Ok… I admit I was really blunt to call him “tea nazi”, as he is by far not as harsh as the “soup nazi”, and he is really a nice guy!

This spring I got “official” announcement from Pan that he is back to tea business – on part-time basis, but in some sense, more devoted than a lot of full-timers in tea world. I know a bunch of “amateur” tea people, part-timers, moonlighters, or “hobby sellers(?)”. In fact, among my favorite tea friends, tea suppliers and tea “colleagues (?)”, there are probably more part-timers than full-timers. Thinking of that just surprised me! I haven’t had any business relation with Pan yet. But I sort of like it that he has come back to tea business on part-time basis!

Now I know it’s easier than ever for foreigners to shop on taobao. So here is Pan’s taobao store:
http://youjianchapu.taobao.com/search.htm?spm=a1z10.1.w28-18216832851.5.3q9noD

His store name is the same as the name of his store before he “retired” from tea business last time. It literally means “Here’s a Tea Store”. I think it’s a lovely name!

There aren’t many items yet there. And I’ve already asked him “would you please add more stuff in the store and make it more business-like?!”

Pan told me that he will add more items to the taobao store, but probably not a lot and not very fast. So far, he would visit every of the production site or collection source of his teas, and he would only carry teas that don’t use any pesticide. He will not do a lot of business in a short time. But he will maintain very high standards for quality and health of the teas, as always!

I think it’s not hard to tell that one can hardly make a living selling tea in this way, especially in China, where there are about a few million tea sellers doing business more efficiently on lower budgets. But it may work out just fine as Pan keeps his day job, which is an interesting job anyway.

If you look for more things to see, his “tea travel” page is very cool:
http://shop58835027.taobao.com/view_page-43393581.htm?spm=a1z10.3.w3-18202084498.4.9cTPU6

And I’m sure he will add more photos and writing to this page to document his tea journey and his teas. I’ve already suggested him to put his writings in text format on the webpage so that non-Chinese readers could use google translate to read them. But so far photos dominate and photos tell most of the stories already!

Besides, anybody who are Chinese-English bilingual, if you are interested, please feel free to translate his writings, publish the English version online and link back to his webpage.

I’ve been living in my small world and didn’t know much about what was going on in Malaysia. But I have a facebook friend who is Chinese Malaysian American and updated me a lot about the recent Election in Malaysia. It was quite amazing!

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These are two Huang Shan Mao Feng that I have every year since 2010. Huang Shan Mao Feng is one of my favorite green teas (probably top 3, and Long Jing is not even in the top 3…) It’s hard for me to pick just a few of “favorite green tea”. Similarly, it’s hard to pick up just a few of “favorite” Huang Shan Mao Feng producers. There are actually many that I like. But these two, I think, are most unique in style and from quite unique places. I’ve explained about them here and here.

This is pretty much a casual tasting rather than “evaluation” tasting. I love them both and hence can’t really evaluate them objectively.

The one on the left is the semi-wild Huang Shan Mao Feng (which I happened to take from the very bottom of a pack so there are more broken leaves than usual), and the one on the right is the 1400m Huang Shan Mao Feng. 

Semi-wild:

1400m:

Overall, the semi-wild Mao Feng has higher bud/leaf ratio than the 1400m Mao Feng, while there are are fewer broken leaves in the 1400m Mao Feng. The amount of broken leaves is partially due to that I reached the bottom of a pack for the semi-wild. Besides, the semi-wild Mao Feng must be carried from its remote site back to the factory for processing, unlike the 1400m Mao Feng, which is carried from a site near the village (the near distance is still by the standards of locals who have very strong legs) back to the village for processing.

In terms of taste and aroma, I feel the 1400m Mao Feng is more “typical” Mao Feng taste, with a subtle floral aroma to begin with, and with very smooth tea liqour. The semi-wild Mao Feng has a quite “interesting” taste, with some edemame flavor and more prominent sweet aftertaste than most green teas.

I didn’t take dry leaf photos this year – but they are quite consistent from year to year. If comparing the dry leaf photos from the above-mentioned earlier blog posts, we could see the semi-wild Mao Feng has more bud, and the pan-frying is not as heavy as the 1400m Mao Feng. It’s still traditional heavy kill-green process. But naturally they shouldn’t be pan-fried as hard as larger leaves.

In contrast, the pan-frying of the 1400m Mao Feng is quite heavy that we could easily see the “blisters” on the rim of the leaves.

Semi-wild Mao Feng (it has some blisters too)

1400m Huang Shan Mao Feng (a lot of “blisters”)

“Blister” is something quite interesting, and I plan to create a blog post with a series of photos of tea leaf “blisters”. It’s commonly seen on traditional green tea genres and sometimes is used to judge if a tea is manually made. But the “blisters” on some teas (such as Long Jing) are much more subtle than some heavily “blistered” green teas (such as Huang Shan Mao Feng and Lu Shan Yun Wu). Between these two Huang Shan Mao Feng, I think the “blister” is an interesting contrast and somewhat reflect the different styles of these two teas.

Some updates: Mr. Wang’s village finally got the road built. My feelings about it are complicated. But I know it’s good for them. Mr. Wang is thrilled about driving a car to visit his parents instead of walking for 8km in the mountain.

* reunion of “3 brothers”
* price of a oolong

And a couple of *really* old ones on teachat – they make me feel old! :-p

* a oolong (and by the time of the posted game, I hadn’t seen this specific style in American market yet, so it was harder to guess then than now!)
* which oolong is different from the other three

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Now here is another one… The tea is 2004 Chang Tai Heng Feng Yuan sheng. Heng Feng Yuan is one of the numerous (as I complained before) trademarks of Chang Tai. There are mostly shu products under this trademark, but there are some shengs. This one from 2004 is relatively well known for two reasons. One is that many people think the leaf materials are pretty good. A second reason is that on the wrapper, the trademark “Heng Feng Yuan” is mis-spelt. The first character “heng” is put as “ji”, which could be interpreted as “ultimate or supreme”. It’s not officially confirmed, but rumors are the misspelling was done purposely. I think that was plausible. Back in 2004, Chang Tai was in extremely good shape, their tea was indeed good, and the company had probably got already quite arrogant (which might be the root of the arrogance that caused them trouble in 2007, I think). But there is no official story about whether the misspelling was done in purpose. And one obvious effect of the misspelling is that the tea can be more easily recognized among all other early 2000s Chang Tai teas.

So I got these two versions of exactly the same tea. With a purpose similar to the that of these “tuition tea”, I got these twins of Heng Feng Yuan for study and comparison purposes. This time, I think, it’s an excellent comparison opportunity that rarely comes up. The two tea cakes here are from two different storage environment. One is purely dry storage, as most of my puerh. The other one is Hong Kong humid storage – if you are a drinker of purely dry storage only, you might think how brave I am to get this bunch of tea… But in fact, it wasn’t a hard decision, and I will explain why later.

Now the question for you is, which is purely dry storage, and which is Hong Kong humid storage?

Don’t be shy of taking a guess. It’s 50%, 50% chance

On the other hand, don’t be surprised if your guess is wrong :-p This guessing game is indeed a little tricky – and I usually pick tricky ones to post anyway It’s never hard to tell between a dry storage and Hong Kong humid storage, if you hold them in hands. But from the photos (and I don’t know if the blog page would allow the largest resolution of the photos but you can try clicking them), it’s not that easy to tell, especially when the dry storage is not the stereotypically “forever green” tea and the Hong Kong humid storage is not the stereotypical “rotten” tea.

There are indeed “keys” to recognize if the photos can be enlarged. Meantime, photos could be deceiving in various ways and they might show some “false keys”. Last month I posted these photos on a Chinese tea forum and let people guess. Most people got it wrong – although there is 50% chance to choose each answer, somehow most people chose the wrong answer!

Now here are the photos. All the photos have the same tea on the left and the same tea on the right.

Although they are “twin brothers”, their wrappers aren’t exactly the same to begin with. One has thicker paper texture. Printing should be the same.

Below is the cake on the right.

Below is the cake on the left.

At the end, I also want to point out that I can’t say for sure the Hong Kong humid storage is the typical product of its type. I do somewhat believe that’s what Hong Kong humid storage is “supposed” to be. Many other things between these two teas are a lot more different than what’s showed by the photos of these two teas. To me, that’s the huge difference between dry storage and humid storage (but not necessarily difference between a theoretical “good” and theoretical “bad”). But I’m a dry storage drinker in general, so the “typical” Hong Kong humid storage in my mind is not necessarily the same as the “typical” in everybody’s mind. Even though I got the humid storage tea for study purpose, I would like a “tuition tea” to be more or less drinkable to me too. In this sense, I can’t say for sure how typical a humid storage is, if it’s drinkable to a dry storage drinker.

I started this series in 2011. Taiwan “Style” Oolong (0) is here, explaining why I’m interested in them.

Taiwan “Style” Oolong (1) is here. I wish I had finished writing this part (1b) much, much earlier, before the close-up of the late Chicago Tea Garden run by , so that some people could have grabbed their last Zealong at a very good close-up discount price. In fact, I wish I had grabbed some myself, as these teas (even including Zealong pure) have quite long shelf life and the prices were great. But I was fully occupied by other non-tea stuff and didn’t manage to do either of this. Though I did remind quite a few people of the good deal in various conversations.

All the Taiwan style oolongs I mentioned in part (0), plus quite a few other Taiwan style oolongs I found later, I’ve tasted them all. But besides once writing a short tea log here at steepster, I have yet to write down my thoughts of them.

Meantime, please let me know if you know of any good sources for Zealong with good prices! Prices are important to me. I know Zealong is good stuff and have no doubt about it. Price is the key factor in my tea purchase for Zealong. Last time I checked, Ya Ya Tea House of New Zealand carries Zealong products. And I don’t know if there still are USA sources of these oolongs.

So here is what I think about Zealong Dark and Zealong Pure.

Zealong dark:

Dry tea leaves. Although it’s called “dark”, it’s not that dark from dry tea leaves to tea liquor. The tea is made with certain degree of roasting. But the purpose of roasting is not to make it “dark”, but to let it reach the best level of taste aroma. The tea processing is “tea centered”. It’s not like that the producer decided “today we make a darkly roasted tea”. How the tea is roasted, depends on the tea.

First infusion.

Fourth infusion:

Seventh infusion:

Tenth infusion:

It didn’t have to go to 10th infusion though. I’m often thrifty on tea drinking and tend to use the last drop of it. But I don’t judge a tea by the number of infusions (I feel I need to clarify it here because some people do seem to give a tea higher score when they get more infusions from it… but on the other hand, you could often get more infusion by using more tea and less water. So to some degree, scoring a tea in this way is a biased method, I believe.)

Spent leaves:

Zealong pure:

Dry leaves:

Second infusion:

Seventh infusion:

I didn’t take more photos of Zealong Pure because as previously mentioned, they are already documented by Matcha and Sir William, and their photos are much better than mine. Sir Williams documentation includes all three Zealongs from the same year (2010?) as mine.

Overall, I think these two teas, together with Zealong Aromatic, tell some very interesting stories and reveal important things about oolong, especially Taiwan oolong. Also interestingly, although they are Taiwan “Style” Oolong made on another continent, I think they inherit some of the best legacy of Taiwan oolong that’s not always seen in every Taiwan oolong made in Taiwan. Basically, I think that’s one of the interesting themes involved in quite a few Taiwan “Style” oolongs that I liked.

1. Comparing the leaf material of the three tea, we can clearly see that the youngest leaves were used for Zealong Pure, the oldest leaves were used for Zealong Dark and the middle level was for Zelong Aromatic. This is not necessarily the rule for all oolong. But it reflects that the processing style of the tea was coordinated with the characters of the leaves. To process a tea based on the characters of the tea leaves, I believe that’s the spirit of artisan tea making.

2. The three types of tea leaves, no matter older or younger, all look very alive. The older leaves of Zealong dark may have a lower market price than the younger leaves of Zealong Pure, but they don’t look inferior. They are thick, leathery, elastic and succulent. These are all signs of good organic cultivation. Whether or not the tea is certified organic, the leaves already reveal nice organic fertilization. I have to stress “good” in front of organic cultivation here. Organic cultivation only means no synthesized fertilizers or pesticides are used. It doesn’t necessarily indicate the quality level of the cultivation. Some commercial organic cultivation, while omitting synthesized fertilizers, simply doesn’t give the plants enough fertilization or maintain a nutrient-dynamic ecosystem for the plants. Then the plants could end up lacking vitality or nutrients. Organic cultivation in a poor ecosystem is not as “organic” as it may sound. The good organic cultivation results from thousands of years of agricultural wisdom and involves various eco-friendly cultivation methods and brilliant ideas of maintaining good soil nutrients and giving the plants organic fertilization (such as sheep droppings and soybean cakes!).

3. The three styles here are more or less similar to the three main styles of Tie Guan Yin that I talked about earlier. Different teas, same philosophy of tea making! Among the 3 Zealongs, my favorite is Zealong Aroma. Among the 3 styles of Tie Guan Yin, my favorite is the traditional light roast, which could be seen as a counterpart of Zealong Aroma in Tie Guan Yin family. On the other hand, I also enjoy the other two styles of Zealongs and other well-made styles of Tie Guan Yin. It’s hard to dislike a style if the tea is well made.

4. The Zealong Pure, although the “greenest” style among all three, doesn’t look as green as some other modern green style oolongs. The purpose of green style oolong processing is to maintain the natural, fresh leaf aroma by controlling for lighter oxidation level. But it’s a commonly shared idea among a lot of great oolong workers (Taiwan oolong and Fujian oolong all included) that “green” is not the ultimate goal, and even green style oolong should have a right level of kill-green (enzyme dis-activation process) and right level of oxidation. Although I say this is an idea shared by great oolong workers of both Taiwan and Fujian, I feel the idea is much better implemented in Taiwan. Although some Taiwan oolongs could be “too green” for my value system, Taiwan oolong competitions don’t favor the “greenest” style. A commonly quoted standard of Taiwan competition tea is “golden yellow and honey green” (金黄蜜绿). This is in contrast with the “green liquor” （绿豆汤色）and “light green liquor” （白水观音）standard from many Fujian Tie Guan Yin competitions.

5. The Zealong Dark, although the “darkest roasted” among all three, doesn’t look as “dark” as some other roasted oolongs. The purpose of roasting is to induce the best aroma from the tea leaves. It’s also a common idea shared by a lot of great oolong workers (again, Taiwan oolong and Fujian oolong all included) that “getting the tea dark” is not the ultimate goal of roasting, and a favored tea is dominated by tea aroma but not “fire flavor”. 

6. The spent leaves of all three styles of Zealong show that they are very carefully made. The producer of Zealong holds very high standards for tea cultivation and tea processing. I think Zealong is quite expensive, but the price is not unreasonable with this level of work.

7. If drinking these teas and some Taiwan-made Taiwan oolongs side by side and blindfolded, can I tell which is which? Well, if there is a large difference in elevation levels of the production site, probably it will be largely revealed in the taste of the tea. But if it’s a blindfolded comparison between Zealong and Taiwan oolong of similar processing styles from medium elevation level, I don’t think I could tell which one is from Taiwan. That’s something very intriguing to me about Taiwan “Style” oolong. I don’t think I could easily tell which one is from Taiwan, which one is not, among two equally well made teas. If some people claim they could easily tell, I would say, let them go blindfolded test first :-p

8. In the above discussion, I was hypothetically comparing Zealong with Taiwan oolong from medium elevation level. This is actually related to something else about Zealong that amazes me. I tried to look up the elevation level of Zealong’s production site, and it seems an almost ground-level place. I always think elevation level is one of the most important geographic factors for tea production. Most of the best Taiwan oolongs are from much, much higher mountains than the production site of Zealong, which can hardly be called “mountain” at all. But the quality of Zealong is way above what I would have predicted just based on its elevation level. I think it’s quite amazing, and don’t know how they did it. Well, no matter how they did it, they didn’t do it fast. From what I read about Zealong, the tea wasn’t put in the international market until 15 years after the establishment of Zealong plantation. Sometimes, “taking time” is part of the secret recipe.

In this blog (that’s over the past 4 years or so), I’ve written about 6 shu. I enjoy each of them, from well to very much. But those are already the vast majority of all shu that I’ve liked. To me, they are like a small drop from an ocean of stinky, fishy, damp, basement-moldy, ammonium… types of shu! So you can tell how (un)excited I’m about shu. Usually when I recommend a shu to somebody, I would say, “look, even I could enjoy it!”

For years, I never understood what’s the point of shu. My best interpretation was, people needed something mild (for the mouth feel, for the health or to go with their food…), and therefore would bear with some stinky flavors. I have almost zero tolerance of stinky flavor. So the few shu I would keep are those that don’t taste stinky to me. And usually my near-to-the-best evaluation to a shu is “not stinky!” But after all, we don’t have to drink a tea for its non-stinkiness, right?! I have to admit that it’s relatively easy for a shu to have some good liquor texture and sweet aftertaste. But to me, that’s not enough. Usually I would prefer shu that has a nice complex, aromatic aftertaste, not just sweetness and smoothness. But I’m pretty much an “aromatic” drinker for various types of teas, and other tea drinkers may not share the same preferences as mine.

Usually I don’t deliberately look for shu, except for my recent search for 421 (because the 421 brick I liked very much was no where to find now). The other shu I enjoy so far were all that I accidentally bumped into.

Earlier this year, I got this 2007 Chang Tai “Gold Bowl Silver Tip”, because somebody told me that I “really really have to try it.” I didn’t know why I “really have to try” it, since I’m not even a shu lover! But I got it anyway, because it does look like an interesting tea. It’s made primarily of high grade tea bud, which, in my value system for shu, is a very good thing. Besides, it’s a tea blended by the manager of Bao Lan Sheng teashop of Hong Kong, with shu of various ages and up to 20 years old blended in. In my own value system, I don’t really understand what’s the point to keep a *shu* around for 20 years (since it’s already a shu). But I do believe this Bao Lan Sheng manager is one of the professionals who really know what he is doing. So I thought I would try this interesting tea. It’s a 100g small tuo. So although it’s not cheap, buying a tuo won’t hurt my wallet that much.

The package – typical Chang Tai style for Hong Kong and Taiwan market. Chant Tai products for mainland China usually have more practical style of packaging. But for Hong Kong and Taiwan market, they attempt to impress with packaging. Sometimes I really enjoy the good packaging, like for this mushroom tuo. But most of the time, I think it’s over done.

Besides, Wei Rong Hao, one of the numerous registered trademarks of Changtai, seems an attempt to attract Hong Kong and Taiwan buyers too. In addition to Wei Rong Hao, Chang Tai has a few other “Hao”-bearing trademarks such as Chang Tai Hao, Yi Chang Hao, Ding Sheng Hao… Somehow, “Hao” could make a lot of people relate to high end product – an interesting phenomenon.

The tea has a lot of golden buds indeed, which I like. It has been dry-stored in Guangzhou, and the tuo doesn’t have much of the typical shu smell.

I had expected it to have some shu smell, and thought it might need some air-out. So as soon as I got the tea, I immediately broke an entire tuo and put it in a jar. Meantime, I took a piece to brew. To my surprise, without any air-out yet, the tea doesn’t taste as if it actually needs any air-out.

Overall, I like it very much, and it might be my favorite shu so far. At certain point, I almost felt this tea tasted like a very old sheng instead of a shu. Although shu was invented in order to mimic old sheng, before this tea, no other shu gave me a feeling of old sheng and made me forget it was a shu.

In the past, for a few times, some very good American/Canadian friends of mine told me that they thought I didn’t appear or behave like a typical Chinese. Each time, my response would be like this – I paused for a few seconds, and said, “is this supposed to be a compliment???” And I enjoyed seeing them a little bit embarrassed :-p But in fact, I’m a most typical Chinese. I would tell them that I probably understand what they mean, but I would guess many other Chinese they knew were not as typical Chinese as I am

Back to the tea… basically what I wanted to say is, this tea almost doesn’t taste like a shu – but then, I don’t know if it’s “appropriate” to praise a shu by saying it doesn’t taste like a shu :-p

As for taste, it actually doesn’t have as long-lasting aftertaste as my beloved 421 and a few other shu I love. But somehow, I love this tea very much. One thing about it that’s most impressive to me is, it has a very sugary taste which is not felt by the mouth but by the throat. Maybe I could say this is the so-called “jujube aroma” of puerh. But in fact, there are already millions of “jujube shu bricks” out there in the market, and most shu that are claimed to have jujube aroma are either crappy or at the best mediocre. So I’m rather reluctant to call this sugary taste “jujube”. 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoy this tea. Here is a comment on this tea made by the manager of Jing Mei Tang Guangzhou store. He said, “Before experiencing this tea, you can’t say you know the beauty of shu.” Well, I hope I still have many years to live and chances to discover a few other good shu. But I do think his comment summarizes this tea very well.  

At this moment, I feel a bit guilty that I didn’t say much of good things about Chang Tai, yet I have enjoyed quite a few of their products very well. But on the other hand, if you wonder about it, I’ve tasted a lot more Chang Tai teas than what I’ve written, and not all of them are enjoyable to me. I do think that some pre-2007 Chang Tai teas are very good deal, partially due to them being boycotted in Chinese market. Some 2007-2009 Chang Tai teas seem to have very good prices, but I haven’t yet tasted enough of them to judge whether they are good deals.

This tea is one of my recent favorites. I haven’t had a lot of it yet, being cautious of having too much new sheng. But overall, my impression on this tea is, it’s powerful yet not harsh. Although for a few times in conversations, I compared this tea to 2010 Zhang San (which I like very much too and showed a few photos in this post), and although they do share some similarity, the contrast of these two teas is obvious. To a large degree, the contrast in mouth feeling comes from age of tea trees (which I believe, but it’s a feeling and is hard to quantify). Zhang San is from young arbor trees. This tea is from tea trees of over 300 years old. Besides, this tea is from an elevation of about 1500-1600m, which is slightly higher than the 1100m elevation of Zhang San. Interestingly (and probably not surprisingly), the price of Zhang San increased rapidly in the past three years. This is largely due to the tea quality there and widely acknowledged outstanding tea processing skills of Zhang San villagers. But the price rise has been too fast and too much, and it’s probably largely because that now many people know about this village and their tea has become one of the most wanted. Currently, the market price of Zhang San young tree tea could easily go way above this Burma-China border tea (basically an unknown source to many people yet), yet I think it’s very obvious that this tea has much higher value.

This is the kind of young sheng that makes me want to slow down in drinking, and get even slower, to experience what’s the taste is like minutes after each sip and the mouth feeling many minutes afterward.

As much as I like this tea, it does have some flaws. I’m just happy that its flaws aren’t what would strike my nerves. 

The “group photo” of the leaves mainly show their nice features. But the individual leaves photo below reflects both merits and flaws of this tea.

Since the tea is from a not very commercialized site and there isn’t strict quality control, there are small amount of larger, broken or older leaves (such as the top right in the photo) that would have been picked out if it were in a more mature producing area of puerh. The transportation of raw tea is basically by foot which causes further crushing of some tea leaves. Later on, the crushed debris was removed through processing but some broken leaves and older leaves were left in. (Talking about by-foot transportation… it is quite normal in remote regions of Yunnan and usually even more strenuous than the Yellow Mountain village scene I wrote about in this post. But I’ve seen 5-year-old Yunnan boy carrying a big bucket of straws and hiked easily in the mountain, which made me feel we city dwellers were degenerative human beings…)

The stems of the bottom two pieces show typical “horse hoof” structure at the very bottom that’s commonly seen in early spring arbor tree products (similar structures could be found in previously posted teas such as this, this, this, this, and this). On arbor trees, some tea buds grow directly from bigger branches or trunks instead of smaller branches. Therefore, when the tea bud is pulled off, the connection between the bud and the trunk shows a “horse hoof” structure. The “horse hoof” structure is not a “gold standard” to judge whether the tea is from big arbor trees, and some people even believe it indicates imperfect harvest method that may hurt the tree. But generally speaking, “horse hoof” structure and early spring arbor tree products have strong association with each other, and even carefully harvested tea from arbor tree would have a few “horse hooves” in each batch.

On the bottom right leaf, we can also see some insect-bitten spots. If we may call it a “merit”… since it demonstrates that the tree lives happily together with bugs.

It’s a little ironic though, that merely 2.5 decades ago, when my grandma or mom went grocery shopping, they would try the best to pick cabbages with fewer bug-bitten holes. At that time, most vegetables in China didn’t have a chance to “enjoy” the modern technology of pesticides yet, and the prettier leaves represented higher quality of the cabbage. Nowadays, instead, we would ever wonder how come the juicy, sweet lettuce doesn’t have merely one bug-bitten hole, and when we see pest damages on organic vegetables, we feel as happy as seeing an old friend!

Another ironic story pertaining to this tea… *rumors* are, nowadays tea leaves from this region (a village near Burma-China border which has little reputation in puerh world) are often transported to Kokango (a Chinese ethnic region in Burma, currently famous for its ancient arbor tree puerh) to be sold as Kokango tea. Meantime, Kokango tea leaves are often transported to Bulang Mountain region to be sold as ancient arbor tea of some famous Chinese villages. When I heard of this, I could visualize busy people carrying tea from China to Burma, and then from Burma to China, back and forth… What a funny scene! All this is driven by cash, cash paid by people who care more about the title of a tea than the tea itself.

A few articles that I feel most people would enjoy!

1. I learned of this article from @jackie at this teatra.de discussion. I’ve heard that Pakistanis are crazy about tea. It looks like their tea is a lot different from the tea I drink. But the enthusiasm is intriguing!

By the way, Pakistan, when not in war, is a beautiful country. The photo on top of this post was taken in Pakistan by The Cyclist Seto (not me, another guy from Seto clan), and more of his Pakistani pictures can be found here.

2. If you want to learn more about Long Jing of this year, here is Long Jing report from Walker Tea Walker, features with photos from my friend 家住龙井村

3. From Steepsters about Mormon tea drinkers:
http://steepster.com/discuss/5149-any-mormon-tea-drinkers-on-the-board?page=1&post_id=89719

This is the first time I’ve heard that it’s arguable whether there is a Mormon tea taboo! I had always thought that it’s a Mormon rule that tea drinking is not allowed. But this Mormon tea drinker says that the scripture didn’t specify tea (and not even coffee!) but as he clarified, “part of our code of health (called Word of Wisdom and adopted in the early 1800’s) is to avoid alcohol, tobacco and “hot drinks” which were later interpreted to mean coffee and tea.”
I don’t have much idea about how religiously correct this above statement is. On the one hand, I was surprised. On the other hand, it’s not surprising to me that humans used their own understanding to interpret religious scriptures and made it rules of the God. It happened for many times in many religious organizations, right?

4. A thread from a Chinese tea forum with a lot of yixing photos. Very high level exhibitions of non-collector group yixing show. (The text is not important. Just see the photos would be enough.)
http://teabbs.zjol.com.cn/viewthread.php?tid=169825&extra=&page=1

I see a lot of discussions all the time about “tuition teapots” and how new yixing users gain experience. Although it’s always important to have hands-on experience to learn, personally, I would think it’s more important to see a lot of good teapots than putting your hands on a lot of bad teapots to learn (let alone those bad teapots usually cost money for you to put your hands on them!).

I once wrote about how to deal with obsessive (tea / tea ware) shopping, and made a list of strategies. Maybe I could add to the list one more strategy – window shopping! For tea, we can’t get much of the “taste” from window shopping. But for tea ware, I think window-shopping on good stuff would do a lot more good than buying bad stuff.

The tea ware board of teachat, especially those threads on the very top of the board, are also nice places for “window shopping”.

This has been a terrible week for Boston! On top of it, yesterday, a grade 7 earthquake broke out in Sichuan province (actually Ya An, the region where Tibetan Hei Cha is produced). On one hand, natural disasters are always so overwhelming and leave a completely helpless feeling to people. On the other hand, in some sense, human disasters caused by human violence feel even more awful than natural disasters.

I’m glad that the week in Boston has a relatively good end, and grateful for the efficient and effective action of the law enforcement. Everybody feels relieved after last night. But on the other hand, we all know that this is so not-over for many others whose lives were permanently damaged at the Boston Marathon bombing…

This is by far not the first time large-scale man-slaughter (involving kids!) has happened. But this time, it makes me feel awful in a whole new way. Part of the awful feeling is from the awareness that we’ve already got too much violence in this world, yet it happened again, to an event that is supposed to be one of the most inspiring and most peaceful activities in our society.

I have this draft about concern of lead in tea, which I’m afraid is neither interesting nor pleasant. I left it unfinished for a long time. But this week, I guess I won’t have the mood to write anything pleasant anyway, and hopefully this lead thing can be a little bit informative for people who do care about lead problems. So I thought I would post it this week.
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From time to time, there are questions from tea drinkers about lead contamination in tea. It is a legitimate concern and lead is indeed occasionally found in tea. Recognized sources of lead contamination includes:

* air pollution – this is mainly caused by automobiles and mainly affects plantations near urban areas.

* soil pollution – this is mainly caused by deposition from automobiles and mainly affects plantations by the roadsides.

Considering the first above two factors, high end teas from traditional producing areas have smaller chance of lead contamination. This is because most of the best tea producing areas are in remote mountainous regions relatively short of automobile roads.

* harvest method – buds and younger leaves are more free of contamination. Generally speaking, higher end green teas are composed of mostly buds and younger leaves, compared with lower end green teas. Across tea categories, green teas generally take younger leaves than high end oolong products. Most black teas and many puerh and hei cha products take older leaves than green teas and higher end oolong.

Harvest method and leaf stage is just one factor affecting lead contents in tea. Older leaves of puerh from pristine environments could be totally free of lead, and very young tea buds in heavily polluted areas can be exposed to lead.

* processing – lead contamination from processing equipment. This is supposed to be the easiest to avoid but unfortunately happens sometimes. According to a study published in a Chinese journal, among the 18 factories whose tea products are sampled, the factories focusing on higher grade teas have the lowest lead contents, and the lead content is less after processing compared with before processing. The factories focusing on lower grade teas have the highest lead contents.

According to a Chinese article about lead standard, the Chinese tea inspection standard is 2mg/kg. Japanese standard is 25mg/kg. EU is 5mg/kg. Australia and Canada’s is 10mg/kg. (None of them is zero because for various reasons, trace amount of lead is commonly found in air and water.)

Since the above numbers are from a Chinese article published in 2008, I don’t know how accurate it is about other countries’ standards and if there have been any changes in recent years.

The article with these numbers resulted from an interview with Chen Zongmao, Chinese leading tea scientist and Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering. He quoted these numbers to emphasize that Chinese lead standards were made in 1988, while the standards of most other countries were made in later years (with a more polluted world). EU standards were made much more strict than before to target on food/tea imports from other countries. Chen Zongmao listed this numbers to urge the government to LIFT Chinese tea lead standard, because he believes it’s unfair to Chinese producers. This suggestion from Chen Zongmao, of course, caused great social debate. On the one hand, do people ever want to lift inspection standard, don’t we want to always make it stricter and safer??

Chen Zongmao’s proposal should be viewed with a context though. What he said was mainly in response to the international trade wars on going during the time. In 2008, EU tightened a series of pesticides inspection standards overnight, with the most rapid change on endosulfan, whose inspection standard was lowered from 30mg/kg to 0.01mg/kg, a 3000 times change overnight. In 2008, many western countries were shocked by the news that so many Chinese food products export to EU failed inspection. But with the context, it’s not really surprising that most of those products satisfied all EU requirement one night before, and would fail the 3000 times more strict standards one night after. Not surprisingly, this failure of compliance of EU inspection standards happened to many products from various exporting countries. European and American news media mainly targeted Chinese producers on this. This action of singling out Chinese products is not surprising to me and I wonder if it’s surprising to anybody at all :-p

So basically the discussion on lead and many other pesticides standards in China were not just about the environment or health, but about politics and economics as well. This is rather unfortunate. But equally unfortunately, the inspection standards of some importing countries, including EU countries, were not just about the environment or health, but about politics and economics as well.

Since not all tea products are inspected for lead (lead inspection is not required for all international trades), the inspection standards can only serve as references. Generally speaking, it seems to me “high grade tea” and “young leaves” are the most visible standards to consumers. Besides, as for many other quality factors of tea, the quality of the ecosystems where the tea is grown is extremely important. However, information of ecosystems is not always available to consumers, and in today’s economy, many “high end” teas are made “high end” based on packaging and advertising.

At last, I also want to point out that the lead concern in tea is not necessarily greater than lead concern in almost everything else, including air and water. In fact, I suspect lead concern in tea is much smaller than lead concern in many other things. In many ways, other food products are more easily contaminated by lead than tea, and many  other food products are for complete consumption, instead of being infused like tea (lead is in its insoluble form in tea products). So generally speaking, lead contamination is a great concern in tea, but it’s in everything else as well. The ultimate way to get clean food is to improve the entire ecosystem, and have more progressive gasoline standards (since automobile contamination is one of the major source of lead contamination).

In non-food products, from time to time, lead raises concerns too. For example, according to some consumer group reports, purses of some popular brands have lead significantly above the legal standards. Among the brands mentioned there are purses with typically $200-$500 price tags (such as Tory Burch).

I love purses as much as I love tea… (and I like Tory Burch a lot!) So I hope it’s not just the bias toward tea that makes me feel tea is generally perfectly safe (but bias does exist because I suspect I love tea more than purses…)  I feel we are in a more danger and more polluted world nowadays, but I still feel tea is safer than a lot of other things.

Indeed, puerh is by far not the tea type I drink the most. But it seems there is always more to write about puerh. For green tea and oolong, after I write about a tea, I’m done. I wouldn’t write about the new Long Jing every year,  because they are similar in most years. But for puerh, there are so many producers and so many brands. And even for the same product of the same producer, there are various years, various versions of the same year (always HATE producers who do this kind of things though!), outcomes of various storage, etc.

Chang Tai is one of those producers that create various versions of the same tea even within the same year, and it has so many registered trademarks to a degree of confusion. Generally speaking, I don’t dislike Chang Tai, and even like some of their teas very much. But I hate how confusing they are, and feel during their heydays back in early 2000s, they significantly benefited from the confusion they generated. But then there is tea karma and they did receive some revenge later on, as I’ve gossiped here.

In Chinese market today, Chang Tai is recovering but still suffers from its failure back in 2007. Then, sometimes there are good deals.

Ban Na Yun Wu (Cloud) Tea is one of the supposedly quality-price-ratio product of Chang Tai. It’s relatively inexpensive compared with other Chang Tai products, and is supposed to have relatively solid quality.

Now here is a game for you! I’ve got three Ban Na Cloud tea here. Some of them I got with really good price, and some of them don’t have as good quality-price-ratio – I got them anyway, mainly to let the 3 brothers have a reunion, and for me to compare them. So in this sense maybe we can call them “tuition tea”?

I’ve got – 1, 2003 Banna dry storage; 2, 2005 banna dry storage; and 3, 2005 Guangzhou dry storage.

Now the question is: Which is which?

And the bonus question is – any comments on the cakes and leaves?

I will let you take the guesses before blabbing more…

After taking the photos, I enlarged the photos and looked at them carefully. And I have to say, part of the question is a trick, and if you know the key, you could tell. On the other hand, part of the question is purely guessing. If I hadn’t put my hands on them, by looking at the photos, I would be quite clueless. So just guess and don’t use too much logic

This is one of the most ordinary tea trays from one of the most ordinary producers. It cost, like, $3-5 in China. I’m sure one can still find something like this today within US for lower than $20. Many people would warn against getting bamboo tea trays, because, they leaks. At certain point in their lives, they leak like there is no tomorrow! In the traditional time, all the bamboo materials for household ware would be treated, aged and weathered, so that they would be tough enough to last for decades. But nowadays few people would do this, and definitely won’t do this for a $5 tea tray. But bamboo tea trays are generally cheap, and bamboo is a nice, lovely natural material. Somehow among all my tea ware, I don’t have the passion to get fancy tea trays, and don’t want to ship nice, heavy ones from overseas. So I got this little bamboo tea tray. I have a few other tea trays here and there. All of them are cheap little tea trays. But this bamboo one is most heavily used (or abused).

When it was new, it looked all nice…

I’ve heard of quite a few discussions on how to protect your bamboo tea tray, like draining it and letting it dry soon after use, or giving it some oil from time to time. But I was to lazy to follow all these. I left water in it overnight all the time and rarely carefully dry it after use. And I use it heavily.

Then, not surprisingly, just several weeks after I started using it, it leaked! But then, I used some caulk/sealant material (from Home Depot, and probably the kind for kitchen sink) to seal around its inside. So the tea tray became a little ugly inside…

But from the outside, one wouldn’t be able to tell…