A Tea Addict's Journal

Entries tagged as ‘skills’

Pictures

May 17, 2007 · 4 Comments

Today I present you with three teas:

Oh wait, it’s the same one.

I didn’t even take them under different lighting conditions — I merely photoshopped them.

Which one’s the “unedited” one?

You can see how different they look… and I’ve noticed that even in natural sunlight, the colour can be off.  It’s a very annoying thing with digital cameras, I suppose.  The lighting is never quite right.  If the white balance of the camera is off when the picture is taken, then you might have really distorted colours.  When buying on the internet… colour changes can really change your perception of a cake.  It’s not like anybody even has to try to fix the pictures — without actively trying to doctor them, it can still come out being different from the real deal.

Unfortunately, that’s one of the risks of buying online.  When I try to show my cakes, I try to make it so that the colour isn’t too far off from what I see with my naked (well, glasses enhanced) eyes, but it’s never quite 100%…

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Grandpa style of tea making

April 23, 2007 · 4 Comments

I drank tea the grandpa way today.  That’s because my grandfather drinks his tea this way.  Essentially, it is the simplest way a Chinese person makes tea — throw leaves in mug, add water, drink.  Add tea leaves when the tea gets watery.  Repeat.

This is also how most people in China drink their tea throughout the day.  Whether a cab driver, an office worker, or a house guest — tea is served simply, in a cup and with no other teaware.  Most of the time even a pot is not used.  Drinking the tea using your teeth as a leaf-filter is a skill that everybody learns quite early on.

Since I have no gaiwan with me yet, not having bought one here, I brewed tea this way today.  Even though it sounds simple, there are some things one must watch out, or risk getting a nasty tea.

One must first watch what kind of tea is being brewed… and add the leaves accordingly.  It is always a temptation to add too much leaves, especially when it’s a rolled oolong, such as a tieguanyin or a Taiwan tea.  They expand greatly, and while they look like not a lot of tea when dried… it gets big, very fast.  Since the tea sits in the cup while drinking and is therefore brewed all the time it sits there, too much leaves yields a very bitter cup very quickly.  Therefore, low amount of leaves is essential.

Water temperature… it depends.  If green, not too hot is fine, but if you’re adding water to existing tea, then it must be hotter to compensate.  For all other types of tea, I think the hotter the better.  It won’t keep warm very long in this sort of arrangement.

Also… I like to keep some tea remaining in the cup and refill before I drink it all.  This keeps the flavour stronger brew after brew.  Otherwise… after one or two cups the leaves will lose all their flavour.

Then it’s just a matter of taste… how strong you want your tea, how long before you add new leaves, etc… a cup will last a day.  After a while, it just becomes flavoured water, but if the tea is good, the flavour goes pretty far.  I’ve seen people using very big (1L) water bottles with about 2g of green tea leaves in them.  I’ve also seen people using maybe a 350ml bottle with 1/3 full of leaves… it’s all about personal tastes.

I drank a Dahongpao today doing this, and even after many infusions, the tea remains sweet.  I added leaves once, but not a whole lot.  It was just easy drinking… and much less work than gongfu.

Definitely a different style, but nonetheless, enjoyable.

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On storage, again

April 14, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the first things I did when I returned from the US to Beijing is to open the cupboard that holds all my puerh here.

Sorry, it’s a little messy, but I leave all the bags open so they all breath, and between that and finding enough nooks and crannies to store all the little pouches of samples that I get, it gets a little messy.

On the right you can see two bowls — one on the top shelf, one on the bottom. Only the top is filled with water right now, but when I left Beijing for Hong Kong, I filled both up to almost the brim. I figured in the dry weather here some water won’t hurt.

When I got back and opened the cupboard, I expected two things. First, the water from both bowls should be all gone. That was exactly the case… it all evaporated, as it should since I was gone for more than a month. All that was left was a lot of salt deposits, testament to the high mineral content of tap water in Beijing. I figured leaving water in the cupboard can hardly be a bad idea given the dry weather here.

The second expectation was that I would smell a strong whiff of tea. Before I left, whenever I opened the cupboard, I can smell that scent of young, green puerh. It’s pretty strong, and I think it smells pretty nice. In fact, when I wake up in the morning and open the door to the living room (where the tea cupboard is) I can often smell the tea faintly. It obviously seeps through the not very tight doors of the cupboard and into the room.

When I got back and opened the door, however…. there was very little smell. I smelled a whiff of sweetness — that sweetness that you get from a 3-5 year old dry stored puerh. It’s not the same raw green smell of a very young puerh, but rather something that has aged a bit. It’s a difficult smell to describe, but anybody who’s had some slightly aged puerh, especially of the Yiwu variety will know what I’m talking about. Even that smell, however, was fairly faint. This was unexpected since the tea was left undistrubed for quite a while. I thought the smell would accumulate instead of dissipate given that the door would be closed all along.

So I added water to one of the bowls, and left the tea in peace except for when I was getting stuff from it. I have a humidity indicator both in the cupboard and in the living room. Throughout the week, the humidity in the living room was significantly higher than the humidity in the cupboard. My meters don’t give precise readings, just general “humid-dry” scale. But the difference was obviously significant enough so that it’s not a product of some mechanical error.

After a few days, I have noticed that the smell that I was expecting has returned… the teas in the cupboard once again give off that young puerh smell that I thought I was going to get when I came back. The humidity of the cupboard was still lower than the room. Even though I opened the door for a while to let in the air in the room, thinking that it will equalize the humidity in the two places, humidity in the cupboard remains stubbornly lower.

This has led me to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the teas are actually soaking up the water in the air in the cupboard, contributing to the lower humidity there despite efforts to equalize it. After all, humidity in and out of the cupboard should theoretically be the same if I left the cupboard door open sufficiently long, and since it’s really not a big thing, you would think that amount of time is pretty low.

The return of the tea smell, or rather, the more pronounced nature of the smell, leads me to think that with higher moisture, the smell of the tea gets stronger — the aromatics in the tea get released into air, I presume, with water. Is that a good thing? I’m not sure, but since they say you need moisture in the air to age the teas, I would think this is only a natural development and not a bad thing. I did notice that in Hong Kong, my rather moist cakes had a strong whiff of tea to them. I didn’t think much of it then. Now I think there’s a correlation and probable causation.

The other thing is that since the bowl of water was replaced, it has lost about 15-20% of its contents already in the past week. This is a little faster than I thought.

All this makes me think that the slightly more moist air that has accompanied my return (it rained for two days, and there’s also my human additions such as steam from the shower, me boiling water, etc) is giving the teas more water to work with.

This would also explain the teas that have been on shelves in Maliandao for too long — they are usually devoid of any smell, and you have to breath into them to get any whiff of tea out of them. In Hong Kong, you never need to do that — you stick your nose up to the cake and you can definitely smell it. Concensus has it that Hong Kong stored teas are probably better tasting than Beijing ones. The few Beijing stored cakes I’ve had indicate the same… they’re not very good and don’t age much. Teas that people have brought back from places like Xinjiang, despite their advanced age (10+ years) taste terrible.

I might try adding another bowl of water, but I think that won’t make much of a difference as there should be a natural equilibrium of how much water gets released into the air, depending on the humidity inside the cupboard. One or two bowls shouldn’t change that very much.

I’d like to think I’m moving the tea in the right direction, at least in keeping the tea a little room to work with, rather than drying them out as they would if I didn’t put any water in the cupboard. For those of you who live in drier climates — have you experienced something like this before? When you open your cupboard, can you smell your tea? Does it get stronger when you’ve had a prolonged period of moist weather? Have you had teas stored in two different places… and have them taste different after a while? Curious to know.

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How do you make puerh?

January 4, 2007 · 2 Comments

How DO you make puerh?

Conflicting versions abound. From my understanding, puerh making is very simnple — picking of the leaves, kill green, some rolling, and sun-drying. There it is in its entirely, raw puerh maocha is done. Then you steam it (enough to soften the leaves) and press it. Then you have compressed maocha.

Puerh, properly speaking, isn’t quite finished until it’s gone through at least some fermentation. Raw maocha just compressed is more like green tea.

Technically, I think, maocha can be classified as green tea, because it goes through the essential processes that green tea goes through, but there’s a crucial difference in processing temperature, which allows something in puerh tea to retain its bioactivity and continues to ferment naturally (into something that tastes good) whereas green tea of our normal kind is processed at very high temperatures, and the tea gradually loses flavour over time and turns into something nasty.

However, some now process puerh with additional steps such as the withering of leaves and the intentional breaking of leaves (to encourage fermentation before kill-green). This, generally speaking, is what you do to tea that is destined for oolong. This process creates honey or fruity like aromas, along with lower bitterness and astringency (relative to raw puerh). It makes a nice tasting tea right away… which will mean the tea is easier to sell. It also means you have something more like oolong, and the aging prospects…. are suspect.

There are other raw puerh that are processed like green tea, and tastes like green tea (a la longjing type green tea). They might not age as well either. The jury’s still out on the long term prospects of these teas. Xiaguan mixes some of them into their tuocha, but it’s only a certain percent, not 100% of it. What happens to these things 20 years from now?

This is what we were debating in the Best Tea House today with Rosa and Tiffany. We don’t really know. Nobody seems to really know. So many developments are so recent that nobody really could figure out what’s a good way of making puerh, what will really age well, what won’t, etc. I’ve heard at least 10 different versions of what makes a tea a good tea for aging. The only common point so far is that it should be strong, somehow. If the tea is mild and weak right now, it won’t do well (Yiwu is weak in many respects, but not in chaqi and thickness of the tea). Is that the only indicator of a good raw puerh?

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Different locales, different tastes

December 22, 2006 · 5 Comments

One of the things that became really apparent on my trip back here this time is how differently people taste teas here. Let’s start with the brewing.

In Beijing the brewing is usually done with relatively little effort and concentration. In the gaiwan the leaves go. In pours the water. Out comes the tea. There’s some variation in how the tea is done at each store. Some storekeepers will do flash infusions with no regard to how much tea is in the gaiwan or the temperature of the water. Others will let the water sit a bit. However, usually the first method is dominant. This has to do with local tastes, where they prefer lighter, cleaner tasting teas. Anything too heavy is deemed to be either too bitter or no good. Ditto for anything remotely wet stored. Some will go as far as to say that anything that has been stored in Fujian or Guangdong is bad.

Then, in Hong Kong, the tea brewing is very different. This is most apparent with Tiffany at the Best Tea House, who takes a lot of care in both the temperature of the water, the amount of tea, and the way the water is poured. She lowers temperature for brewing after 3-4 infusions for almost all teas, but especially the older ones. However, the same can be said of some of the other places I’ve been to (though not all). Jabbok brews teas also in a fairly careful manner. Sunsing a little less so. The people at the Yue Wah National Products store are more like mainland brewing…. a little less attention than I like.

The tasting requirements are also different. Everybody talk about mouthfeel, but what exactly do you want from the mouthfeel is not quite the same. In Beijing, it’s about how thick the tea is, huigan, where the bitterness is, etc. Flavour is also important, to a certain extent. In Hong Kong, the overwhelming first factor that people seem to talk about is whether or not a tea is smooth. Smoothness, it seems, matters a lot to them. Some teas will be considered smooth by most people, but some of the tea drinkers at the Best Tea House still go “oh, this is quite rough”. Requirement in that side is high. The other thing they look for is “throat feel”, also something that is rarely discussed in Beijing (I seem to be one of the only person who talks about it, no doubt a HK influence). Where bitterness is, etc, is rarely mentioned. The thinness and thickness of teas is talked about in conjunction with these other factors, but not really the first thing they mention.

This leads to very different ideas about what makes a good tea. This is most evident in puerh, but also in other teas as well. I am still trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes a good puerh, and having conflicting concepts doesn’t really help. At the end of the day, it will take experimentation and careful observation. I’d tend to think that the Hong Kong way is right — because they’ve had more experience dealing with it. But then, maybe it just comes down to personal taste.

What do you look for?

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