A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘aged puerh’

Purchases

June 14, 2012 · 6 Comments

Taiwan Beer is so good, I had to buy a whole case and had it shipped express to Hong Kong

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Just kidding

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Not paying the resale premium

May 18, 2012 · 12 Comments

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.

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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.

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With teas like this, is there any reason to pay full price just to get a wrapper?

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The learning curve

April 26, 2012 · 30 Comments

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.

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The value of old tea

April 13, 2012 · 3 Comments

I had an opportunity to drink some old tea the other day with the King of pots and some others. It was an interesting experience, going through the decades and trying something that’s your grandfather’s age. During the conversation, one of the things that inevitably comes up is the price of tea – how much such a tea might be worth on the market now, for example, and how much standard bearers like the Red Label is going for these days. A well stored, well aged Red Label might cost something like $200k HKD (prices vary wildly depending on who you talk to, condition of the tea, etc), which is about $25000 USD. Per gram, we’re talking about $70/gram, so a pot of Red Label using 10g of tea is probably going to set you back about $700 these days. Antique teas that are older than 1950 are going to cost you three or four times more. So, at what point is a pot of tea worth $700, or even $2500?

Nicolas’ notes on the Blue Label captures this really well – he thinks the tea he had is probably 10 times better than a 2010 tea, but the cost is 200 times more. Is it worth it then? By that measure, probably not, although by that measure, the only tea anyone should ever drink is probably a nice, dependable Yunnan black tea that costs $5 a pound. So clearly something else is going on here.

I think one of the things that we love as tea drinkers is the variety that teas offer, and there is a premium that we pay for access to that variety. It can come in the form of different types of tea, different terroir, different season, different processing, and different ages. Of these, however, the price differential is quite wide, and age is, by far, the most expensive type of “variety” that anyone pays for. Is it then worth it to buy very old teas?

The answer to that clearly depends on whether or not you have money sitting around. As Nicolas mentioned, if you have lots of money, then buying a tea like the Blue Label is no problem. If you only earn $30000 a year, then buying a tea like that is pretty stupid. Given a choice between a family vacation and the tea, the person who has to choose may very well choose the vacation. For the person who can have both, however, that is no longer a problem.

I think as tea lovers it is very easy to fall into the trap of wanting a particular tea badly because others have told you it’s great, or it’s special, or some such. While many of the much older teas are out of reach of the ordinary drinkers, the impulse is to go for everything that is available and priced reasonably. The problem, at least for my readership here, is this: the supply of good, reliable, well stored old tea to the English speaking population is really very limited, much of it more or less discards from the Asian market, or at least the second tier stuff. The reason is quite simple – because the market that can bear such prices remains primarily in Asia, and I think many people would balk at paying, say, $1000 for a cake of 90s tea. Yet for the more famous makes, that’s what the market rate is. Even for early 2000s teas that are well known, prices are also astronomical. As I mentioned recently, a big market for expensive teas is the gift market here. For them, cost is not really a problem, and may in fact be a good thing. For the tea lover who actually wants to drink the tea (as opposed to hoard it for profit) this is very much a problem indeed.

One solution is to try to find the odd bargain that can be had here and there, through channels such as Yunnan Sourcing or Taobao – teas that are essentially still cheap because they’re not famous and yet still retains a good quality. To be able to do that and to discern quality in not-famous teas, however, is no easy task. This is further compounded by the lack of good, aged teas for comparison purposes. If you don’t even really know for sure what a well aged puerh that’s 20 years old tastes like, how can you pick out a good 5 years old tea?

While I can probably afford at least something from an earlier period, increasingly I find myself not wanting to spend such sums, preferring instead to use it for other things. There are simply too many substitution goods out there for me to find it worthwhile to chase down earlier teas that are great in some way or another. For $2000 I can buy a good cake of say early 90s tea, or I can use it for a variety of things such as kilos of good aged oolongs, and a decent teapot, and a gift for MadameN, and a trip to Taiwan, all together. Do I really want that early 90s cake that badly? I personally don’t, even if I have the money to spare. I can’t even say I’ll enjoy the puerh more than I do the aged oolong, so why should I spend that much money on such things? I also derive great pleasure in the act of hunting down teas and finding things that are out of the way. If I really want that cake, I can march down to the shop tomorrow and buy it, but I’d rather find obscure teas that are good. Maybe that’s what distinguishes those of us who treat this as a hobby and those who take it more as an investment or a business. We do it for love, not treasure.

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The retaste project 7: Best Tea House Brick

September 28, 2011 · 4 Comments

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This thing was one of the earlier purchases I made in terms of puerh – bought about 10 years ago. When I bought it it was already labeled as “Preciously stored old raw brick”, with a nice wooden box to go with it to convey the preciousness of the thing. I remember back then it was pretty harsh. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I tried this tea – it was probably at least four or five years ago. In the meantime, it’s been aging peacefully in this nice little box, hopefully getting better.

One of the earliest things I’ve learned about puerh (not early enough, apparently) was that there’s an order to the world of puerh. Cakes were best, tuos were next, then there are the bricks, and finally there are the other random stuff. Bricks, in other words, were basically at the bottom of the totem pole – crap, in other words. This brick more or less confirms that theory, because it is filled with crushed leaves. Other than the nice surface

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the rest of the brick can best be described as sawdust.  There’s not a single whole leaf in the thing after the surface layer.

The taste is actually quite nice now – it is aged, and definitely has that aged taste to it, but not with a nasty streak of bitterness that it used to have. While I wouldn’t call it mellow, it is not terrible either. The problem, really, is in the longevity of the tea – because of its sawdust nature, it doesn’t last very long. Ten plus infusions later and it’s giving you tasteless water. What’s the point of carefully aging it if it won’t last?

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These days bricks are more hit or miss than before, when it was a sure miss. Very often bricks are now made when the producer has enough stuff leftover but not really enough to make a cake run, or if they sorted out the secondary/less desirable leaves and make bricks out of it. There are exceptions, but not too often.  Which is why I almost never buy bricks.

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Looking for a base

August 7, 2011 · 10 Comments

I had tea two days ago with two new friends in Hong Kong here.  It was a pretty interesting session, with exchanges of ideas of the question of aging.  One of the teas we had was a Mengku Yuanyexiang which was provided to me through a friend.  This particular sample was stored traditionally, and exhibited a taste that the two friends said they had not encountered before in this tea.  Considering that both of them have had various versions of Yuanyexiang before a number of times, this is surprising.

One of the most important thing that we all agreed on, I think, is that taste in a puerh is fickle, and changes constantly.  Mr. L, for example, mentioned how he showed some friends from up north that there’s a significant difference between tea that has been properly aired out versus tea that has not.  In the case of tea that has been through traditional storage, the process of airing-out is quite important in making the tea taste good when drinking it.  Many who dislike traditional storage don’t know that breaking apart the cake and letting it sit for six months will greatly enhance the mouthfeel and the taste of the cake, and draw conclusions about traditional storage based on an erroneous understanding of the process and the result.

Likewise, even for teas that don’t go through traditional storage, the taste of the tea changes all the time.  The condition of storage in each individual home, or in different cities, will alter the tea in obvious ways rather quickly.  One hurdle for many newcomers to puerh is to get past that veneer of taste.  This is something that I’ve written about before, but it still bears repeating.  Chasing taste is futile.  Mr. L told me a story of him buying a cake of 7572 back in the day from this one vendor here, and loved the taste.  When he went back to the same store to buy a whole tong, what he got was something different – still 7572, but without that taste he liked.  The owner insisted that it was the same batch, and he had no reason to doubt that claim.  Turns out, after much searching for years for that same taste, that it might have been because that one cake was stored outside a tong that made a difference — the tea soaked up the storage smell of wherever that owner’s storage unit is, whereas the tong didn’t get as much “air time”.  So, chasing such things get be quite futile, and expensive.

This is also important for those of us who rather enjoy the taste of some young puerh – just because you like it now doesn’t mean it’ll turn into something you’ll like even more.  In fact, among those who love the floral and sweet and fragrant flavours of a young puerh, the aging process can be a real disappointment.  It is really quite important to try real, well aged teas of proven vintage and provenance and to know whether or not you even like that taste to begin with.  If you do, great, store tea.  If you don’t, why bother?

It has been proven again and again that many currently good tasting teas often don’t age all that well, whereas a lot of nasty, sour stuff can turn out to be quite decent over time.  I’m not saying only bad tasting tea becomes great when they age, but current taste and future taste are, in and of themselves, not particularly related.  What’s more important is what we call “base” here, which means, roughly, the underlying strength of a tea.  Without such a “base” a tea is doomed to mediocrity, and I think this applies not only to puerh, but all types of tea.  It’s quite difficult to describe without confusing people how to identify “base” in a tea, but I think it is safe to say that it involves physically activating multiple areas of the mouth, throat, and body.  It has nothing to do with whether or not a tea is sour, bitter, or sweet.

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The retaste project 4: 2001 Mengku Yuanyexiang

August 2, 2011 · 6 Comments

This is a tea that I bought along with the last tea I had, the 2002 Mengku.  Back in the day this was a hot cake, and although the market is now calmer, the tea’s price is a good 7-8x what the 2002 Mengku costs, even though they were made by the same factory and only one year apart in the production date.  I tasted this tea back then right after I purchased it, and the notes are here.  I remember my assessment at the time being that it was slightly nicer than the 2002 version, but not by a wide margin.  Back then the price difference was something like 10-20% difference.  Now, of course, it’s multiples.

This is the thin paper version, and one of the annoyances of teas with such thin wrappers is that they survive storage very badly, especially if they’re out of the tong, which is the case here.

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I realized that I opened the wrong cake, but I just took a look again at the original cake I had in my 2006 post and this one, and in terms of appearance, they exhibit no obvious differences.  It’s the same tea.

The cakes are very distinctive in shape, as are all Mengku factory cakes.  They have a flat surface front and back, especially back, and the edge of the cake is a straight wall, rather than a sloped, tapered edge like Menghai ones.  The cakes are quite unmistakable.  The cake is made up of mostly smaller leaves.

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The cakes did get darker in the five years since I last checked them.  There was some greenness when I drank them last, now they’re more of a blackish colour than anything else.

Now, although the thin paper has always been advertised as “dry stored”, many of the samples I’ve had from other sources in the past five years of this tea have mostly exhibited a “lightly traditionally stored” taste.  It’s not immediately obvious like a normal traditionally stored cake, but once you really savour the tea the storage taste does show up here and there in the shadows.  Most of the tea came from the same place, I believe — one batch of tea that was mostly sold through the Best Tea House in Hong Kong.  Cloud, who originally posted about this tea, also mentions the existence of a lightly traditionally stored version of the thin paper tea.  While no doubt the completely dry stored version surely exists, I don’t think I’ve actually ever encountered it even at the Best Tea House.  Maybe it was all snapped up.

Because of the storage condition that the tea went through, the colour is a bit on the darker side, especially when compared with the 2002.  The colour here is quite consistent with what some others have posted before, for example on Phyll’s blog back in the day (if you’re alive, contact me!).  Given the depth of my cup and the slightly dark lighting conditions, plus a few years of extra storage in Hong Kong, they’re not far apart.

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The tea is actually quite nice, indeed a notch better than the 2002.  Because of the storage difference (the 2002 I have doesn’t seem to have gone through any sort of traditional storage) the taste of this Yuanyexiang is a bit older, and has traces of some older teas I’ve had before.  I’m sure that given another five or ten years, it will turn out quite nicely as a good, aged tea to drink.

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The storage taste is only barely discernable, if you know what you’re looking for.  When I brewed it hard later on with long infusions, it becomes slightly more obvious, and sniffing the wet leaves, likewise, gives a hint of the traditional storage smell.  The leaves are still far from dark brown and exhibit youth in them.  This is a good tea.  Whether or not it’s worth the price of admission now is a question that’s really open to debate.  I tend to think that teas like the 2002 Mengku is a far better value for money, mostly because it’s so much cheaper, widely available, does not have the “fame premium” that you need to pay for the tea, etc, and still have roughly the same quality.  I also know some people who, having stored this 2001 Yuanyexiang for a few years, decide that they don’t really like it much after all.  That’s the problem when “chasing” famous cakes — just because someone else likes it a lot doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy the tea, especially if you plan on storing it for future consumption.  In some cases, you can try reselling them, but in others, you’re stuck with cakes that you don’t want to drink.  It’s a tough call.

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Old tea

June 28, 2011 · 5 Comments

I’m in Beijing at the moment, visiting my friend L and drinking tea with his friends.  One of the teas I had today was a mixture of a some bits and pieces from a Mengjing mushroom tea from Republican days, and a good chunk of leaves from a 60s Blue Label iron cake.  While the tea is quite nice and has obvious qi, at the same time I can’t help but think that all the cost of this tea is not necessarily worth it.  After all, at over $100 USD for that brew if you were to pay for it, the tea is nice, but not that nice.  The qi is certainly something you don’t get with younger teas — an aged tea of enough years is going to be different from your young stuff, no matter what.  Yet, I’m really not sure if this is really worth it for a lot of people.  So many people chase this stuff so that now they are priced out of pretty much everyone’s range.  But if you drink it, and compare it to something like say 1960s Guangyungong tea, the difference is not so earth-shatteringly big that it merits the many multiples of price that it commands.

This is really a dilemma not only of aged tea, but all teas in general.  Is that dahongpao that is very good really worth 10x that dahongpao that is only so so?  Sure, perhaps.  At some point, however, every individual will hit a threshold above which they will not go in terms of cost/benefit.  While it is not always a good idea to measure a tea’s worth in how much pleasure it gives you per dollar spent, at some point that does come into play, and at this moment, for me, I think that many of the aged puerh on the market today are simply not worth the amount of money they command for me to want to actually buy them for drinking purposes.  I’m quite happy with my current selection of tea that I possess, and find little compelling reason to chase such expensive teas.  To buy them is to buy something rare and unique, something not easily found, especially if we’re talking about pre-1970s tea.  That rarity, however, commands a huge premium.  The reasons for purchasing these teas quickly leave the realm of “this is a good tea and is tasty” to “this is something that I can use to show off with” or “this is something that displays my knowledge of tea” or something similar.  In my opinion, those are not good things to pay for.  Nor, I think, should we expect that any tea produced today will command a similar level of prices come their 40th or 50th anniversary – the production level is so much higher now than it was back in the day, and so much more care has been put in to preserve these teas, that I think decades from now we will still have a relatively large supply of such things.  The only good reason to buy a tea is because you like to drink it.

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Traditionally stored 2006 Haiwan Lao Tongzhi

April 1, 2011 · 13 Comments

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I don’t really drink stuff like this very often, but since this tea is among those that I think some of us have had, back when it was fresh off the press, I bought one for fun this time in Hong Kong to try it out.  The reason I got it is not because this tea is amazing, rare, or anything — far from it.  Rather, it’s because it’s been traditionally stored.  People often wonder what this process does, exactly, to a tea.  Here’s a good example of it.

I still remember seeing this tea in Beijing when I was living there, and it sold for about $3 USD.  This time, I paid close to $25 to buy it, so it felt pricey.  Then again, buying tea in Hong Kong is never going to be that cheap, but if you go troll the tea markets in China, I’m sure you can still find dry stored versions of this cake selling for probably $10.

Haiwan tea factory was founded and headed by Zou Bingliang, who used to be the head of the Menghai factory, and is credited with having co-invented the process to make cooked puerh.  Like a lot of others who were in leadership position at Menghai, Zou struck out on his own in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I think among the slew of factories that started around that time by Menghai alum (Guoyan, 6FTM, Haiwan, etc) his outfit is probably one of the better and more successful one.  Lao Tongzhi is pretty much the base cake for the factory — the lowest tier mass market tea.  I remember trying the very young version of this tea, and it tasted like any big factory, newly pressed cake — bitter, rough, but powerful in the hard hitting sort of way.  The tea was not something you’d particularly enjoy drinking, but hope it will get better with time.  An interesting thing to note about this tea is that it says “nongxiang xing” on the left — intense flavour type, literally.  I have, however, never seen any other types of LTZ cakes, so I think this is all just silly marketing speak.

Since this cake is traditionally stored though, it’s not your run of the mill 2006 vintage young puerh.  Right away, the smell is obvious when you open the wrapper.  The cake also looks visibly darker.

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There’s a reason puerh is a heicha (black tea).

There’s some white frosting on the cake, although nothing too serious.  It’s not white all over, and once I crack it open, the interior is quite ok.  Traditional storage can be overdone — as you sometimes see cakes that literally are covered in white hair.  This is medium.

The tea looks dark too, when you brew it.

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I believer it’s very important to educate yourself with stuff like this to get a sense of how a 5 years old, traditionally stored tea tastes like.  If you don’t know what it’s like, then it is very easy for someone to come by and tell you that the tea is actually 15 years old, and you would not be able to tell the difference.  In the cup, the tea is still a little sharp – the storage taste is quite present, and needs time to fade.  The underlying bitterness still exists, although having aired it out for a week now since I got back, the tea is already somewhat sweeter.  There’s decent body, nice aromatics that range from what Toki would call granny powder to dried leaves.  Good, solid traditionally stored pu that needs some time to age.  If I were to buy more of this, I’d just leave it around for a few years, and I think the tea will then progress to something quite nice.  It is also necessary — after all, part of the process of storing a tea traditionally is to tuicang (退倉) process, to both reduce the immediate smell of the storage as well as further aging the cake.  Stuff that just came out of the basement is not meant for consumption.

The wet leaves are various shades of green and brown, a typical look for this sort of storage condition.  Note how none of the leaves are black or stiff — they should retain flexibility, if they are well stored.

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All in all — a pretty enjoyable drink, I think.  More importantly, this tea has gone from pretty undrinkable to pretty drinkable within a span of five years.  I’m pretty sure that if you pick up a 2006 LTZ from Kunming, it’s still going to be fairly nasty.

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Tea with friends

March 13, 2011 · 6 Comments

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It seems almost frivolous to talk about tea when Japan has suffered one of the biggest earthquake in recorded history.  I was on my way from LAX to Hong Kong while it happened, and when it struck I think I just got in the air, eventually flying through Tohoku, completely unaware that 35,000 ft below me was death and destruction on a scale that is hardly imaginable.

Traveling with me was some teaware.  I have virtually nothing here in Hong Kong to make tea with, and so I transported a few things so that it will be possible for me to host a few friends for some tea.  It is always difficult to devise a course of teas for people who have varying levels of experience.  In the group of five (not counting me) was one MadameN, a serious tea friend, and three relative novices.  Left to our own devices, the serious tea friend and I will probably drink a parade of young and old puerh.  MadameN normally humours my habit, to a reasonable limit.  Then you have the novices, who may or may not react well to any or all of the teas, and it’s always a bit of a crapshoot because of that uncertainty.  I settled on a menu of a green tieguanyin, a slightly aged baozhong, traditionally stored Guangyungong bits, and in the end, an impromptu Golden Needle White Lotus, courtesy of said tea friend.

It is always fun to drink tea with people you’ve never done so before, especially if they’re encountering something for the first time, or have very little experience with what they’re drinking, because all of a sudden you hear all sorts of new perspective on the drink that you’re so familiar with, and end up learning more about it in the process.  The green tieguanyin is the most familiar to all, I believe, and goes over as well as one would expect such things to do.  The aged baozhong received mixed reviews, not least because the tea itself is odd — aged, but not too much so, and the liquor was a nice reddish colour.  It is slightly sour, with that vaguely chemical smell that sometimes accompanies aged oolongs.  It was likened to paint thinners as well as meicai (preserved Chinese vegetables), which is quite apt, I think.

The Guangyungong bits elicited some interesting comments, ranging from a certain hollowness, to varying responses on the bitter/sweet balance in the tea, and the earthiness of the brew.  Some were very attuned to the aftertaste that both the baozhong and the GYG present, while others were less aware of their existence.  What I always find most interesting though is that what tea drinkers see as good tea is often not necessarily considered good by others.  Sometimes there’s a lot of navel gazing when tea drinkers talk to each other about teas, and forget that for most people, none of the teas we drink are actually good (i.e. taste good, in a juicy, flavourful way), but perhaps merely interesting.  The Golden Needle White Lotus, for example, does well up front, but when stressed to a slightly longer (1.5 minutes) steep alongside the GYG, it’s obvious that the GYG is sweeter and better.

What’s most important though is that everyone had, I think, a good time.  Tea is best drunk with friends, and if I could, I would do this every day.

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