Bearsblog

Tea with New Friends

2012-01-19T23:43:00.000-05:00

Tea with new friends or new friends with tea? New tea friends!

I recently had a chance to have Bryan_Drinks_Tea and Lerxst2112 visit. They live no small distance away, and in addition to making the significant effort to drive to me, they brought good tea and a fancy camera!

Enjoy Bryan's salacious tea photos below, which depict us drinking either a roasted Taiwanese gaoshan oolong (green clay teapot) or a mix of 60s-80s Guang Yun Gong pu'er (red clay teapot). We also drank a tenacious 80s 8582 that Bryan brought along, but he focused on brewing it instead of taking photos--to great success.

We ended the evening with a delicious dinner at a local Sichuan restaurant, where our guests were kind enough to try some of the stranger fare we offered them, alongside some "easier" menu items.

Join us for gongfu! 1/28 at Aristeacrats in Lawrenceville, GA

2012-01-12T18:29:00.000-05:00

Come celebrate Chinese New Year with some good pots of tea! Fans of Chinese tea in the Southeast, converge!

Well, perhaps the reach won't be quite so far, but with a few passionate tea souls in Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee, I am hoping we can take our love of tea offline and meet for some gongfu occasionally.

Jessica of Aristeacrats has graciously agreed to host our first occasion at her location in Lawrenceville, with the agreement that we get water service for gongfu as long as each of us pays for a pot of tea (just keep the dry leaf for later!)--which is how it's done at the famous Wisteria Teahouse in Taiwan.

Please comment with your email if you're interested. I screen posts, and will not make your email address public.

Let's do this!

As featured in the LA Times!

2012-01-12T18:16:00.001-05:00

The LA Times ran a little story the other day (also picked up at the Monterey Herald) about the tea group that meets in Los Angeles, back when I was still living there. It's a good article, and I give my thanks to Rosanna Xia for doing her best to be true to our experiences drinking tea.

The one thing the article plays up with exaggeration is the cost of fine teas. The best of the best, as with any epicurean pursuit, is very, very expensive.

But the majority of the tea we drank at LA Tea Affair was not nearly so high-end. Higher-end than your average loose leaf, but certainly not commonly in the $1500/lb range. When I've had the pleasure to sample such expensive teas, the person or tea shop sharing was munificent in their not charging me a thing. And that generosity amongst tea drinkers makes our hobby so great.

Likewise, sharing has been central to the success of the LA tea group. Tea is best shared with others, and that sharing rarely comes with a cost or debt of reciprocity.

2009 Dayi "Dragon Pole" Shu Pu'er, courtesy of Shah8

2012-01-08T21:50:00.001-05:00

The holidays for most Americans have finished, but for many Asian-Americans, they have yet to begin. Lunar New Year, aka Chinese New Year, aka Spring Festival (春节), aka Tet, aka Seollal (설날), begins on January 23 and lasts fifteen days.

The upcoming lunisolar year is a dragon year, specifically water dragon; Dayi's "Dragon Pole" shu, then, is the perfect way to add some water to a dragon and see what this new year might be about. Thanks to Shah8 for leaving a sample with me!

The photo above shows the gongting "tribute" grade leaf. These are very small, tippy buds whose small stature requires a skilled fermentation expert to create and whose potency requires my full attention to not overbrew.

The first few infusions are dark and syrupy thick--heavier fermentation shu. The flavors, though, combine earthiness with an almost roasted character, with flavors of carob and coffee.

Middle infusions, like the one below, have a very soft mouthfeel and more "chinese medicine" kind of notes.

Late infusions become woody and sweet, and it gave out rather quickly.

None of the infusions had much aftertaste to offer, but what flavors remained in the mouth were pleasant and light.

Supposedly Dayi's signature shu pu'er, it impressed me less than the An Xiang shu, but I can't say for sure it wasn't my own brewing inadequacy with leaf this small. Oh, if only I had a whole cake to practice with!

The 2009 version runs about US$21 on Taobao before proxy fees and shipping, $53.99 with shipping from Dragon Tea House (ebay seller based in China).

2007 Dayi "Secret Fragrance" Shu, Courtesy of Shah8

2011-12-21T17:09:00.004-05:00

Everybody has secrets. Secrets are priceless to oneself, and when those entrusted with our secrets choose to sell them, the transaction comes at a high cost.

But when you make several wan (万, meaning 10,000) of cakes out of your secret and sell them, is it really still a secret?

暗香 (àn xiāng) means "subtle scent" or "hidden (as in obscured) fragrance". I don't know if "secret" is a good translation (care to opine, Marshaln?). "Dark fragrance" or "underhanded fragrance" are also possibilities, if unlikely ones.

Also, there was a Chinese movie by the same name in 2009. Perhaps drinking this tea while writing inspired the author to use this name?

Whatever the translation, the name clearly suggests that we take a good whiff of this tea and explore the scent, an act that can yield some unpleasant results when the object of our olfactory sense is shu pu'er, which can often smell like that pesky neighbor's clogged and funky drainage ditch.

The scent of this shu pu'er's wet leaves was pleasant, certainly. Mulchy and wet without smelling dirty, that "forest floor after the rain" euphemism that changes "smells like dirt" into a fond recollection of sierran enjoyment. It also carried a "secret/hidden/subtle/dark/underhanded fragrance" of cake.

The taste also carried this clean and balanced trait, woody, mulchy, and peppery. Velvety textured in the mouth, it made me salivate--a very "active" quality for a fermented tea to have. The only downsides were a thinness of texture and aftertaste, although the mineral, rocky aftertaste gave the tea an appreciably clean finish.

The fragrance, expectedly, changed little over infusions. The cake quality became a fruitiness as the tea thinned and tasted sweeter in later infusions.

Some of the fragrant qualities of the tea arise from the more lightly fermented large leaves, visible in the photo above.

I found it a very enjoyable tea, and thank you to Shah8 for sharing this sample with me. If you're interested, Dragon Tea House on ebay sells the cake for US$48 (free shipping), or you can find it on Taobao for less than a third of that price before shipping and proxy fees.

2002 Menghai Factory 7542-208

2011-12-16T12:25:00.000-05:00

I used to think our friend Su kept her tea a little too dry for my taste. I felt that way until trying her 7542-208, supposedly a special production that contains higher quality (i.e., older tree) leaf.

The tea above neither looks nor smells traditionally stored, of course. Su doesn't run a wet storage facility. But it does look rather well aged for a 2002 tea, and the strong, sweet and woody aroma of the dry leaves foreshadows the deliciousness to come.

Bitterness appeared quickly, as did some smoke early on. Yet, the smoke and the aromatic woodiness of the tea reminded me of cedar planks, a trait I associate with Banzhang and some Pasha teas, a good sign that this might indeed have some older arbor leaves from those areas. It moved into more complexity, some "younger" floral notes floated above an almost leathery taste.

The aftertaste was thick and lasting, and the tea remained velvety soft in the mouth. Yesterday I drank this tea with a friend, and I used too much leaf, making some dryness appear early that later softened. The tea is potent enough that a little less leaf than normal might better highlight the complexity.

We drank probably 20 infusions of this tea before retiring for dinner, and it held up impressively.

As usual, many thanks to Su for providing a great experience. This was one of the best stored examples of early 2000s pu'er I've had the pleasure of tasting.

"Lipstick Red" Aged Sheng from Su

2011-12-04T13:18:00.000-05:00

Su sent over a cake of a tea that she indicated Malaysians know as "lipstick red" for the color on the wrapper. Will Y. and I decided to share the cake and sawed it in half.

Upon opening the cake, I noticed it had the familiar compression of Shuangjiang Mengku tea factory productions: a compression that leaves an inner ring (visible immediately below) but keeps the edge of the cake thick (farther below).

I was delighted to think this could be an example of one of the factory's first productions before they broke off from the state-owned China Native & Natural Products (CNNP) firm. I have not had an example of this factory's tea from the years before their privatization, and so I felt some delight when noticing this.

Another way I know that the tea is not by Menghai Factory is the inclusion of these two fellows: an unthreshed piece of rice and a tea seed. Menghai Factory has, in my experience with their aged teas, not allowed such riffraff into their cakes.

Describing the tea in one word, I would say "fruity." The wet leaves smell like raisins in a box, which brought back the memory of my childhood when a small box of raisins was in my lunch bag seemingly every single day of elementary school. Moreover, the taste--aside from its Lincang-proving "rancid in a good way" sour notes--is of dried berries or raisins for many of the infusions. Davin even called the tea a "holiday pu'er"!

Somehow it lacks the earthiness I associate with older pu'er. None appears to be developing here. In fact, the tea doesn't taste of other typical aged pu'er flavors such as wood, mulch, etc. And yet, it tastes like pu'er in a dark grainy sweetness. Later it shows the remainder of its youth in greener flavors like fresh pruned bushes and bitterness.

The tea has an aftertaste of moderate length, and though the mouthfeel is thin, it travels all around the mouth. It lasted a full kettle of water without weakening too much, which I appreciated.

I'll be curious to hear from Su if my guess hit the mark. Nonetheless, I am thankful for the opportunity to try a tea that matched the fall season so well.

Experiments with blending

2011-12-03T07:58:00.005-05:00

The recent teas I tried came from 10g (+/-) samples. Because I tested each using 7g in my gaiwan, I had about 2-4g of each left. I decided to review the results of the first brews to see which teas I thought might blend well.

Here they are again, in short:

Douji 2011 Nannuo

Good: aroma, flavor, bittersweetness (gan), camphor
Bad: thin texture, flavors could be stronger in later infusions

Douji 2011 Mengsong Mao Cha

Good: heavy in "middle flavors"
Bad: weak flavor and texture

~~Douji 2011 Red Da Dou~~ (thrown out!)

~~Good: ??~~
~~Bad: green tea pu~~

Yangpin Hao 2011 (2010?) Jingmai

Good: mouthfeel, savory bass notes, interesting flavors, some cooling/camphor
Bad: gives out quickly, becomes unpleasant when it gives out, a bit sour at times

Dayi 2011 7542

Good: well rounded, potent, aftertaste lasts once it appears
Bad: smoky aroma, can brew sour, no initial aftertaste

I decided to make two blends, the first a 50/50 blend of 7542 and Douji Nannuo, and the second a 50/50 blend of the YPH Jingmai and Douji Mengsong. I didn't quite have enough of the Jingmai for the second blend, so I threw in about 0.5g of the 7542, of which I had too much.

Here's what I learned:

Blending is not a straightforward science

Two teas with good traits mixed in equal portions does not make a tea that has all their traits equally highlighted. Some of the finer notes of the older tree maocha disappeared into softening the harsher notes of the plantation tea. While the effect was good, it tasted like "less than the sum of its parts".

A little plantation tea goes a long way in a blend

Being stronger in bitterness and off flavors, a little plantation leaf goes a long way. To the same effect, old tree tea requires less correction, I think. The 50/50 blend of Nannuo-7542 tasted like 75% 7542 and 25% Nannuo, and the 47.5/47.5/5 blend of Mengsong, Jingmai, and 7542 tasted like 85% plantation and 15% Mengsong. I think an actual 85/15 or 75/25 blend of these two teas would have been a better place to start.

This made me think of the many, many times vendors told me that a pu'er was a blend of X (plantation) with a little bit of Y (old leaf). My taste buds made me skeptical of such claims, because very little if any trace of old leaf traits could be found in those teas. Now I wonder if the vendor told the truth, but the producer did a poor job of blending. Ah, speculation.

It's not easy, but it's fun!

Blending stuff makes fun work out of the odds and ends of samples that otherwise get thrown in a big jar of leftover samples (to later become what MarshalN calls "house blend").

2011 Dayi 7542

2011-12-01T19:47:00.000-05:00

Finally, I tried Dayi's elusive 2011 production of 7542. For some reason, Dayi was stingy with their releases, and when I was in China this year, no vendor had enough 7542 to let anyone sample.

It seems Dayi corrected the situation, and a sample was included in the China Cha Dao pack as an example of plantation tea.

And it is! But Dayi has a reputation for blending reliably good, ageable tea--a reputation which, in spite of the innumerable competitors now in the pu'er market, and in spite of rumors of processing tea at too high of temperatures, appears to have withstood all tests. At least, it has so far.

Steaming leaves in the gaiwan smell of tobacco and smoke, and although the smoke doesn't appear in the flavor of the tea, the tobacco does, along with a more herbal element, savory and sweet like tarragon. The texture is oily.

Other flavors appear later, include a sour/citrus element, some butter, a heaping dose of bitterness in later infusions. Concomitant with the bitterness, the mouthfeel and aftertaste appeared in the middle infusions, lasting longer with subsequent infusions until the tea outlasted me, around infusion 14 or so.

The bitterness makes the tea unpleasant to drink now, but the signs are there that the tea should, hopefully, have enough "oomph" to calm into something decent after aging. With no lack of "decent" sheng pu around at similar or lower prices, this particular example doesn't merit my wallet. But for someone who wanted factory-style tea, this tea would suffice.

2011 (2010?) Yangpin Hao 'Jing Mai'

2011-11-28T20:35:00.001-05:00

Today's tea, the 2011 (2010?) Yangpin Hao Jingmai mountain cake, is another sample from the set of sheng pu'er offered by China Cha Dao with the expressed intent of contrasting plantation "small tree" teas with older arbor "large tree" teas. This is one of the small tree examples, and it is not a tea that the vendor carries. Perhaps this indicates the vendor's opinion of the tea?

The leaves, as pictured in the photo above, are of smaller size. This is typical for teas from Jingmai, whose tea trees are of a smaller leaf varietal. One other trait of note is the heavy stripe-rolling treatment given the leaves.

The first infusion has a hard-to-place aroma, and "leafy" seems like a terrible description, but I can think of no better word for the "baseline" smell of raw pu'er leaves when they are very young. It offers a brothy taste, meaty and astringent, with a cooling aftereffect in the mouth. It moves onward to taste more sour, but with a mouthfeel the lasts and extends to the root of the tongue.

At times chocolatey and alkaline, and in later infusions becoming thinner in texture and offering mostly bitterness and hay, the tea falls into the "ok" category. It appears to be well processed enough, but of a medium quality material that, although it will likely improve with age, may not become spectacular. If this is the cake I suspect it is, it sells in China for about US$8 per 380g cake, a reasonable price given the quality.

Douji 2011 Red Da Dou (红大斗)

2011-11-26T15:22:00.000-05:00

No manufacturer of tea, however well regarded, is infallible. Yiwu Zhengshan Tea Company, more commonly known by its (only?) brand, Douji, has produced many teas I have enjoyed. Even those Douji teas I thought un-spectactular, none did I suspect were poorly processed.

Unfortunately, today's tea is such an example.

I rather enjoyed the 2008 version of this blend, red "dà dŏu", roughly meaning red star, red north star, or red big dipper. The leaf grade/quality for this year's production compares poorly with it, however. Many small bits of leaf, twigs, and older leaf bits (huang pian) comprise the blend--material that was not hand-harvested.

The smells and tastes of the tea are green tea. This surprises me because usually tea blends' having multiple raw material sources usually results in any one poor source being balanced by other better sources.

How to tell? For one, the flavors say green tea: vegetal, buttery, mild. Young sheng pu can taste bitter, but the bitter of this tea appears in the wrong place: the front of the mouth. It also appears without the delicious feature of shengpu bitterness, which is that it fades into sweetness.

The most interesting note the tea gave was Parmesan cheese. The most interesting occurrence during the tea session was the appearance of this little stinker on our rubber plant.

Sort of appropriate.

Anyway, here are the leaves, which along with the soup, prove that looks can only tell so much about a tea. That is, they don't look bad.

2011 Mengsong Maocha (sourced from Douji)

2011-11-25T16:00:00.000-05:00

Mengsong is a huge region comprised of the mountain range west of the Lancang River and east of Menghai city. It includes pu'er tea regions/mountains Nannuo, Hekai, Naka, and others. When I see a tea labeled Mengsong made in the past few years, I wonder if the tea leaves came from one village or many, and if this village was not famous enough to merit renaming it Nannuo, Hekai, or Naka, for example.

This 2011 sample was given to Jerry of China Cha Dao as a gift, and he decided to share a limited number of samples as part of a sample pack whose aim was to contrast presumably old tree tea with the lesser-regarded plantation tea.

If you were wondering about that odd orange twiggy thing in the photo above, it appears to be some sort of dried moss. Finding this stowaway lends the tea a "wild arbor" or other naturalistic feel, and, always skeptical, I asked myself if Douji included it intentionally (hopefully not fraudulently). Here it is up close:

As natural as these tea plants' environment may be, the tea itself disappointed me. Although the leaves are beautiful and the flavor pleasant, I had to brew this tea in long steeps to extract a decent strength of flavor and texture. 7g in a 100ml gaiwan (same as the previously reviewed Douji Nannuo) should offer up enough mouth feel, even if the flavor is lacking.

The tea tasted biscuity, like sheng pu'er tinged with some first flush Darjeeling, but only one or two leaves showed any visible reddening. The flavors are all "middle notes": no bright florals or heavy meaty/mushroom flavors, just middle cut-stem and ashen flavors.

The leaves completely unfurled look beautiful with their thick veins chunky stems:

No conclusion, as I have come to none myself.

2008? Ban Tian Yao (半天腰) Wuyi Oolong

2011-11-24T17:06:00.000-05:00

Like so many teas randomly found in small bags in the various boxes where I store samples, I cannot remember where this one came from, exactly. I can say with some certainty it came during a large yancha order as an extra sample, hence why I place the production year around 2008.

Just opening the bag, the tea offers a smell of roast and raisins. And upon tasting it, I felt glad that I had waited so long; whoever made this tea did a heavy high fire roast. I imagine the roast flavor even stronger two years ago.

The first two infusions offer strong flowery notes with equally strong--too strong--roast, making the florals turn toward bitter/charred flavors. Subsequently, the tea has a combination of roast and flower flavors that remind me of very "bright" coffee.

The energy of the tea and the texture are both good. It has a soupy, brothy thickness to it, something thicker than water but thinner than milk.

Eventually, the roast calms to an enjoyable level and becomes part of a complex group of flavors: grain, floral, raisin, whiskey. But this lasts for only three or four infusions before it becomes bitter and thin.

I have enough of this left to try it once or twice more, and I hope airing out the tea will alleviate some of the less desirable traits. Also, some extra brewing practice would probably help, too. I still feel my gongfu skills are rusty after brewing no gongfu teas during my last two weeks in California.

New Family Members

2011-11-23T16:37:00.000-05:00

I am proud to welcome some new members to the Bearsbearsbears teaware family.

My new kettle, purchased at Maliandao in Beijing. It's a stoneware clay from Fengqing Tang company.

5 new pots and a new (old) tea friend:

Clockwise from the upper left:

Rabbit
This rabbit comes with a sad story. A good friend of mine who recently, unexpectedly passed away owned this rabbit, which we purchased together many years ago when I bought my pig. The rabbit looks joyous from some angles and feral/angry from other angles; sometimes like it jumped in to join a party and other times like it was pouncing on something or fleeing. I have been using this rabbit since it came into my possession as a way of honoring the departed, who I miss dearly.

Hei Xing Tu Pot #1
This was purchased at a friend's shop in Beijing. It was a 90s commission using 80s Hei Xing Tu (black star earth, 黑星土) clay. This shape was originally designed for export, I believe. Will Y. will have to correct me here, but I believe the straight "cannon" spout was for export. So far I have used it to brew aged pu'er.

Hei Xing Tu Pot #2
A larger round pot with a big lid opening, it's telling me it wants to be used for stripe oolong, but this question remains unsettled. It has a beautiful etched mountain scenery design. It is of the same clay as #1; in fact, all pots here are from the same commissioner.

Zhu Hong Ni Pot #1
A higher grade of hong ni with a richer, deeper red. Shape-wise, it looks like combination of Xishi (i.e., the shape named for a famous beautiful woman's breast) and a Shui Ping ("water line", known for the balance between its lid, handle, and spout).

Hei Xing Tu Pot #3
A unique shape, especially in the spout. This diamond shape finds an echo in the handle, which connects to the pot in the same shape.

Zhu Hong Ni Pot #2
I couldn't decide between this pot and the other Zhu Hong Ni pot, so the commissioner told me to take both.

I have no idea for which teas I will use these last three pots. Suggestions?

Douji 2011 Nannuo

2011-11-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

I have finally (finally!) made the transition to full-time living in Georgia. Now, if I could only find some others to join us for tea...

They could have enjoyed the 2011 Douji Nannuo, a pretty decent example of the region. By decent I mean: a well processed, tenacious example exhibiting the flavors of Nannuo Mountain with patriotic fervor.

Leaf from Nannuo is a smaller family member of the "big leaf" (dà yè 大叶) varietal, as shown above. Though small when dry, they expand to an appreciably larger size than plantation teas.

While I cannot say that fresh Nannuo tastes more delicious than aged Nannuo, not having had much of the latter, fresh Nannuo does have some traits I love: a distinctive herbal flavor, like sweet tarragon and anise, a fertile scent, and an easily controlled bitterness that lends the tea much flexibility in brewing.

This particular example's bitterness returns as a sweetness at the back of the mouth, and it even displayed some cool camphor on the lips in the later infusions. It outlasted a full kettle of water, becoming more savory with each infusion. It is very easy to like.

It lacks thick texture, unfortunately, and though it lasts many infusions, later infusions are, to borrow from hobbes, "namby-pamby." But such is the flaw with single-mountain and single-estate teas: strongly idiosyncratic performance that highlights the region's best and worst traits.

As a value question, I would only recommend this tea to someone seeking old tree Nannuo specifically, and I might not recommend more than a cake or two at the price. Douji's pricing always carries some brand inflation.

Though, it is selling on China Cha Dao for cheaper than you could get it in China at the moment. My thanks to them for the sample.

Two San Lin Xi oolong teas from Spring 2011

2011-10-02T02:31:00.000-04:00

During our tea meeting this past weekend, Wyardley and our host, NM, both had 2011 San Lin Xi oolongs to share. WY purchased his from Floating Leaves Tea, where it has since sold out, and NM purchased his from a store in Taizhong (I think?).

We decided to taste them side by side to compare them.

They are pictured below. Floating Leaves is in front of the pink bag on the left, and NM's tea is in front of the other, white bag.

Perspective makes the Floating Leaves Tea look a little larger leafed than it is, though it was larger than NM's. NM's was also a brighter green whereas WY's had a bluish tinge. WY thought his was slighly higher oxidation.

Floating leaves:

NM:

San Lin Xi is a big mountain with many tea fields, but these teas could have been from neighboring farms. They smelled different in their bags (WY's was vegetal, NM's was nutty), but once in the pot they smelled almost identical. Their taste was almost identical too. NM's was thicker in taste and longer in aftertaste, whereas WY's was maybe slightly more floral and less veggie than NM's. But these differences were very, very slight.

The brewed leaves were nearly identical, too. WY's didn't show any additional oxidation that we could determine, either with our tongues or our eyes.

They were both pretty decent, and I preferred NM's but I couldn't say why, other than perhaps I thought the thickness would lend itself well to aging the tea. I don't care much for greener Taiwan oolongs, so the idea of changing them with age is always on my mind when tasting them.

Their sameness, though a bit boring in physical reality, was interesting to think about, that Taiwanese have their tea crafting down to an art that yields very consistent results. Judging gaoshan tea competitions must be rather difficult!

2005? Haiwan Lao Tongzhi Sheng Bing (wet stored)

2011-09-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

"Lao Tongzhi" (老同志) can mean one of two things: "old comrade", as intended by this brand name, or "old homosexual", in Chinese slang. I would really like to make a pu'er cake under the brand "Old Homosexual" and have a pic of Rip Taylor smiling, perhaps confetti would dot the paper. I don't think the Chinese would get it, though.

I think it could work, no?

This sample comes to me courtesy of MarshalN, whom I begged for a sample because I happen to own a similar cake from the year before. I wanted a glimpse into the future. The moldy future, as per the frosty leaf below:

This traditionally stored tea went through its time at a wet storage warehouse, and its release into the market is perhaps premature. Generally, these teas are wet stored for 2 years and then aired out for another long period, perhaps as much as 6 to 10 years or more. 2005 plus 2 is 2007, plus 6 is 2013. But here it is, our little premie, forced into our world still frosted with mold.

In 2005, this cake was known for being a punch-you-in-the-mouth (ow!) sheng pu, powerful, bitter, complex, and with a long aftertaste. And now...?

The first two infusions are mostly mold taste, with some tea flavor appearing when cool. The more interesting flavors appear thereafter, but with the mold taste ever-present above them. It's strong but more like a slap (I demand satisfaction, sir!) than a punch, to keep my violent metaphor going. The "soup" is nicely thick and the aftertaste and afteraroma are decently long. It even lingers at the root of the tongue.

It pleased me to see this tea change into something drinkable and enjoyable, moldiness aside. It would do better with drier storage, and so I'm looking forward to tasting mine again soon to see how it compares.

From the brewed leaves as pictured above, it seems the storage was not too wet; the leaves have not carbonized, and they retain their tenderness and flexibility.

Taiwan Hong Oolong (Black Tea Oolong)

2011-09-24T23:18:00.000-04:00

During our two-week trip to China earlier this year, I had little time to tea shop. Tea shopping in China takes a long time, because a consumer must spend a lot of time sorting:

Sorting through hundreds of shops in tea malls to decide which dozen or more you want to enter
Sorting through the offerings of these shops visually and/or by talking to the employees to find teas you want to try
Sorting through the teas you taste to determine which merits asking its price
Sorting through the asking prices to determine which is worth bargaining down
Bargaining for the tea, if you have the luck to get through steps 1-4

As such, a consumer can feel lucky to actually purchase more than one tea per day of shopping.

As such, I bought relatively few teas in China.

This particular tea I bought as a curiosity. Its manufacture utilizes steps traditionally reserved only for either black tea or oolong tea. My understanding is the tea is:

Picked as though intended to be an oolong
Wilted and oxidized like a black tea
Not given a "kill green" (杀青) process, i.e., frying or steaming, like a black tea
Rolled like an oolong
Roasted like an oolong

The result you see in the dry leaf pic above and the subsequent photos below.

So why go through all this? From what my limited Chinese and translating online has lead me to understand, tea farmers in Taiwan wanted a uniquely Taiwanese product from their leaves, one that could not easily be replicated by the cheap "imitation" gao shan oolongs being imported from countries in Southeast Asia. Also, and merely guessing on my part, they wanted to diversify their product portfolio with a high-end and uncommon product.

So, merely a gimmick or more substantially a delicious tea?

My answer is: a little of column A, a lot of column B.

It is a unique animal, a combination of some of the best features of oolongs combined with a hint of the better features of black tea. It has a very fruity flavor and great aroma, but also rich and roasty.

Given the high degree of oxidation, what surprised me was how different the tea is from both Taiwan black tea and oriental beauty oolong. Taiwan's black tea tends to run in the Assam flavor category, while oriental beauty to me has always tasted like a poor imitation of better darjeeling. This oolong, being made of a different cultivar than Taiwan black tea and processed like gaoshan oolong rather than oriental beauty, has a character all its own that I enjoy better than either of those two.

Its flaws: simplicity and a fleeting aftertaste (black tea/high oxidation trait?), and it lasts only 5 infusions or so, which is more than a black tea (owed to the rolling/unfurling slowing the infusions?) but less than a gaoshan oolong.

I know of no US/English-language vendor selling this kind of tea, and I am unsure what the cost would be. I paid just under USD$20 for 100g, and I can't say if I was "taken for a ride" or not, because no other store in the tea mall I went into had it for sale, so there was no comparing prices.

The store had butcher paper pinned to the wall where customers could write comments, and they asked me to sign. I wrote: "I came in to find pu'er, but instead I bought oolong. They must be Taiwanese!"

Dayi 2007 Yue Chen Yue Xiang Shu Bing

2011-09-14T20:39:00.000-04:00

Another sample from Mr. Jogrebe, it's hard to believe that 2007 was 4 years ago. When Dayi was pressing this "Yue Chen Yue Xiang" ("The older, the more fragrant") tea, I was either in Southeast Asia or just returning to California. Time flies!

The leaves look a pretty consistent grade, with not too many buds. The chunk in the back right shows some really broken leaf, but that was a piece from around the center dimple of the cake.

The tea tastes on the woody end of the shu spectrum, with a black peppery/spicy note. It's middle or middle light fermented based on taste, with a savory flavor and almost milky texture. It had a kind of cooling effect.

Average shu tea, not my preference, as I prefer my blends to have the oomph and soil notes of some darker fermented leaf along with these cleaner, woodier notes. Taking the tea for what it is, it's a decent example.

Looking at the wet leaves, the fermentation is quite light. It looks like a blend of sizes of leaf, but not a blend of fermentations. I.e., it looks like they blended maocha and then fermented it, rather than blending various already fermented shu material.

China Cha Dao Da Hong Pao AAA+

2011-09-11T18:15:00.000-04:00

The last of the China Cha Dao sample pack!

Da Hong Pao is the berobed king of Wuyi tea. Its origin legend says a tea farmer saved the emperor of China from a deadly illness with the leaves of this tea, and the emperor showed his thanks by giving unto the tree his robe, hence the name of the tea, translatable into "great red robe" (or "big red robe" by those with less poetry in their translation--"Grand Scarlet Cloak" for those with too much poetry in their translation).

Other origin stories say that the only real Da Hong Pao tea comes from the varietal Bei Dou Yi Hao ("Big Dipper #1" or more poetically, "North Star #1"), "discovered" by a Da Hong Pao researcher named Yao Yue Ming, who spent much of his life trying to determine the origin of the original Da Hong Pao bush. He narrowed his search down to a few locations on Wuyi Mountain, including Bei Dou Peak, took cuttings from two bushes there which he named #1 and #2 after the location. More on his story as summarized by Guang of Hou De Asian Art here. Legends heaped upon legends, two stories of men saving the dying: one man the emperor via tea, the other man the very same tea bushes via his courage.

Excellent tea legendry aside, what Chinese tea wholesalers and retailers then do shows less magnificence and self-sacrifice. Much tea is passed off as Da Hong Pao that simply isn't. Some of it is crap; naming Da Hong Pao one of China's ten famous teas means it's often the only Wuyi oolong variety most Chinese can name, and much low grade oolong is made under the moniker of Da Hong Pao to supply the high demand for the tea.

Others passed as Da Hong Pao are blends, aspirations by the producer or vendor to balance the best aspects of their best teas, hoping for a gestalt. Yet others simply take their best Wuyi oolong and entitle it Da Hong Pao, as to say, "it doesn't get any better than this, folks!"

Yet other vendors, perhaps catering to a more elite or snobby tea clientele, tell customers that Da Hong Pao is just Bei Dou, quickly relate the story of Yao Yue Ming and explain that for this reason they sell Bei Dou and not Da Hong Pao.

And whichever vendor you ask will point to their tea being the "true" thing: all DHP is really blended, all DHP is really bei dou, all DHP is just the best Wuyi on offer.

For those of you familiar with these stories, what's your take?

So, onto my thoughts on China Cha Dao's higher grade DHP (for thoughts on their lower grade DHP, click here).

Fragrant leaves in the bag have a dark dried fruit smell, which turns into a wheaty/grainy roasted smell when the leaves are rinsed.

I was struck by the very smooth mouthfeel and the oil visible floating like a slick on the top of my cup. The roast and grain/fruit flavors harmonized well. It became sweeter in the second infusion but backed off thereafter, combining fruit with a mild sourness to taste like stone fruit, like apricot. A mineral/rocky taste supports these other flavors.

As far as the body traits of the tea, its thick body oddly left with only a medium-long finish. In fact, I would say has a "medium" sense about it: medium-dark flavors, medium acidity, medium-light fragrance, medium-length aftertaste. Very well balanced, and it really shined in longer infusions, never becoming bitter despite using the entire 10.4g sample in my 100ml gaiwan. Its only flaw is a lack of gan, perhaps caused by its lack of bitterness.

Although rather "medium" in strength, it lasts many infusions without weakening, becoming fruitier in later infusions.

A stellar trait of this tea is how it made me feel. It was the only sample with a noticeable qi, and it was a very strong one. It made me tea-tipsy and was a good complement to my newest music download, an oddball percussion album by Slagwerk Den Haag that's 55 minutes of guys hammering on two-by-fours cut to give different pitches, their staccato hammering creating secondary melodies in the overtones. Trippy stuff for a trippy tea.

Given the look of the wet leaves, which show two distinct colors of leaf, I guess this is a DHP of the blended genre. Also supporting that guess is the balance of the tea, which struck me as an achievement of blending rather than processing.

Da Hong Pao AAA+ costs the same as the Golden Key, which is at the high end of China Cha Dao's Wuyi range.

To recap the sampler, I'd rank them:

Thank you again to Jerry Ma of China Cha Dao for offering this sampler pack.

China Cha Dao Golden Key Grade AAA+

2011-09-09T18:53:00.000-04:00

Continuing on with the oolong samples from China Cha Dao, I decided to bring the remaining two along to tea with the LA Tea Affair group this past weekend. While tasting teas and writing notes and forming my own opinion forms the basis of this blog, writing about tea in a vacuum does eventually feel unnatural. Tea at its best is group sharing of simultaneous individual experiences of a tea among friends and friends-to-be.
We only tried one, the Golden Key Grade AAA+. The entire 10g sample was brewed in a 110ml yixing pot, making for an altogether different experience from my 90-100ml gaiwan at home.

Like the Shi Ru, the Golden Key is rather heavily oxidized and, likewise, reminded me of dancong in flavor and aroma: fruity, floral. Also similar to the Shi Ru, the Golden Key finished more like a wuyi oolong, roasty and masculine. Unlike the Shi Ru, the Golden Key began sour.

It was thinner and everyone commented that it was missing something, and I think this item missing was gan. The bitterness of the tea faded away without a returning sweetness, leaving only an astringent fruitiness behind. This struck some as having a "commercial grade" feel to it, tasting good but lacking some of the body characteristics that take good Wuyi oolongs beyond good and into great.

The Golden Key also gave out sooner than the other teas, giving maybe 4 good infusions before becoming watery.

One sample left, Da Hong Pao, the king of Wuyi teas, and an AAA+ no less! Great expectations...

Six Famous Tea Mountain 2009 "Yunnan Moon" Organic Shu Bing

2011-09-07T19:40:00.000-04:00

Organic shu pu'er is uncommon, even teas certified as organic only by the Chinese organic certification organization, the Organic Food Certification & Development Center, which is in turn certified by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. Perhaps someone can comment here about if IFOAM or USDA has stricter standards?

Personally, I'm not willing to pay a premium for most organic foods, as I have found that most foods grown with care taste the same organic or non-organic, and the conflicting results of studies on long term results of eating organic have left me unconvinced of any health benefit. Mark Bittman's piece on eating better more or less sums up my feeling that eating organically for most people means no health benefit, because they don't change their eating habits away from meat-heavy, fat-heavy, sweets-heavy diets, and that the environment would be a lot better off if we ate less meat and more vegetables. I don't want to go as far as Will of teadrunk.org and give up all meat products, but I think my non-organic eating habits qualify as healthy.

But my thinking there I apply to consumable items grown in the West. Start talking China, where pesticide and agriculture chemical regulation is spotty at best, and I would probably be happier if all tea carried a USDA organic label. Not knowing much about the OFDC process, how often they check up on farmers, and how often the IFOAM checks up on the OFDC, the little cabbage organic label means little to me, but the analysis sheet included with this tea is, at least, a mote of psychological comfort when consuming something that is essentially composted camellia leaves.

So, all that expository explanation behind us, does this OFDC-certified shu pu'er taste better?

No, on the whole it's average. It's woody, not soily, not pondy, and monotone. It has an unpleasant sharpness when brewed strong and not enough depth when brewed weak. No aftertaste, but a camphory effect appears over time. It doesn't last more than 5 infusions.

A tea that is not good and not bad. It would work well with a meal, having enough of the earthy, woody shu flavors to complement a dish without being too interesting as to be a distraction. It would probably do very well in a dark stew in place of broth.

I will likely finish up this sample at work, where such ignorable teas are desirable.

Two Teas from Tearoma: 1996 YCTT Ye Sheng Brick & "1999" 8582

2011-09-06T15:21:00.000-04:00

Will of Teadrunk.org gave me two samples he ordered from the new vendor Tearoma.us: a 1996 "Wild" leaf tea brick and a 1999 8582. Oddly enough, I decided to brew the former Sunday morning, just before the LA Tea Affair group was scheduled to meet, and one of our number had a full cake of the 1999 8582 that he had purchased from Tearoma.

1996 YCTT Wild Tea Brick
This was the tea that appealed most to me when I browsed Tearoma's site. Appearing visibly aged and at an unbeatable price for its age, it seemed almost too good to be true.

The dry tea confirmed it had some age with a hit of the "mold smell" concomitant of 15 years of aging in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and this stinkiness was echoed in wafting steam from the brewed leaf.

This storage smell became a storage taste, the telltale "mold taste" ("mei wei"), along with the straw underpinnings of the "wild" variety leaf. It tasted salty at times, with some youth to the taste in a bitter herb/fennel note. The flavors were fleeting on the tongue, the feeling of the tea remaining on the tongue moreso and longer than the flavor.

The storage taste did not wash away with subsequent brewings; perhaps it will air out over time. This made for a "one note" experience. Not a bad tea, but not a great tea, worth about what they're charging. Perhaps it was just aged poorly or needs more time to air out. Wild leaf is darker to start with and given how wet the tea smells, I still expected darker brewed leaf. The emerald/purple leaves are common for the "wild" varietal.

"1999" 8582
Hobbes of The Half-Dipper already reviewed this tea, and rather than expand upon his review with my own writings, I'll simply leave it with "he's right" and some photos.

One thing I will add is that the "butteriness" he detected I also detected, and it's a marker I associate with "green tea pu'er". There is some green tea/poorly processed sheng pu'er in this blend; the real pu'er flavor kicked in after infusion 4 with longer steeps.

Please note the following signs as to the tea not being from 1999: the stainless, bright white neifei; the 100% fresh, bright, unfrayed ribbon; the neifei being added on later, as though the tea was pressed and marketed with different nei fei for different buyers; the bright green of the leaves; the bright yellow of the liquor. I've had 2003 teas from dry Kunming that look more aged.

China Cha Dao Shi Ru "AAA+"

2011-09-05T17:08:00.000-04:00

The remaining three samples from China Cha Dao carry the grade "AAA+", including this Shi Ru ("rock milk"? Some have suggested "stalactite", but that's rushi (乳石) not shiru (石乳)). These kinds of grades, I'm finding, have either or both of the following psychological effects: it biases the drinker to think the tea is better or it really raises expectations. Will I be biased that this tea will meet my raised expectations?
The tea smells like passionfruit with vegetal green oolong smell and some roasted aroma, very balanced. The taste likewise sits in balance: fruitiness, vegetal, a little roast, ending oily and fragrant in the mouth. Over the infusions, the fruitiness and vegetal flavors take center stage, and the roast stands in the background. It reminds me of what good mainland China Tie Guan Yin used to taste like before it went "nuclear green": halfway between wuyi's thick roasted savory flavors and dancong's thinner fruitiness.

Unlike the other rock teas in the sampler, the Shi Ru has no sourness.

It tastes very well oxidized, and as the brews went on and on, I wondered if this is not a yancha at all, but instead a well roasted dancong! But then, it finishes mineral and thick like a wuyi, and the steaming leavees smell more like wuyi than dancong.

11g in 100ml held up very well to gongfu brewing: the tea lasted upwards of 16 infusions with punchy, very sweet flavor, a difficult task for most oolongs.

So far, this is the best of the bunch, more fragrant and interesting than the Shui Xian at slighly higher a price. I enjoyed being reminded of what Tie Guan Yin was like before contemporary Chinese tastes and modernized production gutted its flavor, but people who like the heavier roasted, savory flavors of wuyi might find this too oxidized/fruity and not roasted enough for their tastes.

2011 Nannuo "Ba Wan(?) Village" Mao Cha

2011-09-05T02:09:00.000-04:00

We in LA are very lucky to have a regular in our midst who travels yearly to China and purchases and/or receives as gifts or samples some interesting teas. Linda of Bana Tea Company has brought us curious teas, such as a black tea made of Simao pu'er varietal tea buds.

During our last meeting, she promised to bring some mao cha (sheng pu'er raw material, i.e., unpressed sheng pu'er) from this year. Today, we sampled a 2011 Nannuo tea from an area called "Ba Wan" (an unfamiliar name to me that I may be butchering).

Despite Hobbes calling it "namby-pamby" and noting that MarshalN simply isn't a fan, I rather like Nannuo teas for their high floral fragrance that floats above their thick, herbal terroir. Nannuo is a flavor and fragrance that is instantly recognizable, but doesn't punch you in the mouth like Bulang or Lincang teas can.

This Nannuo, although a little light from a weaker brewing at lower temperatures (the preference of the purveyor), brought me back to tasting mao cha on the mountain in 2007, watching the Akha farmer's toothless mother walking to and from their bushes, doubled over with the years of hauling that big-as-she-is wicker basket to and from their patches of tea trees.

Thanks again, Linda!

Dayi 2008 "Great Classic" (大经典) Shu Bing

2011-09-03T19:00:00.000-04:00

This was a sample sent courtesy of Jogrebe, America's greatest shu pu'er lover--or, at least, the one who drinks the most quantity of anyone I have come across.

The leaves are medium small, not quite tribute grade. I like this size of leaf because its better examples offer a similar flavor to gongting (tribute) teas but without the difficulty of brewing tiny leaves.

Interestingly, the smell after the rinse is mineral. The flavor is rooty, like jicama or potato skin, sweet and bright lifting up the darker notes of bark.

The compression of the cake seems pretty high (maybe I received pieces from closer to the center of the cake?), which meant the leaves released their flavors slowly and consistently across infusions.

The wonderful thing about this shu pu'er is that, in a genre known for odd flavors, there is nothing odd about it. This is also its biggest drawback: while it suffers no glaring flaws, it offers nothing exceptionally interesting, either. It appears to be unblended, and perhaps being all of one leaf and fermentation prevents it from being complex.

At just under $18, you could do better and you could do worse. Someone looking for lighter flavored shu with no flaws that doesn't require much finesse to brew into something tasty, this fits the bill. For something more interesting, check out its cousins in the brand.

China Cha Dao Da Hong Pao

2011-09-01T18:07:00.000-04:00

The least expensive of the teas from the China Cha Dao sample pack at $23/500g and the only one without a listed grade, the leaves of the gradeless Da Hong Pao are broken/short and dark. It smells very heavily roasted, even when dry.

I used all 11g in my gaiwan, again "Brazil nutting" to put the bigger leaves on top.

To my delight, the brewed tea only a little sour, and although heavily roasted, the roasted flavor never crosses into the "tastes like charcoal" territory. While some interesting floral notes appear in the taste in the 3rd and 4th infusions, and the aftertaste is decent, the tea is monotone.

Eventually, in later steepings the "cheap restaurant oolong" flavor emerges, a sort of "unnatural" sweetness: not artificial, but out of place. It's not strong enough to be awful, but it distracts from the nicer flavors when brewed too quickly. To its credit, although it needs real pushing after the 5th infusion, it does hold up to many long infusions.

At the price, one could buy much worse, for certain. At an "everyday tea" price, it's an everyday tea. After brewing it gongfu, I wonder if using less leaf and longer steeps would be a better way to brew this particular tea.

China Cha Dao Qi Lan Grade A

2011-08-30T15:55:00.000-04:00

"Qi Lan" means "Strange Orchid" and at grade "A" this yancha stands a good grade (and a half?) below the Shui Xian. A link to the tea is here.

The sample measured just over 10 grams, and I used all of it, tapping the gaiwan to use the "Brazil nut effect" to my advantage to sort the broken bits to the bottom of the gaiwan, where they would be the least agitated from pouring and decanting.

The dark dried-seaweed green of the leaves often indicates, in my somewhat limited experience with yancha, a higher oxidation combined with a middle-high to middling roast, my guess on appearances alone being the former. I enjoy higher oxidation Chinese oolongs and also often prefer a middle to middle-high roast, so despite the shorter and more broken leaves that have little aroma when dry, I am looking forward to this tea.

My expectations drop, however, when the leaves have little aroma even when wet, and very little aroma evaporates from the lid. The taste is tart and the texture thin. I want to disregard this first brew as a mere rinse, but I rinse my nose with a neti pot to rule out my sense of smell as the problem.

The second infusion was still tart, but offered a grainy flavor and some gan, a term best explained as "the return of sweetness to the back of the tongue and throat after swallowing something." The only Western food I can think of that has gan is coffee, particularly espresso, but an accustomed mouth can find it in foods like grapefruit and rapini. It's also obviously present in bitter liqueurs like Campari.

By the third infusion, the sourness has calmed down some, the texture has thickened some, and the aftertaste lengthens some. It is floral in the middle infusions (orchid!), tasting strongly floral of jasmine when cooler. The next infusion balances these tastes with the roast and finishes fruity, confirming my suspicions about the oxidation.

The remaining infusions, which brought the total infusions of this tea to only 7, were thin and mostly fruity, leaving me the impression that the tea was well oxidized but not well roasted, or too weak in leaf structure to stand up to the roasting process. The oxidation is visible in the purpling apparent on many of the wet leaves in the picure above.

I think this tea might improve some with resting, but I was unimpressed sufficiently to not want to find out.

The remaining teas from the sample pack are mostly all higher grades, so I am hoping they are more like the Shui Xian and less like this Qi Lan.

China Cha Dao Shui Xian Grade AA+

2011-08-28T15:30:00.000-04:00

Jerry of China Cha Dao offered a free Wuyi oolong sample pack on Steepster recently, and always on the lookout for good yancha, I joined in.

I decided to start with the most generic and widely available varietal of this tea, Shui Xian. Shui Xian is highly variable in quality and characteristics, a trait it shares with its more illustrious brother Da Hong Pao. A suspicion bites at me whenever I see Shui Xian and Da Hong Pao that a particular store takes its least interesting yancha of any varietal and renames it Shui Xian, and takes its best tasting and thickest yancha of any varietal and names it Da Hong Pao. But I digress.

Jerry's Shui Xian carries the grade "AA+" which I interpret to mean "not just your average Shui Xian". I brewed it "gongfu style" using the entire 11g sample in my 100ml-but-functionally-90ml gaiwan and did very quick infusions to start.

The leaves above are long but not uniformly colored, meaning the tea is likely a blend of two roasts or oxidations--or more. I let them rest after their long journey from China, and they became more fragrant as they came to adore the dry, mild California climate, like any good tourist.

The brew has mild fruit flavor and a punchy sourness in the first brew. The sourness becomes less prominent from the second infusion onward, which offers cinnamon notes and has a longer aftertaste. Throughout most infusions, the tea tastes a bit bitter on the front tongue. Third infusion tastes more balanced--less roast, more florals, with an even longer aftertaste that is really pleasant.

The Shui Xian offers a smooth mouthfeel and a slightly cooling sensation after I swallow. There is a sweet smell under the lid of my gaiwan; in fact, the aroma is more interesting under my gaiwan than the taste of the tea. This average complexity puzzles me, because clearly something (grain? candy? malt?) wants to be in the cup, and perhaps my brewing is to blame.

It lasted a good 10 infusions.

One nice feature about roasted oolongs is that they improve with 6 months or more of resting after the roast, and if this tea is from this year, that means its roasty aromas and flavors of this 2011 tea may calm into something even nicer by the middle of fall, which is perfect weather for roasted teas.

$51/500g is a good price for a Shui Xian I would call an A+ tea. I think AA+ sounds over-the-top, but I suppose not knowing how these are rated means I should respect their hyperbole in classification.

Pardon my absence

2011-08-27T15:27:00.000-04:00

Since my last post in May, I have moved twice (in a sense), relocating to Georgia and then returning to Los Angeles for a final 3-month stint. The result being a long period of adjustment in which I've sat down to gongfu tea only four times since the end of July.

I am now all settled in and will return to my semi-demi-hemi-regular postings in the next days.

For my time in LA, I have much simplified my teaware out of necessity. Below is my setup: a 100ml gaiwan, pitcher, small cup, and bowl on a hand-woven Red Yao minority wedding scarf from Northern Vietnam. I kept only one teapot here, a hei xing tu pot I use for older sheng pu'er.

The many samples I meant to drink but haven't also wait here with me, tapping their feet impatiently, un-greeting me with a scornful silence, angry at my neglect. Patience, little leaves! I will bathe you soon.

Features of Sheng and Shu (With Photos and Video)

2011-05-23T02:57:00.000-04:00

Before I begin what is a long post, let me say that of the 9 guesses I received, we had a winner! Unfortunately, said winner chose to post anonymously. For your information, the teas were, from top left to bottom right: young sheng, 90s dry stored sheng, 90s wet stored sheng, young shu, and 90s wet stored shu. This leads into a discussion: what does the appearance of the leaves reveal?

Dry Leaf Appearance
As the guessing game results imply, tea leaf appearances can be deceiving. There are a couple of generalizations that hold true:

Young sheng leaves are green, often shiny, and have visible fur on the tips and even the larger leaves. Some examples are below.

Dry stored sheng ranges in color from greenish brown (10 to approx. 15 years) to medium brown (15+ years) to medium dark brown (25+ years, if you can find it! This is very rare tea indeed.). It is often shiny, and fur is often visible in the larger leaves and always visible on the tips. Some examples are below.

Wet stored sheng is medium to dark brown, often with a golden brown tinge. Often there is visible white frost from mold growing on the leaves, though occasionally the teas are brushed or baked to improve its appearance. It often has a matte finish except for the bud tips, which show the only visible hairs. Sometimes, wet stored sheng also has small yellow spots of mold.

Young shu is dark gray-brown to gray-black, highlighted with golden bud tips if any are in the blend. The composting process breaks the outside of the leaf down, resulting in a matte finish that seems like a fine gray powder is covering the leaves (in shu fermented for extremely long periods, this results in a yellow-gray powder coating). Composting also makes the tea leaves appear indistinct from one another compared to sheng, whose leaves are more obviously separate.

Wet stored shu, like young or dry stored shu, has less distinct leaves, a matte finish, and a dark brown or black color with a grayish powder tone. However, the wet storage often makes the tea appear even more matte and gray than with younger or dry stored shu, and like wet stored sheng, mold can appear as white fuzz or tiny yellow spots. I only have one example to give (sorry!) because this tea is pretty rare in the Western market.

Caveats: there are degrees of wet storage and dry storage. Marshaln, for example, discusses "traditional" hong kong storage and explains it as a period of wet storage (2-3 years) followed by a long period of "dry" storage, yet tea is available in Hong Kong that is much wetter than a "traditional" storage might imply. Also, "dry" storage in Taiwan is going to be wetter than dry storage in Kunming, simply as a factor of average relative humidity being higher in the former.

Brew color and color development
Another way to tell these teas apart is in the color development across infusions. Traits to look for aside from color is depth and clarity. The chart below covers the first ten infusions of the five teas I asked my visitors to guess. All were brewed in the same gaiwan using exactly 7g of dry leaf measured in a scale accurate to less than .1g.

While again, there is a lot of variance, the tropes below become more easily understood when evidenced in reality.

Dry stored sheng and shu tend to be deep in color but clear, particularly older dry stored sheng; wet stored sheng and shu tend to be deep and not clear; the wetter the storage, the less clear the liquor. Sometimes the fine powder of wet stored teas can be seen dried on the side of the cup (I should have tried to photograph this. Maybe I'll edit this post later!).

Shu teas and wetter stored sheng tend to "hit the wall" and lose their depth of color quickly, while younger sheng and dry stored sheng maintain a very consistent color across infusions. You can see the 05 shu hit the wall at infusion 8, so i pushed it a tastier 9th infusion. The wet stored shu hit the wall at infusion 9, so I pushed it to get a tastier infusion 10. The change in the wet stored sheng, however, was more graduated before hitting the wall at infusion 9, again pointing to consistency with sheng tea.

Shu teas are slightly more purple-red than sheng, but brew color is generally not enough to tell a wet stored sheng from a shu. For example, wet sheng infusion 10, 05 shu infusion 8, and wet shu infusion 9 are nearly identical in color tone, depth, and clarity.

Taste
Taste is the most obvious indicator of differences across these genres. In general:

Young sheng is generally bitter, often lingering bitterness that transforms to sweetness after swallowing (at least, amongst better examples of these teas). Individual tastes very widely by the region(s) where the leaves were sourced, size of the leaf, processing, and age of the trees, but common descriptives for this tea include straw, hay, tobacco, smoke, and bright floral notes like jasmine/narcissus. The texture is sometimes astringent/drying.

Young shu generally has muddy earth flavors that end in a mineral water flavor and occasionally a rancid bite. Common descriptives include earth/soil/mud, milk/chalk, lotus root, and in lesser teas pond, fish, cave. There is not much complexity to most shu teas. The texture is soft.

Dry stored sheng shows lessening of bitterness (and smoke, if present when young) as it ages; young dry stored sheng is bitter, but older dry stored sheng is not. The flavors are similar to shu but much cleaner and more complex: earth, forest floor, bark, wet bark, wood, cedar, darker/muted florals like rose. As infusions progress, ~5-20 year-old dry stored sheng tastes "younger": the flavors tend away from "aged" flavors on the wood/earth spectrum and more toward the flower/hay flavors of younger teas. The texture varies as it ages, becoming less astringent and softer over time.

Wet stored sheng shows little bitterness and has much in common with older dry stored sheng in terms of flavor, being earthy. The earthiness can taste less clean than dry stored sheng, and words for this tend to be mushroom, cave/basement, mulch, etc., and it also tends to be slightly less complex. The most distinctive flavor of wet stored teas is the "mei wei" (霉味) or "mold taste", which I liken to the smell of mildew or even bleu cheese. This is usually smelled before tasted, and is also a feature of wet stored shu. This taste often goes away with time in dry storage, as the mold activity in the tea slows (ceases?). The texture is usually quite soft, though some people report very wet teas as making their throats dry and uncomfortable.

Wet stored shu tastes much like young shu insomuch as it shares muddy earth flavors, milkiness, and, in lesser teas, that distinctive rancid bite. However, the wet storage softens these flavors. Wet stored shu can also have mold taste/smell and some of the basement/cave flavors of wet stored sheng, making it in some ways more interesting than dry stored or young shu, although still quite monotone. As with young shu, the texture is quite soft and smooth, but like wet stored sheng, if too fresh out of storage or stored too wet, sometimes it gives the throat discomfort.

Wet Leaf Appearance
The appearance of the wet leaves is often the best visual indicator of pu'er genre and storage condition:

Young sheng: very green, though some strange varietals (wild or purple leaf) can be dark green enough to seem brown. Buds upper flags are tender.

Dry stored sheng: green-brown to medium-dark brown, depending on age. Buds and upper flags are tender. The picture below is 90s tea, hence the leaves show a good deal of green tint to their brown color.

Wet stored sheng: medium-dark brown to black, depending on age and storage condition. Buds and upper flags are not very tender, with very wet teas undergoing "carbonization" into black, leathery leaves that do not fully open or fall apart. This photo shows a 1990s traditional stored tea with medium brown leaves and some carbonized black bits.

Young shu: light brown to black, depending on fermentation level. Most shu teas are blends of leaves of various degrees of fermentation. Leaves are very tender and fall apart when rubbed (see video below).

Wet stored shu: medium-dark brown to black, depending on storage condition. Buds and upper flags are not very tender, with very wet teas undergoing "carbonization" into black, leathery leaves that do not fully open and show signs of structural damage (picture at right). Leaves are brittle and fall apart when rubbed (see video below).

To get an idea of what I mean when I say "fall apart when rubbed", I put together a video of me rubbing the leaves of the dry stored sheng, wet stored sheng, 2005 shu, and wet stored shu:

Ending Comments
I hope this is useful for people who are building their knowledge of various kinds of pu'er, young and aged. While this post cannot substitute for experiencing these teas in person, I hope it helps people who are looking at photos on vendors' websites and tea forums or shopping in person for these teas in Asia.

Suffice it to say from the above, telling apart the darker colored pu'er varieties based on dry leaf pictures alone requires a depth of experience and a keen eye. Pictures of brews and wet leaves help, but even then, the photos are only as good as the conditions and camera: all it takes is odd lighting, a low quality digital camera, and/or an incorrect white balance to throw off even the better experienced tea drinkers.

A Marshaln-style Guessing Game

2011-05-14T19:17:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to do a post comparing various kinds of sheng pu'er teas and shu pu'er teas.

Marshaln, master of tea guessing games, has suggested I ask you to identify these five teas based on the appearance of the dry leaves.

The five teas below are:

Young sheng
Young shu
90s sheng, dry stored
90s shu, wet stored
90s sheng, wet stored

Which are which? Comment with your answers and, if you like, give your reasoning.

(click photo for large view)

Bearsbearsbears in Beijing

2011-05-02T01:42:00.000-04:00

Bearsbearsbears 2007 Youle Mountain small cake on display in Beijing. :)

China Tea Report 2011

2011-04-26T12:15:00.000-04:00

I have recently returned from a 2-week trip to China, including Shanghai, Suzhou, Zhangjiajie (Hunan), and Beijing. My last trip to China was a 6-month adventure in 2006-2007, and I must note that much has changed since then. My purpose here is to highlight some of the major changes I noticed in the tea markets.

Store appearance
First, stores have become prettier, even in the wholesale markets like Tianshan in Shanghai and Maliandao in Beijing. On my last trip, maybe 1 in 20 stores had really great decoration, and by this I mean traditional, carved wood furniture, wood floors, hung framed paintings and/or calligraphy, decorative urns and bric-a-brac, and the like. Now, perhaps 7 of 10 stores in Shanghai and at least 1 of 2 stores in Beijing had invested heavily in their decoration.

Now tea stores strive for a unique character where before they appeared like photocopies of one another. For example, one might have all lacquered furniture and frames, while another might be going for a rustic look, while another goes for an ethnic minority look, and yet another looks more Japanese in decoration.

Some of them are quite beautifully done. One had large low urns filled with koi fish and big light wood bench tables, carved antique (or distressed) bookshelves and display cabinets, and calligraphic scrolls and brush paintings of substantial size. Dotting the shelving were display stones--some water-weathered, hole-ridden large chunks of rock and others slices of marble whose color pattern implied a mountain scene.

Others yet are quite tacky. I recall one store with wax-resist indigo fabrics and tin Miao minority jewelry, a theme that could have worked if done more sparsely with costumes and jewelry of better execution, and without a folding card table and an ugly laminate floor.

But still, stores are striving for uniqueness and (finally!) using decoration to craft the ambient mood they want to associate with their brand. This made walking around the tea malls more visually interesting than ever.

Teaware
Previously one found only cheap mass-produced porcelain alongside yixing teawares of a great varying quality. Only one or two stores in 2006-2007 in Shanghai had longquan and other kinds of Celadon, some produced locally and much imported from Korea. But now, increasing business ties with Taiwan has effected a great change in the teaware being sold in China.

Foremost noticeable are Japanese tetsubin tea kettles, a Taiwanese affect formerly unknown in China. Now, nearly every store sells them, all of them claiming them to be antique (rusted means antique!) and selling them for upwards of 10,000 rmb (currently approximately US$1,500). Many of the better decorated stores also had one or two silver kettles and teapots of Japanese make. The tetsubin, now ubiquitous in China, can even be found at on the blankets of Beijing's famous Panjiayuan ("the dirt market"), an "antique" market featuring stalls, tables, and blanket sellers of various new, antique, and reproduction items such as ceramics, cast bronze, wood items, jade, and the like. I even saw a new breed of Taiwanese-made testubin, which is lined with some other silver metal and made to a very different aesthetic, including some external enamel and more rough surface patterns.

Another Taiwanese import, literally, are Taiwanese ceramics. In particular, Taiwanese-style matte celadon wares, although some porcelain as well. Many teaware shops now sell these, and a few even specialize in Taiwan wares.

Yixing teapots have become larger, overall. I do not know why this is, but I speculate two possible reasons: more wealth has meant more teapot collectors, who buy larger pots, or more wealth means casual tea drinkers can buy into traditional tea items, but they need them larger. Good quality xiao pin ("small product") Yixing teapots of 100ml or less were uncommon before, and are now a rare find in teapot shops.

Higher quality hand-painted Jingdezhen qinghua and fencai/doucai porcelain have finally expanded beyond Jiangsu and Shanghai and are now found in Beijing and even Hunan province. Overall, this expansion of the availability of good porcelain echoes the larger trend of better, finer teaware being more readily available.

Lastly, nearly every store now uses the gourd filters, where a small dry double gourd ("hulu") is halved lengthwise and a small nylon circle stitched into a hole cut into the bottom of the larger half of the gourd, the smaller half becoming the handle. Many teaware stores around China sold this type of filter in 2006-2007, but at that time teashops still used metal or porcelain filters.

Tea
Pu'er is no longer the most trendy tea in China. In 2006-2007, every tea shop in China had pu'er, and most had a lot of it. Even in Xiamen city in South Fujian, home of Anxi tieguanyin oolong, most tea shops stocked as much pu'er as they did the local favorite iron goddess and variants. Now, in Beijing and Shanghai's markets, every store still carries pu'er, but most non-pu'er specialty stores now carry only a few. Where before every store carried Dayi, Xiaguan, Haiwan, or Mengku teas and perhaps 2 to 4 other brands, stores have moved away from the large pu'er factories and into smaller brands. This is true of both pu'er specialty and non-pu'er specialty tea shops.

In fact, tea from these four brands was somewhat difficult to find on this trip; MarshalN has suggested to me that many of these larger factory stores have relocated out of the wholesale markets and into nicer locations. I had hoped to taste the 2011 productions from these factories, but none were to be had:

By the time I found a Mengku store in Beijing, it was closing. I could not find one in Shanghai.
The Haiwan stores did not have 2011 productions.
The Xiaguan stores only had 2011 tuo, no cakes.
Dayi stores did not have 2011 productions. Only one store had 2011's rabbit year, 7542, and 0532 cakes. They would not let us taste them, saying so little had been released to them that they couldn't spare a cake for people to taste. They literally had one display cake and one tong to sell.

This is pretty big news, and the message is that collectors, the drivers of the pu'er market, have slowed their buying and factories are responding accordingly by making fewer productions and making them less available. [By collector, I mean someone who buys teas by the jian (6 to 12 tong, 42 to 84 cakes) and holds onto them to resell at a markup when aged]. Relying on the old trick of artificial scarcity to keep prices up, factories are trying to weather what I think is a dry spell in collecting caused by collectors owning piles of pu'er they know they can't sell yet, while Chinese tea drinking trends have moved on.

This has been a longstanding market evaluation held by me and other pu'er fans: at some point, pu'er has to be sold cake by cake to people who actually drink the tea. Each cake lasts upwards of 6 months. Every 20,000-cake production is 10,000 years or more of tea. Even assuming hundreds of thousands of dedicated pu'er drinkers, the literal millions of cakes held by collectors certainly represent a vast oversupply. Like any collectable, the longterm value of pu'er to collectors depends on the strength of the secondary market, and it might be scaring collectors to note that tea trends are changing.

Chinese tea fad followers have moved onto two other teas: fenghuang dancong and gongfu black tea. Every shop now sells at least one or two dancong teas, usually in those sold in rustic, paper-wrapped blocks. Even in the remote outpost of Zhangjiajie city, Hunan province, the vendors of tieguanyin and heicha all had paper-wrapped dancong on the shelves. Beijing and Shanghai tea markets now have stores specializing entirely in this tea, once rarely found outside the Pearl River basin.

Moreso in Shanghai, but to some degree in Beijing, gongfu black tea had tea vendors talking. China's black tea can be roughly classified into two types: lower grade black teas such as zhengshan xiaozhong (lapsang), jiu qiu hong mei, yixing black, etc., and higher grade "gongfu" black teas such as tanyang gongfu, bailin gongfu, jin jun mei, etc. Gongfu black tea has come into vogue, with fairytales of tea producers venturing into untamed forests to harvest buds from wild trees--sound familiar? This is the same romantic idea many pu'er fans have, imagining hiking up misty mountains to hunt tea trees, stumbling across the mossy-trunked ancient relatives perhaps first harvested hundreds of years ago by wandering medicine men and local tribes.

One last surprise: you can find aged pu'er almost everywhere in China now. Pu'er specialty stores now stock traditionally stored cakes from the 80s, 90s, and 00s, even in places like Beijing, where markets previously saw anything but the driest stored teas as undrinkable and unhealthy. Their tunes have clearly changed, and these teas run into the many hundreds of US dollars, perhaps 2 to 5 times their market price in Guangdong and Hong Kong, assuming bargaining the vendor's price down.

Final notes
It fascinated me to see how much had changed in 4-5 years. While many other features of China appeared unchanged since my last visit, the tea markets indicated a substantial development and evolution of the Chinese tea consumer.

If you have any questions or curiosities about what tea is like in China at the moment, feel free to post them in the comments section. I will give whatever answer I can.

Errors at Vital Tea Leaf

2011-04-26T01:10:00.000-04:00

After reading a news piece online about a vendor called Vital Tea Leaf, I visited their site and found a few...let's call them "errors" to assume the best...in the listed ages of their pu'er teas. I wrote the following letter via their contact us page:

There are some significant errors in your pu'er catalog regarding the ages you approximate for your teas.

Qiang Ming "Yiwu Zhengshan" - 2002, you say "15-20 years"
Pingxiwangfu - 2006, you say "12 years"
Ruipinhao "Qiu Xiang" - 2008, you say "5 years"

It's important to have credibility and build customer trust when selling teas that are so often faked and misrepresented. I would appreciate it if you would work to that end and correct these errors.

Also, many of the cakes you list have broken picture links. With such short descriptions, it's difficult to have any idea what tea you're selling.

I have not heard back.

It's disheartening to see such errors nowadays, when all one needs is a dictionary and Chinese auction sites to get some idea of a (post CNNP) pu'er's age. Even if I assume Vital Tea Leaf bought these teas believing the ages their supplier indicated, my opinion is that they don't select pu'er well and/or that they probably didn't pay the right price for it.

Also, the Ruipinhao and Pingxiwangfu cakes probably have date stamps on them. This is equivalent to seeing a website selling a 2007 Bordeaux wine as a 2001--when the bottle says 2007.

So, as always, buyer beware. Choose your pu'er vendors carefully, and do your own research.

Two Teas from Twenty Ten

2011-03-15T00:08:00.000-04:00

Amongst a small cache of cooked pu'er MarshalN recently gifted me he included a sample of a raw pu'er from 2010, indicating only that it was one (the only one?) he liked, and that this tea is not inexpensive. For some context, I decided to try it back to back with another 2010 raw pu'er sample I received, the 2010 American Hao Youle Mountain (1001, spring). I tried them both in the same teaware using the same amount of leaf by weight.

Both teas have appearances I find attractive: mostly whole buds with 1 to 3 "flags" and healthy, furry leaves with minimal visible signs of excess oxidation. But one I liked and one I really disliked. To reiterate at a point I often repeat: a pretty appearance says very little about a tea.

The sample from MarshalN surprised me. When I think of what he has avoided in young green pu'ers in the past, it has been bitter and smoky teas like this one. In terms of flavor, it takes many infusions for the smokiness to disappear and the bitterness to soften. When it does, it becomes floral, rocky, and astringent.

But the sample from MarshalN didn't surprise me in that he normally seeks in young green pu'ers a "ubiquitous" sensory experience that only begins by hitting the tongue and affects and lingers as many other regions of sensory tissues as the tea manages to touch. In that regard, this 2010 is typical of his tastes, and in my opinion, pretty good. It's a little thin in terms of texture in the mouth, but it triggers salivation, soaks into the soft palate, cheeks, tongue root, and even into the throat a bit at times. It has a menthol/camphor effect as the flavor dissipates (evaporates?) off the tissues, and my face became quite flushed drinking it.

Also, it smells really nice, too, thicker than it tastes. And it lasted 15 infusions before I became bored and figured it was time to move on, and for the first 10 or so, I didn't have to increase steep time by more than a second or two.

The cons: at times pretty thin textured and there were some burnt flecks of leaf in my cup (hence the smokiness?). Minor complaints, overall.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say this tea is a Bulang, because the flavor profile matches well with the Bulang samples I've had recently from Yunnan Sourcing and Nada and the leaves seem the right size. [EDIT 15 March: I was right!]

2010 Sheng pu sample from MarshalN:

The flecks in the cup make it look like the carp are coming to feed on fish food flakes.

2010 American Hao 1001 (Youle Mountain)

Looks are deceiving!

I had already tried the 2010 American Hao 1001 (Youle Spring) in 2010, but I suspected it was too fresh and thus waited to try it again now. Which is to say, I tried it and disliked it for flavor reasons that I thought might change as the tea aired out. As it turns out, it didn't change much.

The tea is confusing. It smells like green pu'er (smoke and all), but its flavors are very vegetal. It tastes leafy and creamy like green tea, and the very light color in the cup supported this idea. The bitterness in the leaf dissipated, rather than transforming into the lingering sweetness of pu'er it became alkaline, and there was very little detectable aftertaste. Past the 6th infusion or so, some pu'er flavors emerged: florals and straw. Although the texture was thin even when pushed, the tea certainly had more tenacity than a typical green tea, lasting upwards of 11 infusions. Another point in its favor was a certain tingliness in the earlier infusions.

This Youle also had many black burnt bits in the cup, even across many infusions. Maybe these are more frequent in newer teas, or maybe I have begun noticing them only now.

As a Yunnan green tea, it was actually quite nice, but as a pu'er, I don't know what to make of it. I almost want to buy a cake just to see what happens to tea like this, but I think I'll just keep the rest of my sample to try in a few years.

Dayi 2009 69th Anniversary Cake

2011-02-26T20:00:00.000-05:00

After some discussion with MarshalN and his recent blog post ("It’s not about the flavours"), I remembered with humorous self-deprecation the days when my tea reviews focused almost entirely on flavors. At the time, pu'er was new to me and its flavors unlike any I had drunk before: complex and dynamic, changing across infusions, its strange flavors colonizing regions all over the mouth.

Now, as my sensory appreciation of the tea I drink continues hours past when I've finished drinking it, the same question that hung over my hunt for pu'er tea in 2005 continues to haunt me when drinking pu'er in 2011: which teas will make great, ageable pu'er?

Today's contender for the label of "great, ageable pu'er" is Dayi's 69th Anniversary cake, of which I purchased a sample at Yunnan Sourcing. The leaves pictured above and below show some rather broken, probably machine-harvested, low elevation, plantation leaf: pretty typical for the factory (I digress to note that, despite the fact that many Dayi cakes share this same appearance, no two cakes taste exactly alike).

It brewed up yellow and clear, without smokiness, and with a fertile, stemmy fragrance. Flavor-wise, Dayi celebrated their 69th anniversary with buttered biscuits, green olives, and root vegetables. So much time has passed since I last drank a Dayi tea, I'd nearly forgotten what they can taste like. The olive note reminded me of many Lincang teas I've had, and the vendor's description of the cake indicates the blend contains some Bada mountain leaf, which is on the border with Lincang. Coincidence?

Beyond flavor and fragrance, the texture of the brewed tea struck me as neither thick nor thin, though water temperature has an effect, with rapidly boiling water thickening the tea somewhat, and below boiling water thinning it. It sometimes hit the roof of my mouth and soft palate, and at its thickest hovered its flavors and fragrance by the root of my tongue. On the whole, though, it felt weak in the mouth.

Between infusions my tongue felt like a sponge soaked with the aftertaste of this tea: ashen, mildly sour, and bready or yeasty. Writing this blog some 45 minutes after drinking the tea, I still have some olive and ash drifting out of my tongue.

The verdict? It's another Dayi factory tea, solid but unremarkable, not too pricey but not cheap. "Middling" describes most of its qualities, the exception being the aftertaste, which was appreciably lengthy. Ageable? Probably. I should revisit some of my earlier purchases of tea in this style and check up on their aging to get a better answer.

One final note: the tea's sticker says something about how Menghai is located on a volcanic/seismic belt that produces a soil rich in volcanic nutrients and a magnetic field. Not sure what all that means for your tea, but thought it interesting they included the information to market the tea.

My system of breaking pu'er cakes

2011-02-25T13:46:00.000-05:00

I wanted to post a photo of a cake I recently broke into for drinking, the 2008 Lancang 0081 shu blend. I thought this might be useful to people who love the fascinating beauty of pu'er tea wrappers as much as I do, and want to preserve them. I have also updated my tasting notes at the original post.

When I remove a chunk of tea from a pu'er cake, I begin at the center dimple of the cake and work my way around it and outwards, a sort of spiral from the center. I have several reasons for breaking the tea this way:

It slices off half the thickness of the cake, making the cake easier to break later with fewer broken leaves.
It gets the hardest chunks to break off out of the way first, leading to more whole leaves later.
It keeps the face whole. This has two benefits, one purely cosmetic and one practical. Aesthetically, the face of a cake looks better than the back. The practical reason is it that it avoid the neifei (the inner label), which I get to last. By the day I get to the chunk of tea around and under the neifei, the tea around the neifei has had time to breathe and the neifei comes off with less damage to it.
Most importantly, it keeps the cake round. When a cake is rewrapped, the most taught areas of paper are on the edge and face, jagged tea leaves and stems left sticking out when breaking tea off the edges and faces of cakes can cause the cakes' wrappers to tear, which has several drawbacks. Torn wrappers look sloppy, and the holes in the paper often spill dust out onto the tea table, floor, etc.

After I have completely removed the back, I take tea off the edges of cakes in a reverse spiral, moving from the outside inward to keep the cake round. I rewrap the cakes very loosely to avoid tears in the wrapper.

There is one drawback to this method, which is that for cakes with "pretty faces, ugly butts", where the face of the cake has different material from the back of the cake, taking leaves only from the back (or, later, only from the front) does not yield a 100% representation of the blend. In my experience, those prettier face leaves are not very important to the overall taste of the pu'er cake at hand, so I don't suffer the loss. But, your mileage may vary, and the information may prove useful.

So, a question to you: do you have a preferred method for breaking up cakes, bricks, tuo, etc.? Please share!

The Tea Environment

2011-01-26T16:07:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of not posting without something interesting to say, I've dutifully neglected posting anything since my last spate of shu pu reviews. I have been drinking those and other teas, the other teas not offering enough of interest to merit scribing.

We in Los Angeles met again recently for tea, and the excellent tea space of the host made me return to thoughts of the importance of environment when drinking tea.

The space where we drank tea is very well laid out: a recessed, wall-less space near the back of the host's home, separate from the nearby living spaces but not cut off from them. As you can see above and below, he has one long tea table, functional in its length and shallow depth insomuch as it makes it easy to serve tea to many people without reaching over anyone and beautiful in its carving, slightly curved shape, distressed red and brown paint and elegant slate inlays.

More photos of the space are below. I am missing a shot of the left corner, which housed a short table holding some additional wares and canisters.

Visiting the space made me long to finish my own tea space, which is currently half ugly office furniture and half nice tea furniture, with two walls that are begging for adornment with their blank faces.

Tea can be had and enjoyed anywhere, but a space's charm--whether a dedicated indoor tea space, a well decorated dining room, or outside at a park--can bring an added element to the experience. On this particular occasion, the added elements were calm and intimacy, and very enjoyable.

I also remember visiting a shop in Taiwan, a standalone building set into the corner of what was essentially a shopping plaza parking lot. The tea tasting space was simply decorated with heavy wooden furniture, but the real beauty of the space came in through the windows: the tea table was surrounded on three sides by windows that let in the diffuse light, dancing shadows, and rustling whish-whish of tall bamboo planted just on the other side of the glass.

Of course, many other pursuits benefit from a good environment, and conversely, good tea will stand out wherever it's brewed. But a little charm certainly makes it more comfortable and memorable.

2010 Dayi 7562

2010-11-21T22:42:00.000-05:00

As mentioned in my post on the 7452 cake, the 7562 recipe offers heavy competition in the realm of Menghai shu pu. A little grittier and less refined than 7452, the 7562 brick's blend contains more heavy fermentation leaves. This yields a greater complexity than the aforementioned cake, but sometimes at the cost of brewing tenacity and usually making it less "easy" to drink.

This year's 7562 is certainly more complex than 7452. It's earthy, chalky, woody, mineral, and aromatic. The earthiness and chalk/talk are bold and bolder still after the tea cools in your cup: a shu lover's shu pu.

As the tea brews on, it lightens some, tasting of bark and then of wood, eventually tasting thinly of rocks--or, at least, tasting the way rocks smell. All in all, it gives the impression of wet stored sheng pu'er but without the mold smell/flavor and with more punch.

7562 lasted a few infusions less than 7452, perhaps 9 good infusions. Knowing of its limitations, I used a lot of leaf to get this many out of the tea. I think that, using less leaf, the tea would have a smoother feel, but taste less rich.

I brewed leaves from the back of the brick. As you can see, there's a fair amount of broken stem in the mix.

2009 Lancang 0081 Shu Bing

2010-11-20T15:53:00.000-05:00

Of my most recent order, none of the teas so far had heavy earthiness to them, which is odd for the genre to which they belong, shu pu'er. This tea is the exception.

This tea hails from Lancang region in Pu'er Prefecture (formerly known as Simao (1950-2007), formerly known as Pu'er (1729-1950), formerly known as...?). Lancang is a minority autonomous county inhabited by the tea-growing Lahu, Dai, and Bulang ethnic minorities. It contains the famous Jing Mai tea mountain (Dai minority) and lesser-known Mangjin (Bulang minority).

I couldn't remember the last time I had a purely ~~Simao~~ ~~Pu'er~~ Lancang shu pu'er (Pu'er pu'er sounds too redupicative!), and thus I bought it for variety.

I generally don't like Lancang area sheng pu'er: I find it bland and lacking depth. But in the spirit of "don't knock it until you try it" I kept an open mind.

The leaves are the usual "pretty face, ugly butt" blending trick. If this isn't obvious enough from the pics above, click on the pics below for comparison. I should mention that this review is of leaves from the back of the cake.

Also, the tea was pressed in January 2009, meaning it's likely summer 2008 tea material, maybe with lighter fermented stuff from fall.

The first three brews tasted very earthy, like the smell of loamy soil, so I would suggest rinsing this tea twice to reduce some of that taste if you don't like it. Not fishy or pondy, just muddy. For the large size of the leaves, the tea held out for an impressive 13 infusions, even when pushed for more flavor.

The next infusions were sweet, earthy, woody, finishing rocky. They made me salivate quite a bit, and the "mouthfeel" of the tea was comfortable and oily. Not too much aftertaste, and not too much depth, but enjoyable nonetheless. It took extra long infusions very well. All of this adds up to be a good tea for brewing at work, where I have no one to impress and want passably good tea even if I forget it or otherwise abuse it.

I forgot to take a picture of the brewed leaves and the brewed liquid, but it's all the same with shu pu, no? No? OK, well, the leaves are mostly heavily fermented, with some of the larger leaves looking lighter in color.

A good tea for sitar music, rain, and the smell of baking pumpkin sourdough bread.

(the neifei (far above) and nei piao (immediately above) are both marked "10", whatever for I can't say. Any clues?)

If you have had this tea or any other shu pu from this region, please comment here and give me your thoughts. I'm always curious!

Update: 25 February 2011

As of today, I am halfway through the Lancang 0081 shu cake. I have been drinking it at work, which is where I drink most of my shu tea. For me, shu is easy to brew, easy to drink, and given it's of decent quality or better, forgiving when brewed in imperfect situations, such as my office.

In my office, a small fabric-lined cardboard tea caddy holds a comfortable half a qi zi bing (approximately 179g).

I dip into the red box about once every four days. I keep to a routine tea schedule at work, alternating between teas daily--usually one or two oolongs and one or two pu'er teas. The benefit of this seemingly obsessive-compulsive habit is that I don't spend unnecessary time pondering what tea I'm in the mood for or want to brew. I stick to the order unless I arrive at work with a strong feeling for what I want to drink.

Enough distraction and onto the tea!

The tea remains smooth, earthy, and rocky, even when brewed in my California stoneware pot using filtered water. It feels less thick in the mouth and tastes less rich, but the rocky aftertaste seems stronger.

I suspect the filtered water, boiled in a metal kettle, causes this thinness and stronger mineral flavor. It's a small complaint to say a good tea could be better unless the price is high. Thus, even at this slightly lower quality, the good value of this cake remains solid. A loose shu at a similar price ($15.90 per pound) would probably taste horrific.

2010 Dayi 7452

2010-11-13T18:49:00.000-05:00

You read that right, 7452, not 7542. Reverse the 5 and 4 of 7542 and you get a shu pu'er instead of a sheng pu'er. Funny how that works!

7452 is probably my favorite standard Dayi shu cake, which means it's probably my favorite shu cake of all time. Some years are better than others, and in some years 7562 sometimes beats 7452 for "shu of the year" in the Bearsblog "Teas of the Year" Awards.

I haven't tried this year's 7562 yet, but 7452 clearly wants badly to hold onto its title. It displays some of its best traits this year: richness, smoothness, clean earthiness, mineral/"rocky" flavors, thirst-quenching throat "feel", tenacious brewing, and an aftertaste that lingers in the mouth for an hour or more after drinking.

My two complaints with this year's 7452 is a lack of complexity, maybe highlighted by having drunk the Nan Jian Tulin brick too near in time. Second, 7452 has little aroma this year, but this could be my sense of smell (?).

Nan Jian 2009 Tulin Organic Ripe Brick

2010-11-11T23:35:00.000-05:00

I rarely stray from my Menghai/Dayi, Xiaguan, and Haiwan factory shu. More truthfully, I feel even those latter two can taste significantly less smooth and interesting than my classic standby Dayi-brand shu.

But after drinking only Menghai/Dayi shu for the past year--and only Menghai lao cha tou for the past 4 months--gourmet wanderlust overcame me when it came time to order more cooked pu'er, and I included two non-Dayi offerings in my lineup.

This post deals with one such purchase, the 2009 Nan Jian Factory, Tulin brand "certified organic" cooked brick. Known mostly as an "also-ran" factory, Nan Jian was at one point a conglomeration of three brands via the partnership of three individuals: Zhai Zi Po, Nan Jian Feng Huang, and Tulin. Something brought Zhai Zi Po out of this partnership, and currently Nan Jian only produces tea under the Feng Huang (phoenix) and Tulin (local forest...?) brands.

The brick is moderately compressed and, as shown above, covered with pretty face leaves that look like grade 1-2 material. One look at the side of the brick, however, shows that underneath the veneer lay less illustrious leafage, and a view underneath the face layer confirms the suspicion.

It also appears to be a darker fermentation, but this too is a trick of blending, though maybe not a purposeful deception, considering that lighter fermented shu pu'er is "of the now" in China...but more on this in the tasting notes.

First sip screams, "Coffee! Or an approximant!" The tea has a roasted quality, almost like instant coffee without the bitterness, insomuch as instant coffee has none of the acidity of fresh brewed coffee. Oddly described (I apologize), but the flavor strikes me as pleasant. Maybe they oven-dried this brick?

The texture is creamy, oily, soft. Stems and big leaves show their presence in the aftertaste, and while tasting I guessed they comprise 30-50% of blend. It dawned on me that this tea is not earthy, and instead the flavors variate "woody": stem in the flavor, sawdust in the aroma. Mulchy is as close to earthy as it gets. A fermented aroma appears in later infusions, not the fishiness of bad shu, but something piquant (read: pickle-y, umami...?).

You can see above that the tea is a blend of heavier fermented stems and leaves, with less fermented small to large leaves in the mix, too.

When it weakened after some 9 good infusions, only the stem flavor and sawdust aroma remained. So, I moved the leaves from the gaiwan to my pitcher, added some tea flowers, and prayed this concoction would counteract any caffeine in the tea.

Verdict: there's a good amount of complexity in this tea, but it tastes very little like the Menghai Factory teas I enjoy, which is appropriate considering the tea is from a region typically unused by Menghai Factory, Lincang. I don't remember much about shu pu'ers I've drunk from Lincang, so this this brick has provided an altogether different experience, thankfully a pleasant one!

2010 Autumn Yong De Cha Hua "Tea Flowers"

2010-11-09T23:47:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much opportunity to buy tea lately. I bought perhaps three dozen samples of young sheng pu'er some time back hoping to drink through them, find good aging candidates (at least, by my standards), and buy in bulk.

While I found a few winners, I found myself without money to buy them before they became too expensive to merit bulk purchase. And now, I have three dozen half samples to add to my jar of "shake".

But, I have been regularly drinking through shu pu'er. Having drunk through 90% of my last two bricks of shu cha tou--those little nuggets left over at the bottom of the pu'er compost heap--I ached for variety. And variety I bought:

7452 and 7562, two of my favorite Menghai recipes. Lancang (Simao) 0081 and Tulin (Lincang "border tea") were recommendations of Scott of Yunnan Sourcing. Normally I don't venture far from Menghai, but one risks becoming too boring when consuming only one brand. Drinking only Menghai is the pu'er equivalent of wearing only Giorgio Armani: it's classic, always well made, but after a while your friends think you predictable and maybe a tad snooty.

More on those teas later--much later if my recent posting frequency is any indication.

This post actually treats with a tisane I have come to adore: tea flowers. No, not the little balls of green tea with globe amaranth, notoginseng, and strands of jasmine flowers tied into ornate shapes by the tortured hands and strained eyes of Chinese girls: these reproductive organs of the tea camellia require no more than picking and drying to blossom into a beautiful product.

In my conversations with Scott online, I requested he find me some fresh tea flowers. I drink these pearl colored gems at night because they have insignificant caffeine content--if any--and help me sleep. After running out of some 2006 vintage, I had to dig deeper into some 2003 vintage, and although they still did the job, their taste had morphed into something like "tastes the way dry sycamore leaves smell", and not in the good "earthy pu'er" way.

Scott replied that he had found some 2010 autumn flowers from Yong De county in Lincang prefecture.

You can't tell from the photo above, but these flowers are so fresh, they yet hold enough moisture to bend when touched. Their color is another fine indicator: compare to this less fresh, golden brown-yellow bud of a previous post.

They taste most like honey (appropriately for a source of honey!) with a bit of orange zest. Light, crisp, subtle, never going bitter and delightfully free of mouth-drying tannin.

And here I sit, drunk on tea flowers, half sleepy, wondering how I'll stay awake until my proper bedtime.

Sue's 1950s Liu Bao

2010-08-23T01:40:00.000-04:00

A love of fine tea connects people across the globe. I recently met a friend online--Sue, from Malaysia--who sent me a munificent collection of tea samples. Primary amongst them was an aged liu bao purportedly from the 1950s or earlier.

I say munificent, because here in the USA, there are no vendors reliably selling liu bao tea, much less very old liu bao. Even in China, it suffers the rarity of teas popular only amongst a few. A ragtag "true black tea" (hei cha) from Guangxi province, few Chinese tea vendors I met had any experience with the tea. Many commented dismissively: "it's medicine for constipation" "it's difficult to drink" "shu pu'er is better".

Like most hei cha, liu bao yields earthy, old hay and mushroom flavors, but the best aged green liu bao stands apart from its brethren: earthier than qian liang cha, more delicate than aged sheng pu'er, sweeter than liu an, and cleaner than shu pu'er. It becomes more earthy over time but, if stored well, maintains a fresh, light flavor without becoming sharp.

My apologies to poor Sue, who has been waiting for months for me to drink this tea. When receiving such aged tea, I believe that drinking it with others is the best way to "pay it forward". So, after much delay, six of us gathered to share some good tea, and Sue's sample was enjoyed along with a 1980s traditional characters cake, a 2003 Xiaguan "blue mark" remake, a 1997/8 bulang, and a competition tasting of the 2010 offerings from Essence of Tea.

Sue's tea set a good example for liu bao. Earth and hay in the flavor, mushroom in the nose after two rinses. The tea made all of us gathered extroverted and gregarious, and the best infusion, as Sue predicted, was the 4th after the rinses. Like most liu bao, the flavors dropped after the 6th infusion. We compensated with longer steeps and were rewarded with sweeter, if weaker, flavors.

Our gratitude to Sue for the experience!

1997 Menghai 8582

2010-06-17T01:03:00.000-04:00

In the mood to drink tea tonight, and not in the mood to stay up late, I pulled out an acquisition bought via Will of teadrunk.org, a 1997 8582 he purchased on my behalf during his recent trip to Asia (thanks, Will!).

Upon inspecting the tong of tea Will bought, we quickly discovered the tea housed some insects. Evident in the photos below, but also by a couple of live ones found crawling around the packaging, and even a little critter in one of the cakes. Pictures of bug damage are below.

From upper left to lower left: wonky compression (my guess is, wonky decompression from stuff crawling around and/or wet storage), bug holes in wrapper, bug egg (?) casing on leaf, bug holes in nei piao. (click for larger pics)

Evident in the photos far above, the cakes face and back show the clear evidence of Menghai blending: tiny buds on front, big chunky leaves on the back. Da huang pian (big yellow leaves) and the occasional twig show the blender wanted to round out the tea. Forget your two-leaves-and-a-bud, sans-yellow-leaves, twigless, single-mountain fancy productions of today: this relic of the 1990s looks to have a bit of everything.

As far as the taste: the tea tastes younger and less wet than it looks. 13 years later, there's still a hefty amount of bitterness that ends in a classic hui gan. The woodiness of age appears early, sweet and aromatic, but not yet dark enough to have become earthiness. It gradually fades to a sharper floral note, which combines with the woodiness into a cedar flavor that reminds me of adolescent banzhang/bulang teas.

The tea makes me hot; perhaps the materials, perhaps the bug droppings, but something has made my hands into fleshy radiators and my brow perspire.

12+ infusions in, this 8582 continues to yield potent infusions. The tea is good, but needs more time.

More interesting photos: a dry huang pian leaf in the middle of this pic shows signs of being eaten; a wet leaf in the pot shows the telltale hole of feeding larvae.

Twin Hong Yun - 2008 Dayi Hong Yun & its Liming imitator

2010-05-11T00:02:00.000-04:00

Quick disclosure: the Liming Hong Yun was given as a free sample in an order from Puerhshop.com.

In 2008, Menghai Factory released an iron-pressed embossed tea cake called "Hong Yun" aka "Red Flavor/Rhyme". A year later, Liming Factory, Dayi's ever-chasing doppelganger put out its own version, in nearly identical packaging (Dayi on left). Edit: the box looks too much like Chinese cigarette packaging for my taste.

Dayi Face:

Liming Face:

How do they measure up?

2008 Dayi Hong Yun (available here and here)
Although it looks as compressed as plywood, digging my tea knife into the cake surface I managed to scrape chunks off without pulverizing the leaf.

Creamy, loamy flavors and velvety thick texture, my flushing face tells me there's energy in this tea. The Dayi Hong Yun coats the mouth and hits every part with flavor. I swear I can taste it on my soft palate and inner cheek (weird?). The milky flavor is a treat and reminds me of hong kong pearl tea. Sweet for shu, this reminds me of a more refined version of the famous, darkly fermented 7262 recipe.

The negative of this shu lies in its long stretch of similar flavors. From the second infusion until the tea nearly dies, the creaminess takes its time changing into chalk and wood flavors with a side of bittersweet, more like liu bao than shu pu. To that point, Davin walked into my brewing several infusions in, and toward the end had to ask what we were drinking; he said had I told him this was tea other than shu, he would have believed it.

I try to compare small portions, like tuo and mini cakes such as this one, to the price of larger cakes. At $6.45 to $8.45 for 100g, this is the equivalent of a $23 to $30 for a 357g cake, on par with other Dayi greats, the 2007 Golden Needle White Lotus cake, 2007 Yun Xiang, and even some aged shu pu cakes from 2002-2003. I feel that for the quality, this is competitively priced. And only having to invest under $10 to try it, it's easier on the wallet than the slightly better and slightly cheaper per-gram Golden Needle White Lotus.

2009 Liming Hong Yun (available here)
The Liming, once you can pry off a chunk, has dark, earthier flavors. Like the Dayi, the higher grade leaf makes the heavy fermentation release a creaminess, but unlike the Dayi, it offers a hint of unpleasant pondiness. While both teas are velvety in the mouth, the Liming leaves the mouth and throat dry after swallowing, not achieving the olive oil slipperiness of the Dayi. A few other tasting bits: it leaves a rocky/mineral and bark mulch flavor in the mouth, and sometimes has the flavor of baked bread, much in common with your average shu, but a few degrees more interesting.

But darn that fishpond flavor when it sneaks in!

A cardinal rule of reviewing is to review something for what it is, not what it is not (thanks, Aristotle!). The Liming Hong Yun tries hard to be the Dayi Hong Yun, and so I compare them. Standing apart, the Liming is a good value--moreso at its taobao price of 9 Yuan ($1.31; Dayi Hongyun from 2008 sells for $4.40 on taobao)--but even at its price at Puerhshop, considering its durability (8+ good infusions). It's a third the price and over a third as good. At US prices, it costs about 1/2 to 2/3 the price of the Dayi cake, making it a tougher decision if you had to choose between the two.

Still, I wish they had marketed the cake on its own. Why not, Mulch Rhyme (土幂韵)? Or Mineral Spring Rhyme (矿泉韵)?

Dayi Wet Leaf on left, Liming Wet Leaf on right. Notice Liming has larger, less fermented leaves in greater proportion:

New to Pu'er?

2010-05-07T16:57:00.000-04:00

I have posted a brief bit of advice and a current list of sample recommendations for people who are new to pu'er tea. Please click "New to Pu'er?" on the tabs above to view.

Hopefully, some of you out there will find this information useful as you start enjoying this tea.

Assumptions, Surprises

2010-05-05T17:39:00.000-04:00

Last night, Davin, Maitre_Tea, and I brewed dancong oolong for the UCLA Natural Complementary & Alternative Medicine student group, as a complement to Imen's gongfu presentation. At my table, we brewed four teas provided by Imen: a commercial grade Ba Xian "Eight Immortals" dancong, a Milan Xiang "Honey Orchid Fragrance" Gold Medal dancong, a Guihua "Osmanthus" dancong, and a 1999 aged dancong. They appeared to be ordered from lightest to darkest.

Most of the students at my table didn't regularly drink tea, and none regularly drank oolong. When I brew tea for non-tea-drinkers, I assume that most of them will enjoy the more flowery and fruity aromas of lighter oolongs. Dancong proved to be a good choice, as most of the students commented on enjoying the floral, fruity flavors and smells the teas offered.

While I knew they would enjoy the dancong, I did not predict that they would have such strong preferences and instant intuition about which of the three new dancong teas offered the best quality. Independent of me and without my having mentioned the "gold medal" in the grade, all the students at my table agreed that the second tea, Milan Xiang Gold Medal, was the best of the three. The first they thought was good. The third they thought was all florals with no flavor underneath it.

Not enjoying the third, I asked Imen for a fourth tea, and she brought over a 1999 aged dancong: a twiggy, brown, mushroom-smelling tea whose wet leaves the students called "wood ear mushroom" and "wood when it's wet". Thus began the most surprising part of the evening: their favorite tea overall was the dark, woody, straw-aroma'd aged dancong!

Whereas for the first three teas, they passively accepted the few milliliters of tea I could afford each of the 12-14 of them, they nearly fought over the old stuff.

I learned that good tea demands attention loud enough that even newcomers to tea can't ignore its call, even when presented with prettier, if less substantial, aromas.

A 5, 6, 7, 8!

2010-04-24T19:20:00.000-04:00

A quartet of young sheng from Puerhshop on the menu this domestic morning, representing years 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. 3 of these were rather disappointing, and one I really liked.

Clockwise from top right:

1. 2008 Red Army "Banmu" Cake ($16.95/cake)
2. 2007 Gujun Factory "Bulang Spring Buds Cake" ($14/cake)
3. 2006 Changtai Factory "339" Cake ($19.99/cake)
4. 2005 Nanjian Phoenix Tuo ($12.90/250g tuo)

2008 Red Army "Banmu" Cake
Of the 4, this cake disappointed me most. It tastes buttery like mao xie oolong, but with a bitter melon type bitterness that had me wondering if the bamboo charcoal in my kettle had gone rancid. The bitter bite remained after elminating any cross-contamination factors (I tasted my water, brushed my teeth dry, and swirled and spit out some fresh olive oil). The leaves look ok, not entirely whole and no suspect color. The tea brews a nice yellow, too. But with few flavors and this bitterness, I have nothing pleasant to say about this tea.

2007 Gujun Factory "Bulang Spring Buds" Cake
This tea had a nice minty aroma and tasted like chocolate/carob and sweet in the first 2 infusions. It was boring by the 3rd infusion, tasting like little. I had to stress the tea with long infusions to get any flavor, and it did have some bitterness and astringency when pushed, but not much mouthfeel or aftertaste. The leaf quality was surprisingly poor upon examination, its broken leaves looking a step above tuocha grade material. Better than the Red Army cake, but still nothing I'd purchase.

2006 Changtai Factory "339" Cake
Changtai has never been a favorite factory of mine. While some of their sheng cakes have been good and their cooked tea rich and smooth, I have not had a stellar sheng pu'er production by them. The flavor of the 339 cake is subdued and easy. The interest is in the mouthfeel, which extends into the throat and causes a cooling sensation on my lips. But with a sour aftertaste and a flavor that reminds me too much of green dancong oolong in later infusions, this tea perplexed me. When stressed, it yielded an appreciable thickness and astringency with a musky aftertaste. It could be good with more age, perhaps blended into something stronger, like our next contender.

2005 Nanjian Phoenix Tuo
This was my favorite of the four. Despite an orange liquor (5 years age doing this, or ?), the flavor and bitterness taste like traditional big factory sheng, in a dependable and comforting way: punchy, floral, bitter, and a tad smoky, I think this tuo's flavor will go somewhere with more age. I lament at its dry storage and am curious how one of these aged in Guangzhou might taste. I was glad to end this tasting on a high note and might grab one of these for future aging.

2007 Ruipinhao Spring of Jingmai Mountain Sheng (raw) pu'er

2010-04-19T22:53:00.001-04:00

2007 Ruipinhao Spring of Jingmai Mountain Sheng (raw) pu'er
or
2007年瑞聘号景迈山之春生饼

This is one of Puerhshop's selections I have tried as a sample thanks to yet another tea friend who decided he can no longer stomach young sheng pu'er--appropriately, because if young sheng troubles your tummy, this bitter monster of a cake will turn you off to young sheng entirely.

It's bitter, very bitter, but to express just a tiny apologetic nod to the tea, my sample was loose bits that perhaps don't represent how the cake normally brews.

But it's so bitter!

One of the women behind the tea table at one of the better known tea houses in Hong Kong once asked a friend to find whatever cheap super bitter young tea he could find to satisfy her fervent belief (inherited from her tea master) that bitter, tenacious young sheng turns into strong, solid aged pu'er. If you are of that school, this thick, tobacco-ash flavored, bittersweet finishing sheng pu belongs in your cabinet.

If you're of the (primarily Taiwanese?) school of juicy whole leaves and strong flavors with little bitterness, you will lambast this tea as typical low grade plantation tea marketing itself as "old arbor" tea.

Believing that educated ambivalence is the logical conclusion of any philosophical pondering, I don't subscribe to either camp--or perhaps subscribe to both. Thus, I don't know what to make of this tea.

I will say that, if Puerhshop sold it for closer to its price on Taobao (26 yuan or $3.80 at time of writing), or even at twice this price, I might indulge in a purchase for the purpose of experimentation. As it is, I'm not sure I will.

BTW, consider this post an update. I originally posted here.

Tea at Work: Imperfect Pieces

2010-03-31T17:32:00.001-04:00

Tea at work: green glazed cup and short banded pot, originally uploaded by bearsbearsbears.

Brewing green dongding oolong at work, in a cup & pot I created. The green glaze is my own recipe.

This glazed pot brews "wrongfu" green oolong particularly well. Problem is, the lid's foot (which serves as its knob) is too short to remove the lid easily, a task made more dangerous when the pot is full of boiling hot water. Nonetheless, it pours well, with no dribble.

I made the cup to test a green glaze I formulated. Tiny bubbles suspended in the glaze are responsible for the depth of color, and they float above the throwing lines. I hadn't intended this but like the effect.

Two imperfect pieces finding use--very satisfying.

At work, my teas of late have been:

Cheap roasted dong ding blended with medium roasted da hong pao: the DHP was boring, the dong ding a tad sour. They balance each other well.

This $99/lb green dong ding: a very forgiving green oolong purchased in Chinatown.

2005 or 2006 CNNP fulushouxi shu puerh square: classic heavy fermented shu pu, leaf grades 1 through 4.

"Long jing" given to my late father by Chinese friends at the senior center

Random sheng puerh samples: latest was a purple pu'er no longer carried by Puerhshop.com that looked and tasted like Da Xue Shan / Xiaguan "wild tree" teas.

What's in your cup at work?

Final update on 2007 6ftm Hong Yin

2010-03-08T12:33:00.001-05:00

One final update on the 6ftm Hong Yin cake. I returned to the place of purchase, and they had put up laminated product promotion signs for each of the "famous label" reproductions by Six Famous Tea Mountain Factory. Each one offered a flavor profile, but most notably the laminated sign for the red label cake indicated that cake was "good for long term storage with no change in flavor"!

Had to laugh.

Followup on 2007 6FTM Hong Yin

2010-03-06T15:01:00.001-05:00

I brought the remaining bit of the Six Famous Tea Mountain 2007 "Hong Yin". Brewing the tea at home birthed a very different animal than the same leaves brewed at my office.

For one, the liquor is not orange! As below, it's a pale yellow. Cloudy through the first two infusions, which I didn't notice at work.

Also, the flavor is very different. At work, the tea was monotonous, pleasant, biscuity, floral. Davin best described how this tea tasted at home: "if you served this to me without me knowing what it was, I'd assume it was overbrewed jasmine tea". Nauseatingly floral, very bitter, and not much under it, we quit drinking the tea after 7 infusions: it developed no new flavors, lost no strength, and it made us quite hungry.

At home I use water stored with a piece of bamboo charcoal and two maifan stones (granite, basically). At work, I use filtered water rather devoid of minerals. At the office I brew in a stoneware pot, at home I used a basaltic clay gaiwan.

The chunk I had left came from close to the center dimple of the cake and took two long rinses to decompress. Unsurprisingly, the leaves pictured above look much more broken than is typical for this cake. You can tell it's a blend, and probably not all hand-harvested.

As for what will become of it over time, who knows. I own no more of it, and that causes me no distress.

Pondering "orange"

2010-02-27T16:00:00.000-05:00

Lately rather unremarkable but easy to brew teas have filled my cup, mostly because the bulk of my tea drinking now occurs at work. Some examples:

Cheap "dong ding" ($7/600g)
CNNP fu lu shou xi brick from c. 2006 ($40/300g)
Lu Yang Chun (free!)
"Long Jing" (free!)
Korean Persimmon Leaf Tea (free!)
Bei Dou Yi Hou Fannings ($? The cost escapes me.)

My "drinking" young pu'er has been a 2007 Six Famous Tea Mountain Factory approximant of the famous Hong Yin, or perhaps better understood as an homage to the famous cake.

2007
2007 resulted in some very strange pu'er tea productions. From the many Haiwan productions that tasted like green tea to the highly varying products released by Xiaguan, Menghai, and Mengku, even the bad teas cost twice what they should have, yet all big factory productions seemed to sell out shortly after release.

Why this cake?
Six Famous Tea Mountain, whose cakes post-2005 have disappointed me, produced this series of Red, Blue, and Green Label cakes, each one very different in compression. Our local Chinatown ginseng and Chinese products warehouse stocked them. They sell for approximately $11-$14 a piece, which means they probably cost next to nothing (For comparison: Mengku cakes at this store cost thrice what you get them for from Yunnan Sourcing).

I chose the Red Label (Hong Yin) cake hoping to taste the best of the three. Presumably this cake was stored for 2 years in Hong Kong before I purchased it, in dry storage conditions, as the leaves are still bright green and the wrapper shows minimal staining.

Orangeness
The topic (and I have one) is the “orangeness” of a young cake. Orange on the leaves, dark orange liquor, and the smells and tastes that accompany it.

Hobbes and other bloggers associate dark orange brews with excessive oxidation aimed at making maocha palatable immediately. Some feel this process ultimately harms the ageability of the cake. Truthfully, sometimes a brew oxidizes into orange while sitting in the pitcher or cup, and leaves left wet for hours between infusions often oxidize as well.

Teas that are usually orange when young have included Dehong "wild" tea and lower grade Xiaguan productions such as Bao Yan branded teas. I have tasted these teas with some age, and they aged well and pleasantly.

I have nearly finished off the entire cake, and here are some observations and some questions:

Its leaves appear beautifully intact after brewing. They don't show much obvious signs of poor processing—brown or red edges or veins, e.g.—yet the tea usually brews orange. The tea can overbrew, but not easily, and the flavors are monotonous but pleasant in their predictability brew-to-brew: florals, slight biscuity flavor, some bitterness, not much aftertaste, but not sour. It smells of grain and fertile soil.

Are two years in Hong Kong enough to produce some orange color? At what age does a darker orange tinge become an expected marker of age? Under what storage conditions?

These questions have been bouncing around in my head. I don’t have enough experience with pubescent pu’er to make a judgment.

I’ll try to update this with photos later.

Meiguo Hao 0904

2009-11-07T19:23:00.001-05:00

I received a surprise sample of Meiguo/American Hao 0904 from Jim, the proprietor of Puerhshop.com, and many days and weeks of moving, unpacking, and procrastinating, Davin and I finally completed our tea room and had someone over for tea. We began our drinking with this sample.

Having misplaced my memories of the good review and cake naming drama over at Hobbes's blog, we were able to approach this tea with pleasurable naïveté. The first two infusions laid thick on the tongue, a bit smoky and meaty, with a sweet aftertaste. The tea maintained its strength through over 10 infusions, and although the never reached any appreciable layer of complexity, we all enjoyed it and felt it had promise for aging.

Another good sign: after drinking a 1999 brick made for export to Mongolia and a bowl of matcha thereafter, the aftertaste of Meiguo Hao 0904 kept its foothold on our tastebuds, renewed after we finished the other teas.

When I saw the provenence--Mahei Village, Yiwu--the tea's characteristics made sense. And at $44, perhaps the tea merits a purchase for those with Yiwu underrepresented in their collections. But for me, with my ridiculous amounts of young pu'er, I couldn't justify buying it. That said, I plan to thoroughly enjoy the rest of my sample.

Hunting and Gathering

2009-10-19T19:38:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday at the pottery studio, I was uninspired. The previous day, I had thrown two small teapot bodies and lids, and as the pieces dried and shrank, one pot's lid did not shrink enough, and no longer fit. Somewhat disappointed in my fixing the lid too tight, my work moved to handbuilding the handles and spouts for the pots. I slowly caressed and stretched the red stoneware into passable forms, but frequently found my thoughts far from the clay between my fingers, my gaze wandering to the magnolia trees outside. Looking forward to my trip to the mountains, my eyes wouldn't look at my work.

Davin and I tested the limits of his hybrid car that evening, driving the steep roads up to Rimforest, a small community near Lake Arrowhead and on the path to Big Bear Lake. Under her pines, oaks, and cedars, the sparkling San Bernardino city lights enchanting us, we spent a relaxing night at my sister's house there, giddily inflated with clean air and elevation.

The morning put Davin, my sister, my brother-in-law, and I on the road to Big Bear. Where my thoughts at the studio strayed to the mountains, my thoughts in the car connected the mountain scenery with pottery. Each exposed trove of decomposed granite, every naked ochre-lined cliff made me want to fly out of the car and eat at the clay like a wild parrot. The anticipation of our hike to a natural spring, however, clipped my wings and sat my behind firmly in my seat, the fall foliage flying by.

A friend who used to reside in Big Bear told me of the spring. He recently brought some spring water down the mountain for us to use for tea, and I wanted to gather more for myself and my own experimentation. He gave me a map, and I decided to hunt for the spring.

We easily found the spring, located not too far off a dirt access road. Bursting forth from the recent rains, the outflow like a geyser, the spring fed a small stream that likely emptied into the lake below. The three one-gallon jugs we brought quickly filled with cold spring water, and we spent the afternoon hiking around the area. Wild roses brambled about the pines and yellow shrubs, showing juicy, red, puckering hips, their stalks bristled with thorns like a hair brush. Bark mulch and dead trees, pine saplings and baby ferns, decomposition yielded to new growth.

My sister gathered leaves to press. I gathered beetle-eaten, twisted twigs to use for teapot handles. We all took home the sights, smells, and soft taste of the cold spring water.

Back at my sister's, I gathered stray acorns to use for knobs, and cleaned out her fireplace ash to use for glaze. Happy for a haul of free, local materials, natural inspiration, and good company, I sat in contented silence for the drive down the mountain and homeward. Although I returned home loaded with water, twigs, and ash, at the threshold of the door I felt a tinge of sadness for the one thing I forgot to take: photographs.

Saturday Art Show

2009-08-21T00:20:00.000-04:00

An announcement:

Some folks from the studio and I are holding a sidewalk sale of our student artwork this saturday from 11a-2p at the studio:

Bitter Root Pottery
7451 Beverly Boulevard (at Vista, a few blocks east of Fairfax)

There's a lot of really good work and talent at the studio. I will have lots of jars and a few gaiwans and sake bottles with me.

Come by and see us!

Congratulations to Imen Shan & Tea Habitat

2009-08-19T15:40:00.000-04:00

I wanted to send a message of congratulations to our LA tea sister and proprietress of local tea house Tea Habitat, Imen Shan, for her front page writeup in The Los Angeles Times Food section: http://www.webcitation.org/5j9Spt0j7

I hope the feature brings her many more tea-loving customers and greater success in the future. It's well deserved!

Kilinoe "Misty Rain" Green

2009-07-08T00:32:00.001-04:00

The 2008 World Tea Expo offered its guests the first public tasting of the first teas being commercially grown in the US for the high-end US tea market--the green, white, oolong, and black teas of Hawai'i.

However, the tea brewers sadly had to prepare tea for 50, brewing them at too low of temperature, all with the same water, Western style. I thought this an unfortunate coming out for America's first boutique tea. So when I read that Narien Teas of Florida began distributing the first commercial batch of Hawai'ian green tea to hit the market, called Kilinoe ("Misty Rain") I jumped at the opportunity to purchase some and give our homegrown tea a second chance.

Kilinoe is grown on Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawai'i. It's marketed as sustainable and eco-grown, and from the somewhat cultish WWOOF ads I've seen online, I do believe it.

In its foil pouch, Kilinoe smells like sugar and cream with a slight vegetal hint. Its long and twisted leaves gave me impressions visual and olfactory of Yunnan maocha fresh off the straw drying mats.

In the gaiwan, it smells strongly of citrus peel and sweet grass. It tastes much the way it smells at first, developing a richer maocha flavor with citrus highlights. The creamy texture reminded Davin of white rice.

The aftertaste, while present, disappears sooner than I'd like. About a 5-cup green, in later infusions it tastes so much like a lighter flavored green pu'er that I find it hard to justify the price: at $1 per gram, Kilinoe costs more than any other green tea that has passed my lips. In fact, my criticisms of Hawai'ian teas at the Expo included dismay at how light they were.

Still, Kilinoe is a pretty good hand-picked boutique green with soft energy and light, non-fishy, non-chickeny flavors. Fans of green tea would do well to spend the $9 on a sample, if only to see the budding potential of Hawai'i's boutique greens.

Tenacious Tea

2009-06-26T13:17:00.000-04:00

At the moment I have Menghai Factory's 2005 "Ba Ji Pu Bing" (Grade 8 Pu'er Cake) in my cup. I'm on my second day of drinking this good, mild shu pu'er.

Yesterday marked 48 hours spent brewing many infusions from the same pot of gao shan leaves before I tossed them out. They probably could have continued juicing, but two days was enough.

8 days ago, I ended a 3 day brewing session of a pot of a Taiwanese oolong, an inexpensive Alishan from a local store.

In attempting to place the reason why one pot of leaves could go so long, the idea that these teas were better than those I encountered previously crossed my mind. These teas, though, were relatively inexpensive, except for the Ba Ji Pu Bing (which is no longer available from online vendors). The oolongs taste good, but have textures and aftertastes that are only acceptable. Better leaf appeared an incomplete answer.

Next I suspected that perhaps my brewing improved. Also not the answer.

Today I realize I am using more leaf and initially brewing faster, in a kind of reverse Grandpa-style, or a hyper gongfu. Later infusions I brew longer, and what I discover is that, with the additional leaf, the teas brew some flavor for at least 2 work days full of drinking, often longer. For about a third more leaves, I get another day of brewing, saving me that other 2/3 that would have been in the next day's pot.

This frugality is truly ridiculous for someone with as much tea on hand as I am grateful to have. I may go back to my old style, simply to make the leaf cycle of jar-teapot-compost move faster. But when I'm lazy and wanting to pay little attention to my tea at the office, this method works great.

Thought I'd pass it on, and I'm curious if anyone else does something similar or to the same end.

Glaze and Surface Texture Explorations

2009-06-25T14:16:00.000-04:00

Absence
It's been a long while since I posted to my blog. A few things have happened to cause the delay.

First, I had an emergency move to a new apartment. The new place has very little natural light, and my attempts at macro photography of my tea sessions and pottery pieces yielded very poor results, jeapordizing my commitment to make this a visual blog.

Second, my routine quickly became: wake, work, cook, clean, pottery, gym, sleep. On weekends, I have been visiting my ailing father, building a container garden, traveling for business school interviews, and occasionally having tea with the LA Tea Affair or other groups of friends.

I have returned, macro photo studio in tow. The brown background pics are the last photos of work I took at the old apartment. The white background pics are new pieces. Many more to come in the following weeks.

Currently, my studio time has me exploring lidded forms, glaze calculation, and surface texture.

Form
Initially, progressing through pottery in the order of bowl, cylinder, vase, lidded form, teapot seemed the most logical in terms of building skills. While that may still hold true, I failed to realize that somewhere along the way I might get stuck or, as is the case, choose to stay in one subcategory of forms because I enjoy them so much. The progression above also indicates naivete about other variables: some pieces are easy in one size, more difficult in another, and the kind of clay used (stoneware, porcelain, sandy stoneware, etc.) also influences the relative ease.

Formulation
Glaze calculation's science and adjacency to cooking captured my interest, too. After reading up on the subject, I have been experimenting with altering glaze recipes, and have produced some nice variants (and ridiculous failures). Without my own kiln, though, formulating recipes from scratch will prove a time-consuming process.

Above is a glaze layering combo whose results suprised me. The Mother of Pearl glaze melts the black glaze I applied over it, creating a bluish fur texture. Detail:

Here's the same combo on a kyuusu-style teapot I made. The spout, while better and more functional than my last, hideous teapot, still needs major work. Unfortunately, I neglected to poke a hole in the lid for proper air pressure. The lid fits so tightly that water does not come out when the pot is full.

Texture
I have picked up some tips & tricks regarding surface texture. The two jars below form the results of two variants of a single process. With the first jar, it gives the piece a texture like human skin, though the photographs capture this poorly:

In this jar, dry clay and small holes acecnt the slight cracking texture. I really like the raw earth look to the piece.

I have new pieces that take this technique farther, but I am waiting for them to finish firing. I will share them soon.

Hopefully, though, my next entry will be a tea entry.

Gaiwans & Pitchers, Cups, a Jar, and an Ugly Teapot

2009-03-20T14:12:00.000-04:00

New works out of the kiln. I'm still figuring out the best curves and knob styles for gaiwans, ones that avoid burning heat but are still comfortable to hold and functional. I'm happy with the glazes, mostly.

Gaiwans & Pitchers:

Black and Blue Gaiwan:
This started as a project for ABX from Teachat. He wanted a "drippy" blue and black gaiwan that was somewhat small and wider.

I'm really pleased with the result, but I need to use less blue glaze next time. First, I think the exterior of the piece doesn't utilize the black as negative space, not as well as it could. Second, the glaze dripped onto the foot of the piece, and I had to chip the foot to get the piece off the kiln shelf.

But, the interior is great:

Mother of Pearl Gaiwan with Slip Decoration:
Love this glaze. This gaiwan pours well without burning my fingers, but it's a little wide. Small hands might have trouble with it.

Mother of Pearl Set, Ming-lidded Gaiwan and Pitcher:
The lid's not quite deep enough, and it gets somewhat hot. Thankfully, though, the pitcher pours well.

Closeup of the pitcher glaze:

Mother of Pearl Pitcher:
An experiment with throating the spout. Still need to test the pour against other pitchers I've made.

Cups:

Several sets of mother-of-pearl glazed cups. The set of three has thicker glaze, hence the foggier texture. The thinner glaze and ribs on the other cups bring out the pinks and blues of the glaze. The cups are quite small and suitable for gongfu.

Jar:

Tri-lobed Jar in Green Satin Glaze
This glaze usually doesn't move, but it moved enough to stick to the shelf, so the foot is slightly damaged. But, the rest of it is gorgeous. I really like the shape. Two lids for better tea storage ability.

Inner lid:

My First Teapot:

Well, I tried. The spout and handle are too big and the glaze went orange. The spout torqued in the firing, so it's slightly crooked in addition to being oversized and hideous. Throwing spouts, I learned, requires a lot of skill that I do not yet have.

The handle, while it looks disproportionate, is comfortable to hold. That's probably the only plus.

Pottery Show / Craft Fair

2009-03-13T14:39:00.000-04:00

Davin and I will be displaying our pottery and making tea for the visitors at our studio's student show. If you're in LA, feel free to stop by and say hi! We will only be at the evening show.

21 and over only: vodka, beer, appetizers (we have a chef!) and tea will be served.

LA Tea Affair 2nd Anniversary Event

2009-03-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

(Photo: Will)

LA Tea Affair events have been some of the most fun tea drinking I have experienced since coming back from Asia. Those of you within driving distance of Los Angeles do not know what you are missing if you haven't come to an LA Tea Affair event yet.

(Photos: Tom)

A few weeks ago we celebrated our 2nd anniversary with an outdoor tea at the California Institute of Technology, drinking tea from 1:30 p.m. until past sundown. The recent rains cleared up for the day, and we enjoyed tea, cheese, honey, fresh air and good company.

Jason with honey. Dan unimpressed. (Photo: Will)

Pu'er and oolong were on the menu:

2007 Spring Yiwu Cha Wang of Chen Guang He Tang, Hou De Asian Art
2007 Spring Fèng Huáng Dòng Dǐng (凤凰冻顶) (Classic Roast), Teamasters
2008 Ròuguì (肉桂) of Lin Ping Xiang, Cloudwalker Teas
2008 Sòng Zhǒng Dān Cóng（宋种单丛), Tea Habitat
Early 1970s Qī Zǐ Xiǎo Huáng Yìn (七子小黄印), Hou De Asian Art
70s Thick-papered Měnghǎi (勐海) #7542 (sheng pu'er), Hou De Asian Art

The spread...

The spring yiwu was thick and impressive. The Dong Ding was hearty and chocolatey (well priced, too). The Rou Gui had strong qi and fruity oxidation. The Song Zhong I really liked, even though Imen, proprietress of Tea Habitat, said it usually comes out better; it was dankly floral like too many roses, and when we drank it, we all shut up.

Yay tea! (Photo: Will)

We saved the oldest for last and switched to two 1970s pu'er. By the second tea, it was already dark, and I had to wear a headlamp to brew the tea. That's dedication! Somehow, someone (not me) had planned for this.

Tea dork (Photo: Imen)

The two 70s pu'ers pushed us into tea drunkenness, and the last one still had some strength left when we had to leave for dinner, so we brought the wet leaves with us and had the restaurant brew them for us.

We ate at a Sichuan restaurant so authentic the front door could have been a portal to China. Fresh Sichuan peppercorn numbed us, pickled peppers burned us, and many napkins later we left with full bellies and ready for some dessert. We slurped black rice and fruit concoctions at a Hong Kong style dessert place known for serving frog fallopian tubes and birds nest mixed into their treats.

The Western Pu'er Trend Officially Begins

2009-02-17T13:32:00.000-05:00

The pu'er bubble may have burst in China, but it appears the Western pu'er bubble has begun inflating at rapid speed. It's been a long time coming, but the predictions I and many other teaheads made about pu'er being the next fad tea have come true.

Two headlines today at World Tea News display this. First, the lead article discusses how the pu'er bubble burst is an opportunity for less knowledgeable sellers to begin selling pu'er. Second, Numi has announced that pu'er will join the bottled tea fad ranks of rooibos, white tea, and kombucha on the shelves at major supermarkets throughout the country in flavors like Moroccan Mint Puer Green Tea, Magnolia Jasmine Puer Green Tea, Earl Grey Puer Black Tea, Mango Passion Puer Black Tea, and Peach Nectar Puer Green Tea.

Aside from the content reality of these news pieces that demonstrate the trend, the method of news transmission feeds a positive feedback loop that will inflate the trend further. That is to say, by announcing the opportunity to buy (news item 1) and the corporate leap of faith in pu'er (news item 2) to the thousands of tea and tea-related businesses worldwide that subscribe to or read the World Tea News, the trend is reified. The news distribution packages the trend and distributes it, creating a powerful market force that will ultimately echo at all levels of the market, from other ready-to-drink tea products to small tea rooms.

Others have drawn parallels between an anticipated pu'er boom and the recent cigar boom that diluted the quality of cigars and placed enormous market pressure on a scarce resource. As USA Today summarised the cigar burst, "[T]he supply of quality tobacco couldn't keep up with demand. The market became flooded with inferior but pricey cigars hastily rolled with lower grade tobacco, as many of the poseurs and neophytes moved on to something else." This nearly limbs the pu'er burst in China, and the cigar industry only recently recovered its quality and returned to a normalized, peacefully steady increase in sales ten years later, I wonder if the same will hold true for pu'er. But will the Chinese pu'er bubble-burst history repeat itself in the West?

In all likelihood, I think not. First, the Western market is marginal. The fledgling market in the United States, at most a few million potential consumers, cannot put the same pressure on the trees and bushes that tens of millions of East Asians did over the past 15 years when buying and selling pu'er like a commodity in enormous volumes. With the Western markets comprising--a guess--2% at most of the pu'er market even after the burst, doubling our market demand to 4% of the total demand remains marginal.

Secondly, pu'er requires more time, patience, and exploration than previous fad teas like rooibos and white tea. In the first article, Guang Lee of Hou De Asian Art remarks that successfully selling and marketing pu'er demands hardcore enthusiasts. The article itself even suggests hiring pu'er aficionados or encouraging nascent ones to help spread the madness. The implication here is that in order for pu'er to fly off the shelves, businesses need to cultivate the customer base. It doesn't sell itself; potential consumers need educating.

Numi intends to sell the tea through "educational" campaigns about pu'er's supposed health benefits, and the first article likewise suggests selling the health benefits of pu'er rather than the tea itself. Oddly enough, people who know very little about pu'er will take on the role of educating the public--about health benefits that have no proof in human clinical studies.

While this marketing tactic hardly surprises, as it reiterates previous trends, using unproven health benefits to sell tea is hardly an ethical practice. While some large long-term clinical studies have examined green tea's potential in health improvement, what few clinical studies have been done with pu'er were not long-term nor had enough participants to be considered statistically significant. However, pu'er is great beverage choice if you're an overweight rat. Moreover, studies about pu'er haven't isolated the mechanism that reduces cholesterol and blood lipids, so what becomes of the cholesterol in those rats remains unknown. Fat and cholesterol removed from the bloodstream can simply remain as unprocessed body fat or find its home elsewhere in the body.

Lastly, studies on tea largely deal only with the antioxidant ECGC, which is found in all camellia sinensis teas, not just pu'er. These studies also usually examine ECGC at doses far higher than could be gained from brewed tea, the difference in dosage making a health benefit claim from drinking brewed tea unsupportable. While it's not as unethical a practice as, say creating a false need, selling pu'er as a weightloss or cholesterol tonic exploits needs that it cannot yet claim to fill.

Of course, watering the tea down with fruity flavor additives sweetens the deal for the average consumer. All tea fads fall prey to fruitification and health claims, ready-to-drink or otherwise, in order to sell product to the average consumer. But is pu'er (or other tea) so good for you when it's ingested with 25g of sugars per bottle? I could not find nutrition data for Numi, nor do I know off-hand if they will sweeten their pu'er RTD beverages, but given the high sugar content of many RTD teas, it seems the same tonic that supposedly helps your cholesterol could help make you fatter. Sounds like a catch-22.

At least nobody's talking about tea as investment anymore. Giving investment advice as a tea vendor sounds like an invitation to litigation. Then again, tea vendors already seem to think they're qualified to give health advice.

Tangent aside, now that green tea, white tea, oolong tea, rooibos tea, and now pu'er are fallen dominos in the line of tea trends, what's next?

Two Oolong Jars

2009-01-28T01:27:00.000-05:00

Two new Oolong jars from the kiln, both designed with storage in mind.

First, a multicolor jian-style glazed jar with slip applique:

Second, a soft brown glazed dual-lid storage jar with green glaze accents:

That is all! I'm off to Atlanta on Thursday for my first business school interview. Wish me luck!

Wuyi Duet: Will's Bei Dou and Jing Tea Shop 2004 Bei Dou

2009-01-19T15:33:00.000-05:00

I wish I had taken more photos of these teas.

Last Sunday, we drank these two Bei Dou Wuyi oolongs to break up the pu'er sessions and freshen up our palates.

The first tea was sourced from a local farm not located on the Wuyi Scenic Area. Its roasting falls on the high end of medium fire, still a bit green. However, its nicely high oxidation made it fruity in addition to roasty, and only a bit bitter.

The second is Jing Tea Shop's Aged Bei Dou (2004). We drank this in between the two pu'er sessions. The scent was roasty and sweet. After 4-5 years, it indeed tasted aged with a dried fruit flavor that went a little sour, maybe from being in humid Guangzhou. Spicy, too: Davin noted black pepper. I really enjoyed it.

Pu'er Competition Tasting - Six Sheng Bing from 2007-2008

2009-01-16T12:07:00.000-05:00

As mentioned, Will of the Teadrunk Forum, Roy, Davin and I met up on Sunday to taste six sheng pu'er bing from 2007-2008.

Our setup:

Six 150ml (?) tasting sets and spoons. Preheated with boiling water and decanted. 3g of tea would steep for 5 minutes, then be decanted in succession. We preceded the session with some roasty oolong to prepare our palates, and kept hot water around to clean our mouths between teas. Will also provided some olive oil, which he and I took shots of when we felt our palates began to converge the flavors of the different teas.

The candidates all came from Will's Yunnan Sourcing sample collection. Included in the mix were the 2008 Yong Pin Hao Lan Xiang, 2008 Xiaguan FT Nanzhao Round Cake, 2008 Xiaguan FT Exquisite Elegance, 2008 Shuang Yi ("Hai Lang Hao") Star of Bulang, a 2007 Yong Zhen Qing Bing, and 2008 Menghai 7542-801.

Sample A

Sample B

Sample C

Sample D

Sample E

Sample F

We all remarked on the smoky smell of "factory" green pu'er when we decanted the teas. The smell threatened to become too strong, so we left the leaves in the lidded tasting mugs, lid on, to limit its influence our olfactory perception.

I had some fun trying to guess which were the "factory" cakes--the Xiaguan FT and Menghai 7542--and which were the smaller productions (Shuang Yi and Yong Pin Hao). While I couldn't place exactly the factory, I guessed from the smoky roughness of teas B through E that they were probably the large factories, with A and F having the least smokiness and a more gentle strength.

It turns out I was mostly right. Tea F was the Yong Pin Hao cake. Tea A was the Yong Zhen Qing Bing, which I know nothing about and don't see on the YSLLC storefront. What surprised all of us most of all was that the Hai Lang Hao / Shuang Yi cake was one of the smokiest and roughest teas. Here are our notes:

Sample A: 2007 Yong Zhen Qing Bing
Scent of after processing smoke. Not too bitter. Nicer flavor than the initial scent. Good after taste. Perhaps a blended leaf? Medium-sized and broken leaf.

Sample B: 2008 Menghai Dayi 7542 Batch 801
Smells and tastes like factory tea. Smoky, fruity, and a little sour. Not that bitter, though. Tastes similar to C. Wet leaf is tiny little bits.

Sample C: 2008 Hai Lang Hao Star of Bulang
Thick. Broth transitions from oily in the mouth to dry. More interesting after taste. Little bit sour? Tastes similar to B, but more bitter. Side note - according to Scott, the maocha in this is actually from 2005. Also, it’s not really a Hai Lang Hao cake; it’s a joint production with another vendor. Small leafed.

Sample D: 2008 Xiaguan FT Nan Zhao Round Cake
Bitter. Smooth. Smoky. Round citrus. Bitter aftertaste. Jason guessed it as a Menghai factory tea [oops!]. Distinct after taste. Roy says it tastes like the Pacific North West. Mix of little bits and medium leaves, but mostly the former.

Sample E: 2008 Xiaguan FT "Exquisite Elegance"
Sour with some cigarette. Light scent. Bread mold or dust. Same as D in leaf quality.

Sample F: 2008 Yong Pin Hao "Lán Xiāng"（兰香）Wild Arbor
Least like a factory tea. More herbal. Astringent at the end. Most whole leaf of any of the teas. Largest leaves of the bunch.

Personally, I liked teas F, D, and A in that order. I disliked teas C and E. I thought B was good but maybe too much like dianhong to be convinceably wholly da ye varietal.

But this opinion probably doesn't amount to much: none of us are particularly accostumed to competition-style tasting. I yoinked Will's samples to brew them gongfu at home, and will post anything interesting later.

From top to bottom: C, D, E, F

Pu'er Competition Tasting - Three 1999 Menghai Factory Qing Bing

2009-01-15T12:06:00.000-05:00

This past Sunday, Will of the Teadrunk Forum, Roy, Davin and I met up to taste a lot of sheng pu'er while drinking as little of it as possible. After doing a a blind competition tasting of eight young sheng bing, we moved onto these three 1999 Menghai factory teas:

Sample A:

Sample B:

Sample C:

The setup was three competition tasting sets. They were preheated with boiling water and decanted in the succession they were filled. We used 3g of tea brewed for 5 minutes. We attempted to create roughly equal samples in terms of the proportion of chunks to loose leaves.

This is the result, from top to bottom the teas are A, B, and C.

Sample A
We all remarked that A's darker color probably meant it underwent the most humid storage. Unsurprisingly, it gave off some mold smell on the tasting spoon. However, it did not taste as wet stored as it smelled until it cooled significantly, which was nice. Will and I instantly felt a rush of energy on our first sip, but otherwise the tea didn't offer much. Its flavors were relatively flat.

Sample B
Sample B tasted dry stored and young. Despite its age, the flavor had developed some fruit and just a bit of wood. It easily tasted the most complex of the three and had a good aftertaste. The dry storage made Will remark that of the three, this was his favorite.

Sample C
I liked Sample C best. It underwent slightly more humid storage than B and showed more development of wood and earth notes, but still complex enough in young ways (straw, a little smoke, bitterness on the tongue root).

Here are their brewed leaves. It might appear the white balance is off between photos, but it's a trick of the eye. Sample A's leaves are darker, B's the lightest, and C's brown.

A:

B:

C:

Unfortunately for me, tea C is the most expensive, over $400. Teas A & B are roughly equivalent in price, around $150-$180.

The teas are:

A: 1999 Menghai 7542, Sampan Tea
B: 1999 Menghai Big Green Tree, Sampan Tea
C: 1999 Menghai Big Green Tree "Dark Blue Piao", Hou De Asian Art

New Pieces

2009-01-15T00:01:00.000-05:00

Black Basaltware Whiskey Cups / Yunomi, Set of Four
Collaboration between Jason Fasi (throwing) and Davin Dawson (glazing):

Red Stoneware Tea Tray with Rust Glaze and Lichen Detail
The top only fits one way because the lid shrank less than the lip of the tray. Still, I'm very happy with the glazing and clay texture.

White Opal Gaiwan
This piece's lid unfortunately suffered damage. Artfully hidden in photograph.

Footless Yellow Spot Gaiwan
Layered glazes, wax resist decoration

J'adore

2009-01-03T01:22:00.000-05:00

Black basaltware tea tray in blue and gray, handbuilt by Davin Dawson:

2008 Mengku Banmu Bingdao Brick

2008-12-30T02:52:00.000-05:00

The 2008 Mengku Banmu Bingdao brick sample was sent to me with the American Hao sample. The tea shows tight compression and flosses silver buds:

The compression made the tea not open up until the third infusion. The first two infusions, sweet and bland, released little aroma and seemed more like extra rinses. It carried the sweetly herbal aroma of good older tree pu, similar to that first whiff of American Hao (amongst others), so I figured the tea would be good.

The qi was great. At the 4th infusion my body was burning up, and by the 5th both me and my guest were tea drunk. We noticed a fleeting minty freshness in the 3rd infusion, not quite camphor, and the usual green pu flavors of fresh cut plants, straw, and bitterness. My guest noted "green bell pepper." I couldn't place most of the flavors, but the long finish and good qi made me think highly of this tea. It lasted longer than we did. We gave up around the 15th infusion.

I wrote these notes not having checked the price of the tea. For zhuan cha, it's pricey at $22.75. But it's darn good, whether it is or isn't what it claims to be. Bingdao is the 2008 pu'er buzzword, and lots of vendors are claiming teas young and old come from that region.

Another tea I wish I could afford right now, but b-school application fees are piling up. Maybe in February...

Next reviews won't be Puerhshop teas. They'll be trades from ABx and teas from other vendors I have sitting around, hopefully oolong. Yum!

Merry Xmas Will!

2008-12-29T12:40:00.000-05:00

Black basaltware body with foam glaze:

I threw this piece with Will of the Tea Drunk Forum in mind. He, a few other teachatters, and I had discussed various lid designs and how easy or difficult they were to seal. Will had decided to seal away some oolong, and I thought this lid style might seal well. So, the jar is in his hands, waiting to be filled.

It's a very tight fit, and the lid has an irregular shape: to get the lid off, you have to twist it out. I will report any thoughts from Will should he seal away more oolong using this jar.

His efforts instill me with copycat desires, but first I need to find some ageworthy oolong, or at very least oolong that inspires curiosity about its future. At this point, I would only be experimenting.

Your comments on your experiences in aging oolong would be appreciated.

2008-0802 American Hao Nannuo "Ban Po Lao Zhai" Cake

2008-12-23T01:34:00.000-05:00

This was a sample of the 200g and 400g cakes sourced in late summer / early fall by Puerhshop's Jim Liu. It comes from the same village on Nannuo Mountain where I sourced the maocha for my Bearsbearsbears cakes, Ban Po Old Village, but this cake is fall materials where mine was spring.

Intrigued, I wanted to dig into this sample as soon as I received it, but was waylayed by a cold. Mostly recovered, I shared the sample with friends.

The leaves are medium sized, and folks and experience have shown me Nannuo leaf is relatively small compared to arbor or old tree leaf from other regions.

The fragrance off the first rinse intoxicated me. I could tell from first whiff that I would enjoy this tea. It had the candy sweet herbal smell of Nannuo. The first infusion I unintentionally underbrewed, yielding a bland, herbal, sweet and thin character.

The subsequent 2-3 infusions had a smell like dry waxy chocolate bars or carob, which seemed odd for young tea. It tasted more "green", sweet and herbal, but finished like that waxy chocolate smell. A friend remarked it tasted like lemon leaf or lemon verbena, not sour but fragrant. It began to dry our mouths, but I think the water could be to blame.

Around the 5th infusion it began to lose complexity, becoming mostly fragrance and metallic flavor. Maybe this is the autumnal element coming through. While it lost complexity, it didn't lose in strength. We gave up before the tea did, after more than 10 infusions.

The qi was rather mild. Don't know what to make of that.

But for $20, this is pretty darn good tea. It's bitter in the right places and displays good Nannuo regionality in its fragrance. I'm considering a xiao bing purchase...

Baozhong!

2008-12-13T02:04:00.001-05:00

In Taiwan, teachers sometimes invoke luck for their students at college entrance exams by serving them baozhong tea, because baozhong is homonymous with "guaranteed to win".

So, tonight, I'm drinking some 1970s baozhong for some of that island luck.

GMAT is tomorrow at quarter past noon. Send good vibes my way.

Menghai 2007 Dayi "Yin Xiang" Shu Bing

2008-12-05T11:30:00.000-05:00

A gift sample from Puerhshop, I brewed this tea once and thought it forgettable. Appropriately enough, I forgot I had it. Upon rediscovery, my opinion has changed.

Notes:

1 Malty, stronger on sides of tongue. Clean, simple. Aroma is walnuts and soil. Guest co-reviewer Davin remarks it reminds him of dried bamboo.
2 More complex: grains, the flavor of black pepper without the bite, still not as earthy as it smells.
3 Davin, not knowing anything about the tea, had to ask if it was shu or sheng--a good sign! Mellow but not weak. Soil creeps in.
4 More soil and earth, but still clean. Oddly enough, no aroma in the empty cup or pitcher!
5 Best infusion. Sweet like a gourd (winter squash?), leaves a tingly feeling on my tongue.
6 Consistent flavor as 4 & 5 despite slight decline in strength. What a friend calls "rocky" flavor. This infusion drinks cold with no awkward acidity or aftertaste.

Verdict first: this shu impresses. A great buy for someone who's only had bad, fishy shu pu'er, Dayi's Yin Xiang cake redeems the name of shu. And for any doubters, this tea's traits define why I love Menghai Factory shu pu above all others. Pricier, but worth it I think. When I'm in the market again for cooked tea, this cake is on my list.

Good pots

2008-12-04T03:49:00.000-05:00

Click photos to enlarge.

I'm rather proud of these!

Stepped cup in red clay:

Grogged red clay, layered glazes, wax-resist decoration

Stoneware Whisky Cups with Snow Glaze:

Thrown & carved/altered brown stoneware with varied surface decoration.

Carved tea bowl with Snow Glaze:

Carved winter tea bowl in buff-colored stoneware, snow glaze, wax resist "windows" and carved texture.

Black pitcher, "Bled Foam":

Black basaltware pitcher, thrown & altered, foam glaze with iron bleeding.

Be thankful you have real tea...

2008-11-27T16:12:00.000-05:00

This video shows people in Guangzhou drying and repacking tea to be sold as 1958 pu'er...

Tea Tray & Gaiwan set

2008-11-16T02:49:00.000-05:00

Davin made an awesome new tea tray.

The basin has four pillars that support the center plate. It's large enough for one teapot:

More pics:

I made this gaiwan set, with pitcher and jar:

The power of belief

2008-11-15T20:37:00.000-05:00

I'm drinking liu an right now. I bought it at a local Chinatown ginseng shop back in autumn 2007.

When I bought it, it tasted musty and a little rancid..."in a good way" as I said at the liu bao tasting.

Today it tastes like liu bao, shu pu'er, and liu an mixed together, but it looks nothing like a blend. It has liu bao's richness, shu pu'er's earthiness, and liu an's old hay sweetness, and a creaminess all its own. The rancid replaced by depth, thankfully. Butterscotch appears early in the brewings and is the most interesting chord. I say "chord" because butterscotch simultaneously strikes the tongue and nose: it's a fragrance and a flavor.

Before, flavor disappeared around infusion 6, and now flavor lasts until infusion 10.

A year away from the scents of the medicine shop improved this tea. You might wonder why I bought this tea at all; who drinks a rancid tea that dies at the 5th infusion, of questionable provenance (it came loose), and sold so cheap it "can't be good"?

When I tried the tea at the store, two things struck me. First, the tea coated my mouth and made me salivate, and second, my body felt a rush. The former told me this tea could mellow into something decent, and the latter told me even if it aging failed to improve the tea, I could use it to meditate and enjoy the qi. This revealed something to me about my tea habits: I'm willing to forgive almost anything in a tea as long as it takes me somewhere. I reclassify it as a "meditation tea", and I have a few of them on my shelf. I don't serve them to others because these teas' flavors would register as mediocre to most.

With so little information about this tea, and aged teas in general, what we know about tea is merely what we choose to believe. From our belief in a tea's quailty to our belief that certain signs indicate quality, occasionally approaching tea from a meta, external standpoint offers the benefit of keeping our feet on the ground, realizing that when we drink tea, we are a conduit that allows our beliefs to communicate with our realities. It's a beautiful thing.

Yet more pottery...

2008-11-10T12:47:00.000-05:00

Red stoneware jar with green jian glaze, wax resist decorated:

Green & gold-brown chawan, brown stoneware with iron texture slip under glaze in spots:

Red stoneware ribbed jar with blue jian glaze, wax resist decoration:

Davin's tea tray, buff-colored stoneware with multiple glazes:

More pics on flickr.

LA Tea Affair 26 October meeting: Liu Bao

2008-10-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

The LA Tea Affair met up for a Sunday afternoon tasting of Liu Bao. My notes on the various teas are below. Photos courtesy of Will Yardley.

Liu Bao is a hei cha (post-fermented tea) from Guangxi province. It's post-fermented, pressed into baskets, and aged. I was told when I bought the 1970s sample in China that Liu Bao was prescribed as a cure for constipation in infants and the elderly, because other TCM remedies would be too harsh or were ineffective, and was most popular in Guangzhou, Malaysia, and Japan.

2003 3 Cranes brand Liu Bao bing
The resulting thinness of this tea, despite its prevalence of buds and my filling the pot 1/2 full with leaves, reinforces my approach to brewing liu bao: steep long, use lots of leaf. Even then, I could not make this tea sing. With more age, it will become more even sweet. But for now, it has a smooth, pleasant, simple character. I don’t know that the tea will gain complexity with time. I gave everyone some to take home because I think it could have been brewed better. Usually, this tastes a lot stronger of hay.

1992 Liu Bao
The 1992 liu bao offered more harshness (aka complexity?) than the 2003 version, and a longer aftertaste. Like the 2003, though, it died quick (another feature I attribute to liu bao). Not pleasant to drink–yet–I think it will do better with some aging

1994 Liu Bao
This emerged as the best of the “young” liu bao teas we tried. Thicker, complex, but not harsh. Really nice in later infusions, it could have continued on past six infusions had we the time to brew it. Liu bao is considered an earthy tea, but I think this hinted that liu bao can be more than just dirt: roasted hay (?), hops, and the like. Dry leaf pic is below.

1970s Liu Bao
The 1970s liu bao brewed similar to the 1994, but with larger leaves, which made it a bit sweeter. It also could last beyond 6 infusions, but probably not much farther than 8. It tasted of dried mandarin orange peel and had an oily texture the others did not. I bought this tea in Shanghai, but I don’t know where it was stored.

50-60 year old Liu Bao, http://community.livejournal.com/puerh_tea/217430.html has more info

This was only the third 1950s-1960s liu bao I tasted. The dry leaves displayed a fine dusting of wetter storage, and this lent a mei wei not shared by the other teas we tasted. Someone said “old bamboo” and immediately I recognized in the tea’s taste the slightly rancid, slightly bitter/acrid, woody flavor of aged bamboo shoots I had I was traveling. Some compared it to coffee, and I guess I can agree with a comparison to espresso. This tea’s texture was significantly more oily than the 1970s tea, and it finished even longer. As the tea mellowed it improved, and although the flavor weakened at the 6th-7th infusion, the mellower brews almost exceeded the pleasantry of the initial stronger infusions.

It’s difficult to gauge the qi of this tea. By the time we hit this tea, we all felt the cumulative effects of the previous teas. The previous teas had greatly relaxed me, but this tea seemed to enliven me. Indeed, I noticed conversation picked up once we started drinking this liu bao.

New pottery pics

2008-10-25T16:41:00.000-04:00

Red clay with blue jian glaze

Red clay jar, unglazed

Stately red clay jar, unglazed

Hand-carved Winter Chawan, white textured pearlescent glaze with oxide detailing

New Teaware from Jie Sen...

2008-10-22T03:57:00.001-04:00

New teaware from Jie Sen!

The first piece is an experimentation in formulating a "volcano" glaze. It was pretty successful, as you can see from the detail pics:

The next set of pieces is a Korean-style infuser cup and jar set:

The infuser:

And a detail from the jar:

In the background, you can see the winter chawan I carved. I'll take better pics later.

More later...

Many thanks to Mattcha for the Korean inspiration!

Meiguo Hao 0801 "Mansa Yuan Ye Xiang" of Puerhshop

2008-09-13T23:45:00.000-04:00

Puerhshop has posted notice over the past few months regarding its special order cakes, which they sell under the label "Meiguo (American) Hao". As far as I know, these cakes are perhaps the first commercial offering of a custom blended pu'er cake ordered by an American tea retailer under its own label.

It's very tippy, as you can see. even the interior of the cake shows lots of silver buds. Silver tips can make a pu'er very astringent, even after aging. In my experience, most become bitter and bland with time. Some however, seem to age well. The Guang Yun Gong and the buds-enhanced cakes of the 1970s don't seem adversely affected by the high amount of tips in their recipes, though these appear mostly on the face of those two cakes. The tips in the Meiguo Hao make it rather astringent now, and give it a sort of silver pu'er taste that the other larger leaves can't compete with--yet.

The liquor even has a light color. There was some concern on teachat regarding the clarity of the liquor, but mine brewed clear.

On the whole, this mansa cake is sweet and easy to drink, with no smokiness. It's a bit salty (weird) and a bit herbal. Despite its thin flavor, it left a nice aftertaste on the root of my tongue that hasn't gone away and has a stronger warming effect than most young sheng. I still feel a bit woozy from it. I have little experience with Mansa leaf, so I can't elaborate on the characteristics of this region's tea and if this tea fits the description.

Like most sheng pu'er, the tea wouldn't end. I'm going to brew again soon with more leaf; I think the bland character might stem from fewer large leaves inhabiting space where normally broken or smaller leaf would fill to the same volume.

A new cup...

2008-09-12T21:53:00.000-04:00

The white speckling is cool, but unintentional. The studio really needs to start mixing their glazes better...

2007 Taidong Si Cha Oolong

2008-09-05T02:33:00.000-04:00

Some of my pottery items in use...

I bought this oolong from Hou De Asian Art many moons ago. It didn't impress me the first few times I brewed it, and others felt similarly disappointed: at a tasting with a few members of the LA Tea Affair, nobody preferred it.

However, it appears that over the last year, the tea had the opportunity to breathe and change, and I really liked when I brewed it tonight. The roast/charcoal flavor has softened into a richness, and orchid floral notes similar to dancong have appeared. This oolong was a good companion during this long night of study.

Mystery Xiaguan Tuo...

2008-09-01T20:00:00.000-04:00

Jadecicada on the Puerh Livejournal kindly sent me a sample of a "mystery" Xiaguan factory tuo cha. She wanted some users' thoughts on the tea, its age, etc. So, here are my thoughts, with many thanks to the cicada, whose six little legs did a great job posting the sample.

The tuo underwent some wet storage before making its way to California, where it was supposedly sourced. Visually, the thin strands of white fluff on the leaves detail the wet storage:

Despite its appearance on the leaf, the mold left no trace in the flavor of the tea and only a residue in the aroma. Sweet, smooth, woody, and with a long aftertaste in both early and late infusions, I was impressed. Wet enough to have aged the tea significantly, but dry enough to maintain a complex flavor profile and the floral elements of younger Xiaguan teas, the storage seemed on target: the tea was balanced. Better yet, it was easy to brew and a charm to drink.

I shared it with two others, and all of us began to sweat. One had never had aged sheng pu'er before, and drank his portion even faster than the two of us who knew what it was, and we hadn't told him a thing. His novice enthusiasm for the tea was a good sign of its quality.

All in all, you can't buy a better aged pu'er for $8 anywhere. A great find, and I hope the retailer stocks more, cuz I'd like to have the Cicada ship me a whole tuo...

My guesses: Early to mid-1990s sheng tuo, mildly wet stored.

First batch of Jie Sen Pottery

2008-09-01T01:57:00.000-04:00

Roughly a month in the making, my first pottery pieces sat waiting for me on my shelf at the studio this afternoon. I'm jazzed! The photos and descriptions are below.

Some of them delight me, others disappoint me, but I learned several valuable glazing lessons with this first batch.

Here are two pieces. Atop the clear-green glazed shallow bowl is a tea caddy I glazed with a tenmoku approximation. Because I layered the glaze too thin, a black/brown glaze turned eggplant, and has the look and actual texture of mussel shell. It's a neat effect I didn't intend. It does a look a little like a witch in this color...maybe I should add a warted nose?

The shallow bowl was meant for use in Taiwan-style cha xi. I envisioned it holding a small pot, proud to be the bland background that made the pot's clay pop. However, the clear glaze was contaminated with some green glaze, and I got this yellow-green bowl that also shrank too much to be used with any but the smallest of pots. I don't know what to do with it now, but it's pretty.

This shallow bowl has a lip. It's also a little useless, except maybe to hold olive oil and spices for bread dipping, or some other sauce/dip use. A clear-green glaze coats it, and brown line is a streak of tenmoku. The glaze interestingly crackled, as is seen in the detail photo.

I like the idea of this piece, and I think I'll repeat the effect with a thicker application of tenmoku on the exterior for more drama. I do like the ghost-under-the-glaze feel it gives the bottom of the interior of the bowl, though.

The two pieces below are two teacups, one in a thin brush of white glaze and the other in a combination of clear and straw glazes.

I'm happy with both of these. The white brush design is impromptu but balanced, and the straw glaze's uneven application complements the uneven finger lines on its cup. Both say "organic", but the white cup speaks to organic decoration while the straw cup speaks to organic form. UPDATE 9/2/08: The white brushed cup has found a loving owner, one of my coworkers who called it her favorite of the batch!

This chawan is probably my favorite piece. I made the decoration without thought, and when the pressure from the circular indentations threw the piece off-center, I was annoyed. But in the end, I think the lines display the clay's nature despite the unintentional imbalance.

The piece below is yet another small bowl, thrown by me and decorated by Davin. He used two glazes like paint and covered the whole piece in a third glaze, the clear contaminated with green. The result was the slight ripple at the lip you see on the piece. I like the way the clear glaze shows off the specks of iron in the clay. I've also shown you a closeup of the lip, which Davin chose to leave bare, so your bare lip touches the naked clay.

I made three other pieces. One suffered an odd fate: a lidded jar, the jar expanded in the kiln, dropping the lid to the bottom, where it stuck. Two other pieces I glazed using a thick coat of the white, but the glaze developed pinholes and looked gross.

More photos when they're ready...for now, here's my current signature:

The Leaf, Issue 3...and tea with a friend

2008-08-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

The third issue of The Leaf is online, and it contains an article I wrote about the anthropological field study Brian Kirbis conducted on Bulang Shan and the presentation and tasting at UC Berkeley that premiered his research here in the States.

I invited a friend over for tea on my only free evening this week--an increasingly uncommon phenomenon. Tea drinker, Thelemite, and type A individual, he hikes and mountain climbs on alternate weekends, works full time, is starting a business, does yoga daily, and otherwise stuffs his schedule to overfull. Understandbly, last night was the first time we met in over six months.

Menu:

Yongpin Hao Yiwu Mao Cha from Puerhshop
"Monkey-Picked" Oolong from Chado
Light-to-Medium-roasted San Lin Xi oolong
1996 Muzha Tie Guan Yin from Hou De Asian Art
70s/80s Guang Yun Gong

Too long had passed since I shared tea in a lengthy, tea-focused evening.

More later...?

Absence

2008-08-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

I'm not posting much lately here. Life has kept me busy: I'm studying to suffer the GMAT and anticipate having more time for posts when the exam is finished, at least until I start school applications.

Also, ceramics classes have absorbed many of my free hours, quickly becoming a new passion: this much word vomit hasn't spewed out of my mouth onto friends and family since tea first became an interest. I can only thank them for putting up with the boring rantings of a novice potter. Tonight, I trim my first successfully thrown pieces, which include a chawan, a teacup, and three bowls of different shapes. I'll post pictures when they're finished. I don't anticipate them coming out very good. In ceramics as in tea, practice produces aesthetics.

These past few weeks, my teapots have brewed mostly sheng and shu pu'er and dancong. My dancong brewing noticeably improves each time, becoming more and more second nature. These improvements appear to enhance my brewing of all teas. For example, two shu teas once written off as mediocre now taste quite good, even when I'm not paying them so much attention.

More later. If you stopped by and read this post, tell me what you're drinking lately. :)

2001 CNNP Yiwu Zhengshan

2008-07-30T16:42:00.000-04:00

Jim has a handful of adolescent young pu'er teas on offer, and this is one of them. Like the keyixing, whoever stored this tea kept the storage very dry. The leaves carry only the suggestion of brown. After 7 years, and the tea brews up the color of fresh tea.

The tea smells like the Tong Xing Hao cake I reviewed before, but more biscuity. It's not bitter unless overbrewed...prosaic the whole way round, really. Strong flavors, some sensation on the hard palate, some floral flavors.

I brewed the tea over the course of two days; it weathers multiple steeps very well, and doesn't seem to die. Admirable. Nice leaf quality, as pictured below, again with very few bud tips. I'm noticing this pattern amongst teas labeled "Yiwu"...

"3 Forms One Tea" Shuangjiang Mengku Old County Tea Co. 2007 tea

2008-07-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

This Lincang-area tea is offered in three compressions by Puerhshop: 250g zhuan, 357g bing, and 1kg calabash. I'm not sure where my sample came from, but with its slight curvature, I figure Jim pulled the samples from either the cake or the calabash.

The leaves have an unremarkable appearance, with some tips, few twigs, and very few huang pian. After brewing, a pinch of the leaves reveal their youth and tenderness. I would guess they harvested these leaves in spring.

The aroma was sweet and carmelly, like young pu'er mixed with cola. Thick, round, soft, the flavor lingers, but not too long. Slightly bitter, not smoky at all, it had an odd energy that made me sleepy. For a young sheng lover like me, this tea really is a pleasure to drink now.

Most interestingly, it shows a mild lincang flavor profile. Lincang has a bit of a funky taste to it, a little danker than Xishuangbanna and Simao teas. The regionality of the flavor is there, but not strong. Still, Lincang flavor intensifies during the first 10 years of aging or so, so I wonder how more apparent the regionality of this tea will become. I plan to finish the sample, though, and more cakes aren't in my budget until at least after I finish off all my remaining samples from this shop and others.

An Experiment with Pu'er Flowers, Part Two: 2006 7562 Zhuan (Yunnan Sourcing)

2008-07-09T12:53:00.000-04:00

Davin invited me over to join him and a friend to smoke a brisket, grill some chicken, and watch Auntie Mame. I brought the tasting sets and decided to finish our look at tea flowers and pu'er as the food was cooking. Thankfully, barbeque and smoking cooks with little attention, so we could pay attention to the tea.

We had already decided our opinions of tea flower with adolescent pu'er: I couldn't decide which I liked better, and Davin preferred the tea unadulterated. I wondered if shu pu'er might benefit from the addition of tea flowers the way it can benefit from the inclusion of chrysanthemum buds.

Parameters: 5.3g of tea in each cup, 1.2g of tea flower in one. We used mineralized filtered water (with bamboo charcoal and meifan stones) boiled with bamboo charcoal in a glazed clay kettle. Brewed each infusion for 10 seconds after a 10 second wash, the final infusion 30 seconds.

Davin made the poetic observation: "With the flowers, it smells like the forest floor in Spring. Without, like the forest floor in winter." I found hot cream in the smell of the leaves without pu'er flowers, and honey in the aroma of the tea with flowers. Davin found honey not as a flavor in the fleured pu'er, but in the viscosity of its brew.

7562 is a recipe I came to love at Scott's (Yunnan Sourcing) recommendation. It's a blend of different fermentations, from light to very dark, giving it a more complex aroma and flavor than other more fermented blends. It's not as rich as most, but it's very forgiving with brewing errors. The leaves offer notes that vary from coffee, earth, bark, and butter, with most flavors centered on the tongue. Decent energy, but little aftertaste. Already liking it so much, I should have predicted that I would prefer it plain before I thought of doctoring it with flowers.

Coffee vs. caramel, drying vs. thirst-quenching, woody vs. earthy, the plain 7562 and the 7562 with flowers different greatly. The flowers lended texture and a different aroma and flavor to the tea, but Davin and I didn't prefer it. Our third, a friend of Davin's, seemed to prefer the pu'er-plus-flowers.

Without flowers on left, with flowers on right

The flowers did not alter the aftertaste of the tea, as they had with the 1999 cake, nor did they stretch the flavors or make the tea more tenacious. In fact, at the final infusion the unadulterated tea ended better.

Without flowers

With flowers
I still reserve judgment about the inclusion of flowers. I'd like to play around with them more, using less of them, and with different teas. On a related note, I brought the sample to work and tried them with some Yunnan green tea with coworkers, and all of us preferred the tea with the addition of a few flowers.

Ali Shan Anti-Fake Labels

2008-07-08T14:57:00.000-04:00

An interesting news story in the Taipei Times indicates tea growers will use a new system to indicate real Ali Shan oolong. Inside each tea package will be a cotton swap and liquid. When the emblem on the exterior of the package is wiped with the liquid, the emblem would change color. Created by a biotechnology firm, the local Ali Shan tea and tourist industries hope this will protect consumers and secure profits for the farmers.

Like so many things in Asia that are faked, could this new measure be faked as well, or simply be stolen? Forgers may discover the specific biotechnology impossible to duplicate, but I imagine that a simpler, cheaper, already extant chemical color changing system could be substituted by tea forgers. It'll be interesting to see how well these new anti-fake measures work in practice.