit – they are not as strong as, say, a Red Label. On the other hand, there’s a soothing calmness to these antique teas that make them very attractive. Twenty or thirty infusions later, when the taste from each individual infusion becomes very weak, I grandpa’ed a few more cups of the tea, which also allows for good shots of the wet leaves. You can see the tea is still brown, not black, and the leaves are not stiff or carbonized in any way – they’re still very flexible. Also, unlike cooked puerh, they retain their shape and consistency when lightly rubbed.
And finally, you can boil these things. Boiling old teas will yield a strong jujube taste, but once you do it, the tea is spent and there’s nothing left to do with it other than send it to the garbage bin or the compost pile.
Two kettles later, I called it quits. I think I wrung everything there is to wring out of these leaves. Is it great tea? Yes, maybe, depending on your perspective. It’s not as exciting as an oolong or a newer puerh. It’s not as impressive as a 30 years old puerh. It’s not as fragrant as a green tea. It does, however, possess an old man’s quality to it – it has depth and strength. This is also probably the most potent of the antique teas I’ve had – again, might have to do with its storage conditions in the United States, rather than Southern China. Having said that, it’s not a tea you’d drink every day, or even every month. It’s also not a tea you buy to drink, unless you have too much money to burn. For the approximately five grams I had, this tea cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1200-1500 USD. In other words, it’s worth more than its weight in gold. Having tried it is already good enough.
Taiwan Beer is so good, I had to buy a whole case and had it shipped express to Hong Kong
Just kidding
Puerh is different from most teas in a number of ways, but one of the traits that it shares less with tea (other than liu’an) and more with wine is that puerh holds resale value, at least in the compressed form. When you have a cake of puerh, you can resell the tea to someone else quite easily, and if you have held it for a while and the cake is famous, the cake can resell for quite a premium. I was talking to some friends last weekend about tea while we were drinking together at a local teahouse, and they mentioned that they bought some Yellow Labels back in the day (about 10+ years ago) for 500 HKD a piece. That tea is now easily 20k HKD depending on the condition of the cake, so it’s quite a markup over the years. While they may not be able to fetch that kind of price, it is quite safe to say that someone who bought tea twenty or even ten years ago would’ve made a lot of money keeping it.
This is drastically different from most teas, which, upon being sold, holds little value. Sure, you can resell 200g of whatever oolong you bought from some online shop probably for little loss if you grew to dislike the tea or simply want something else. Try doing that with 2kg, or 20kg, however, and you’re in real trouble – it’s no longer feasible, and chances are nobody will take it off your hands without a substantial discount. With puerh, that illiquidity haircut is much lower than that of other teas.
This also means that when you buy a cake of puerh, you’re also paying the premium that comes with the liquidity of the underlying asset – the tea itself. When you spend 15k HKD to buy a cake of Zhenchunya, for example, you know that you can quite easily resell the tea to someone else for pretty much the same price. This is also one of the reasons, I think, why teas from Dayi tend to trade at a premium to other factories. Of course, with Dayi tea we more or less know what we’re getting, and there’s definitely a “trust” factor involved here. However, there is also the case that Dayi teas are among the most liquid of puerh teas on the market today, which therefore commands higher prices. This is why there’s the very strange phenomenon, observed by friends in the mainland who deal tea, where one jian of Dayi tea costs more than 42 loose cakes (Dayi jians are all 6 tongs now) of the exact same thing – the jian is more valuable because 1) the packaging of the whole jian gives it one extra layer of anti-counterfeit measure and 2) the jian is the basic unit of trade for tea traders, whereas once you’ve broken up the jian you have to sell it retail, and there just isn’t all that much demand, retail, for this sort of tea.
So when you buy an aged cake, one of the things you’re paying for is this resale premium. You are, in other words, paying for the ability to sell it at a later date. What if you can strip this value away and not pay for it?
Well, there are ways, one of which is to buy broken up pieces of cakes, which are always substantially cheaper than the whole cake itself. Some of these, when you can find them here anyway, are quite tasty and well worth the value. Another option is to buy cakes that are damaged in some ways so that they are no longer sellable in the same way a whole cake with original wrapper, etc, can be sold. Some of these were used as samples. Others were just damaged. Still others… who knows. For the end user of tea – drinkers like you and me – this is something that matters very little.
One of the cakes I acquired recently is in this vein – cheap (relatively speaking) aged tea because it has no wrapper, lost a decent amount of tea (it’s about 300g instead of 357g) and just generally not very appealing looking. It doesn’t mean it isn’t aged, and it isn’t tasty – it’s just no good as something to be sold to someone else, so the only people who’re going to be willing to buy them are people like me – drinkers.
You can see this is typical Menghai factory stuff (the neifei is “submarine” i.e. under the surface of the cake) with a layer of finer leaves on the face of the cake, and on the back (and inside) rather big leaves. The tea is not particularly great or anything, but it is superior to many of the loose, broken pieces that you can find, which tend to be a little lower in quality. Also, this being a whole cake, it provides a nice reference point for the age and the type. The seller claims this is about 20 years old or thereabouts. The information is, at best, sketchy. The tea has been through some traditional storage, but that was definitely a while back, and the time spent on the shelf of the seller’s store has made it rather mellow.
With teas like this, is there any reason to pay full price just to get a wrapper?
If you are serious about tea, meaning that you are spending time thinking about the teas you’re drinking, learning about their nuances, and doing things like reading this blog, then chances are you have discovered that there’s a pretty steep learning curve to tea drinking in general, and puerh teas in particular. With any kind of tea this is hard enough – the different types of teas that exist, with different locations of origins, processing, and grades. The different ways to brew them, and what water to use with what, and the brewing parameters. There are so many moving parts that to say that you have “mastered” tea in any form is a claim that can serve as Exhibit A of human hubris. There’s always a learning process, and there’s always something you can discover about a tea you’ve already had many times before. This is what makes the hobby fun.
There are, however, ways to speed up the learning process and allow you to delve deeper into the art and science of tea appreciation on various levels. What triggered the writing of this particular post is a recent tea session I had at one of the stores in Hong Kong that sells puerh. Over the course of an afternoon, I drank, with some of my friends, about five or six teas. The youngest of the lot was from 1998, and the oldest was about 30 years old. The fact of the matter is, for tea drinking in general, and puerh in particular, it is important to sample a wide range before you really have a clear idea of what’s out there, and what’s possible given the complexity of teas. The tea aficionado is really building a mental library of teas that s/he can recall and compare against. In so doing, s/he is learning about the different teas and whether something is good, bad, or just different.
Likewise, for aging teas, it is crucial to know what you’re trying to get to before you even know what you’re aging for. I see people talking about building their young puerh collection hoping to age them into something great, except the only aged teas they have had may be some third rate 1990s teas that are, at best, poorly stored, or sometimes even none at all. This is not to poo-poo those who have not had the opportunity to try these things, but if you haven’t had a properly aged tea from a variety of storage conditions and starting points, how would you even know what you’re trying to get to? Is it a “wetter” taste that you’re after, or do you want a dry stored taste? Do you want something sweet, or something smokey? We had a brick from 1997 that was still, even as I drank it with the friends a few days ago, extremely powerful. It was strong, smokey, very active, and got us all tea drunk. It was, in other words, a very potent tea, but even now, 15 years after production, it is still too harsh to drink. Sure, it has great aging potential, but how many 15 years do you have that you can just hold on to these things forever? When new, the tea must have been extremely smokey and also super-strong – to the point where many might give up on it all together. Also, keep in mind that this brick has been aged 15 years in Hong Kong, a pretty hot and humid condition. If it’s aged in, say, Chicago, how long would it take to just get the tea to its current condition as I tried it? More than 15 years, I can guarantee you. Then what?
The same can be said of aged oolongs. Many aged oolongs I’ve seen for sale, both in Asia and online, are really terrible teas that have been roasted to death. They are not so much aged but charcoalized. They’re sweet and nice, sure, but they’re also not what I’d consider a great aged oolong, which should be fragrant, active, and isn’t one dimensional. For example, how much sourness is acceptable, and how much is too much? Sure, individual taste plays a part in this, but there’s also some basis for a universal yardstick. Alas, unless you’ve walked through Taipei and tried dozens of aged oolongs from different stores, ranging from the amazing to the terrible, it is impossible to say with any kind of certainty “this is a great aged oolong”.
What I want to say is that while it may be very tempting to just drink lots and lots of new teas and read other people’s blogs, books, and magazines to learn about tea, there’s nothing that will prepare you for a lot of these deeper questions except personal experience. One could theorize all they want with regards to aging potential, durability, etc, but a crucial question is – what will it age into? Is it going to be soft and sweet? Harsh and smokey? Fragrant and floral, or woody and deep? There are many possible endpoints (unknown) in addition to the infinite starting points (known). Unless you have tried many potential endpoints, how, if at all, can you determine which start points link up with which endpoints?
So the life of the foreign tea aficionado is made considerably harder by the lack of availability of good, aged teas, which are distinctly absent from the market. For example, how many versions of Menghai factory (not some other imitation) 7542s from 2000 or before are there on the market? In what condition? How about 8582? Or 7582, of which I bought one cake while shopping, and which one of my friends said “this will be an interesting reference piece”? Or how about Xiaguan’s 8653 from the 80s and 90s? Here you can find them ranging from dry to very wet, with different batches (which all taste somewhat different, if you pay attention) and with varying quality. I certainly haven’t figured it all out – not by a long stretch, but I feel at least I am lucky to have access to things like this, through stores that sell them and friends who have them. It greatly flattens the learning curve of figuring out aging of tea and what not. When your access to old tea is limited to second string products and, in many cases, discards from the Asian market, what does that mean for your learning of how to age teas?
Alas, I don’t think there’s much to be done in the way of solving this problem. This post is, unfortunately, a negative one – I don’t have any solutions to propose, other than to try more tea, except that the availability of old teas is such that this is not really possible as an option. I can count on one hand the outfits that offer aged teas for sale, and of these, I think only one or two are actually worth bothering with. So, until then, I’d advise travel to parts of Asia with good, aged teas, as a temporary remedy. There really aren’t many other ways, unfortunately.
