Another tea afternoon with some friends. This Saturday was spent mostly drinking Chenyuan Hao, although not exclusively. In reverse time order (and also the order in which we drank the teas) 1) Dayi 2012 Longyin (Dragon Seal). This thing is about 800 RMB now, for a cake that is barely a year old. It’s a silly price for something that is basically a few steps above your regular run of the mill big factory productions – it’s not that great, a little smokey, and well, you can hold on to this for ten years and see what happens. At that price point there are a lot of better teas. It’s probably great if you had gotten in at, say, 200 RMB, so you can sell it now for a handsome profit. Getting it now is rather dumb, I think. 2) 2007 Chenyuan Hao Yiwu King vs 2007 Wisteria Red Label … Continue reading →
Speaking of silly prices, here’s one. This is a tea that I have been holding on to for the past few years. Tim of the Mandarin’s Tea Room visited me, or perhaps I visited him, and somehow I ended up with half a cake of this (Tim, you want it back?). I think he wrote about this somewhere on his blog, although I can’t find it for the life of me. The tea has been consumed a number of times by the time I got it. I haven’t really tried it since. Relatively tight compression, but otherwise an unremarkable big factory looking cake. The Taobao price now hovers somewhere in the ballpark of 3000 RMB. Notice there are fakes out there, but either way, I doubt many are dying to buy a 3000 RMB cake without first having tasted it. In any case, it seems like none of the Taobao … Continue reading →
Or, more accurately, no new puerh, for the last few years and from the last few years. I was going through what I do have and what I have bought, and what I have found is that I have bought very little new puerh in the last few years. This is not to say that I wasn’t buying tea – quite the opposite. I have bought quite a bit of tea in the past few years (probably too much, as usual) but much of that is stuff that pre-dates 2007. Among the full cakes I’ve bought that are younger than 5 years, most I purchased as samples – through Taobao, for example, where sometimes the smallest sample size is a full cake. Almost all are single cakes, with two exceptions, a tong of old tree tea from a local outfit that makes decent tea, and also two tongs of Yiwu … Continue reading →
Before I talk about them, let me show you the pictures first. \ So… what about them? I should preface this by saying that the perceived darkness of the cake on the right probably has more to do with lighting than anything else. In person, the cakes are very similar in colour. The right hand cake may be a tad bit darker, but only just. What these two cakes are: two 2006 Douji Gushu blends. The left one is from the spring, the right one from the fall. From the packaging, you can’t tell at all – the only difference is the production date on that silly sticker that they put at the back of their cakes, which ruins all wrappers and therefore has been peeled off. Aside from the sticker, there’s no discernable physical difference between the two cakes. Not when it comes to the packaging, anyway. You … Continue reading →
One very simple metric of checking whether or not a tea is good is really pretty intuitive – how fast do you drink the tea? I have enough tea to last me a while, but among them, some are consumed quite quickly, and some take forever. Some teas, especially ones that are not very interesting, may be left undrunk for a long time, while others, such as a few aged oolongs that I have, are things I have to control myself from drinking, lest I run out of it. The same can probably be said of samples – when you buy a bunch of samples, there are ones that will be drunk immediately and gone within a week, while other samples, you may open, and they will then fester – left around, because you don’t really want to go there again, usually because it’s bad. This is more obvious when … Continue reading →
I was just in the US for a few days for a quick conference trip, and had to endure a few days of subpar tea. I did bring my own – some tuo that I found recently that’s rather decent. These days, nice hotels generally have better coffee makers than they did of old. Whereas the old drip coffee machines mean that your water will have to pass through not only the area where the coffee goes, but also into the glass pot where anything going in will start tasting/smelling like coffee, the new ones tend to be done with a construction such that, if you were to remove the coffee element, water will directly pour into your cup. This means, among other things, that there’s no more need to really try to eliminate the coffee smell before you can use them for tea. So thankfully, tea in my room … Continue reading →
Chinese alchemists of the past were trying to create elixirs that will prolong your life, or even grant you eternal life. Western alchemists, generally, were trying to turn other metals into gold. Either way, what they wanted to do was to turn something crappy or mundane into something extraordinary (of value, or use). It doesn’t work. Likewise, unfortunately, bad teas almost never turn into good ones. I had a tea recently, a supposed “Nannuo Wild Tea” from the factory Six Famous Tea Mountains (liudachashan or 6FTM). Old timers like me will remember in 04-06 in the English online circle of tea drinkers, 6FTM was, for a while, pretty popular – Yunnan Sourcing stocked them, and generally, they were pretty cheap and seem to be a bit different from Menghai factory stuff. Generally, however, they were not exactly high quality stuff – mostly mass produced, large factory fare, and I think in many … Continue reading →
Despite the title of this blog, I actually only drink one tea a day, unless I happen to be visiting a tea store. Generally, when I’m by myself, I brew up one and only one tea, and will drink it until I feel there’s not much left, or when I get bored of it. For years I documented this meticulously on a daily basis, although starting a few years ago, I felt that it was oftentimes more obligatory than anything, without anything to add – nobody really wants to read about my daily tea drinking habits, after all. So, I stopped, and this blog became more about tea drinking culture and my thoughts on tea. The one-tea-a-day habit, however, remains. Recently though, I have started dumping teas. I have lots of samples – either through purchase or through gifts from others. Samples of tea, as I’m sure most of you … Continue reading →
First of all, I wish you all a happy lunar new year, and that the year of the snake may be a fruitful one. Continuing the theme from the last post, I thought it is also worth mentioning that storage climates are not just dependent on big things – local climate of the city where you’re at, or even the area you live in, but also heavily dependent on how your room, your closet, or even that cardboard box on the ground where you put your tea – how those things may affect your storage conditions. One of the things that I see people asking sometimes on tea forums and the like is whether or not it is safe to drink from leaves that were left around overnight. Usually, the answer offered by myself or others is “it’s probably ok”. In my personal experience, that has most certainly been the … Continue reading →
A few months ago a reader of the blog emailed me with a problem. She is newish to puerh, and has been buying some cakes since 2011. She bought some clay jars to store the teas in, and in the hopes of speeding up the aging process, decided to try to add a bit of humidity to the jars to make things go faster/age better. This much sounds familiar – lots of people do similar things, especially if they live in drier climates, because, well, they worry about the tea not aging properly. These are the jars. Then the inevitable happened – first, signs of yellow mold, which can be dusted off easily and stopped the addition of humidity to the tea (by some method of adding water to the clay and let the clay soak it up, I believe). Then, a more invasive problem appeared – bugs, little bugs, … Continue reading →
