Author Archives: Puerman

Meng Song Ku Cha – Bitter Tea

Sinensis assamica var. Kucha – or in plain English, bitter tea, is a sub-variety of sinensis assamica that grows in the Meng Song area. For reasons which are doubtless obvious, it’s not the most sought after of Puer tea, but with a light touch when brewing it can be rather pleasant, with a distinct, lingering, but not overwhelming bitterness.

A friend just dropped by with a few handfuls. We plopped some in the gaiwan. It’s not the prettiest maocha you’ll ever see, but it’s totally honest, unadulterated.

With maybe 5-6 grams in the gaiwan and very quick steeping times, the bitterness does not become overpowering and there’s some decent flavour and fragrance.

The soup is clean – when sampling it’s good to use a gaiwan – not a pot – and no strainer. The broth has a pleasing colour with a hint of pale, almost pinky, gold.

See here for an earlier post about Meng Song: www.zhizhengtea.com/puerblog/stone/

Wan Gong and Bai Cha Yuan

HM has been recently spending a fair bit of time going up to Wan Gong where we found a little tea last year, and Bai Cha Yuan . Our hope this year is to build on last year and make some more tea from a couple of tea gardens up there.

Old tea trees that were cut back and then left untended

The trees in the photo are typical of a fair number of the trees in this remote area near Bai Cha Yuan – they are maybe about 200 years old but were cut back heavily many years ago and have subsequently been left untended for a long time.

HM and some tea farmers from the area have built a small makeshift ‘pondoki’ where we will make tea, as it is much too far from any more permanent tea making facilities.

A makeshift shelter

We have improvised two small woks for frying tea.

Two makeshift woks for frying tea in the field

A rather splendid view from near the top of the mountain.

A view from near the top of the mountain

2012 Lao Ban Zhang

Yesterday we received our first little bit of 2012 Lao Ban Zhang. A few kilos, brought in by our friend from Menghun.

Lao Ban Zhang 2012 mao cha

Quite nicely made, and with a very ‘chun’ – unadulterated, pure flavour. It seems like it could have used a little more drying time perhaps. The kuwei is pronounced, the huigan a little slow, materialising after a couple of minutes, but pleasing enough when it does show itself.

Mao cha and gaiwan

It has that slight smokiness which disappears after the first couple of steepings and that I’ve almost come to expect of Lao Ban Zhang. As someone said to me a couple of years ago, “If it’s not smokey, it’s not Lao Ban Zhang.”

It’s just been made, so we’ll give it a little time.

Lao Ban Zhang mao cha broth after four steepings

The leaves after four steepings look pretty good. A nice eveness to their appearance

2012 First Spring Tea

We recently started to get some samples of this year’s tea. A handful here and a kilo there. It’s still early. We had three samples of Lao Ban Zhang. One of them was not bad except there was a hint of ‘new wok’ in the flavour.

Peng Zhe from Xishuangbanna Tea Association also brought in some samples he had got from Liu Da Cha Shan area. One was also rather pleasant. Here’s a picture the aftermath of some late evening sampling.

We were also debating the rule of thumb, that one ought not to sample more than 3 teas in a day, but we pretty much all conceded that during Spring there is no way to abide by such logic – often sampling many more teas a day.

Puer Glossary

A few years ago I thought it would be an educative and fun activity to start to compile a glossary of Chinese terms that are used in talking about Puer tea. After publishing the page, I largely forgot about it, and it looked like it got buried somewhere in the web of online Puer tea information.

More recently, because I realised that it had been viewed, I started looking at it again, and have subsequently realised what a labour of love it is.

Each time I looked at it, I would see entries that were garbled, contradictory, or even flat-out wrong. Every time I looked at it, I would think “Did I write that? What was I thinking? What was I trying to say?”.

So after maybe a year of dragging my feet – part of my reluctance to deal with it was due to some coding issues since I had imported the original document from another programme and ended up with lots of messy code which meant that each time I touched it, the whole thing was thrown into chaos – I finally got round to re-working it.

It’s far from perfect. There are probably still inaccuracies and some muddle. And there are certainly plenty of omissions. I also have some hope of including more expressions in dialect – because they are interesting and fun – ???????? ‘zhe ge cha jin ya chi’ for example. ‘This tea tightens the teeth.’ A reference to tea with some astringency along with a feeling in the lower gums – causing salivation – which is considered good. Actually, astringency is probably not the right word. It should be more like the French ‘âpre’ which sometimes is translated as acerbic in English, but is still not quite right; acidulous maybe.

So, still some way to go. Any comments or suggestions would be gratefully received by anyone who happens to find the glossary and be idle enough to look through it.

It can be found here.

New Year

It was half three in the morning and I was riding my bike home in the chill air. It was cold enough that I could feel the heat on my face from the small fires along the side of the road where cleaners had already swept up the remains on New Year fireworks into piles and were burning them.

Earlier in the day, I had been at a friends house for lunch and after that, dinner with another friend, then had gone to the shop. HM, being a rather traditional Beijinger had prepared to make jiao zi. For people from the north of China, eating jiao zi for New Year is de rigeur. The contents are also important: qing cai, jiu cai…..phononymes that all have significance, mostly to do with wishing (for) wealth, happiness and good health for the new year.

At midnight we set off firecrackers and ate jiao zi, then someone we know from Yibang came, bringing a cake of sheng from his own village. He has been talking for some time about tea from Yi Bang, but up till now we had not tasted his tea.

So, HM brewed some up -15grams in a 400 cc pot. It was good: the xiang qi, kougan, huigan, all good enough. The tea looked nicely made. Nicely pressed. But there was something missing. ‘Hou du bu gou’. The hou yun was also not what it could have been. Lao Feng suggested that HM had a used a pot that he had not used for some time, so the pot had absorbed some of the flavour from the tea. Another steeping. This time using a large gaiwan. The result was sightly different, but the thickness was still missing somehow. No deeper lying, more penetrating qualities. A little astringent, but nonetheless pleasant.

Our friend kept asking us to comment on the tea his brother had made, determined also that we should not be less than satisfied with the gift. So, on realising we were not completely sold on his tea, he suggested that he would go home and get another two cakes of tea.

All three were from Yi Bang. All were good. All were early spring teas from 2011. All had lost their qing wei. All were made by his brother. All three are from different areas of Yi Bang. One from a single garden of old trees. Another from three separate groups of trees that are in the woods. The third also from a single garden. Two are xiao ye zhong one is zhong xiao ye zhong. These sub-varietals typify Yi Bang Puer tea.

One after the other, we tried all three. one was really very good: kou gan, xiang qi, huigan were all good, but this one tea also had very good hou yun.

The other tea was less pleasing and had a slight hu wei (burned aroma) from the sha qing which was not particularly noticeable, but was there and marred the pleasure of the experience a little and was more marked because the thickness was not as fulsome as the second tea.

The tea we liked best was from a small area that, if made to the same standard as the tea we’d been drinking, would only produce 2 or 3 jian. The other areas, our friend reckoned could produce a little more.

There’s the rub. The elusive search for excellent tea that will produce enough quantity to ‘take to market’. And so the beginning of another year.

Dongguan Zhi Zheng Tea Shop

We weathered the coldest spell Guangdong has had for many years to attend the opening of a branch of Zhi Zheng Tea Shop in Dongguan, Guangdong which is on the main Shenzhen – Guangzhou highway.

Dongguan is known for its manufacturing industry (as well as other related service industries, which somehow, in China, seem to be deeply interwoven with doing business), so we were happy to dwell in the rarefied atmosphere of tea, for which Dong Guan is less well known.

Dong Guaners’ enthusiasm for tea – particularly Puer tea – is considerable. The shop is actually in Da Ling Shan which was once a small town that has now been subsumed by Dongguan, and Da Ling Shan alone has more tea shops than Jinghong.

Two dragons and their leader, with Wu Meng Zhao (left), Chairman of Guangdong Tea Culture Association and (right), Li Gui Rong, owner of Dong Guan Zhi Zheng Tea Shop.

The shop, which opened in typical Guangdong style on the 5th of January, is on two floors and has rooms on the second floor for tea tasting/drinking, and meeting friends.

Puer Pick

The ultimate Puer tea knife. Made of agarwood by a friend in Guangxi. Turned, with a brass ferrule and steel pick. Something of a renaissance man (except he rides a Harley), he works in wood and clay, making tea trays and tea tools as well as ceramic water kettles.

Tea Heads

We’ve recently been going to Nan Chun Tea Factory in Menghai to get some work done. One day while we were there, HM discovered that they had previously made som ‘cha tou‘ or tea heads. This is basically a large ball – 1 or 2 kg – of tea. H.M managed to convince Nan Chun Cha Chang’s lao ban to personally make some cha tou out of some Nan Nuo Shan mao cha that we had left from this spring.

The weighed tea is steamed in the usual way and emptied into a cloth bag.

The tea is then rolled,

hammered,

and squeezed

into a near spherical shape

Nan Chun Tea Factory, Peng Lao Ban with a ‘tea head’

What you end up with is a pretty dense ball of tea – it could certainly do some damage if thrown in the wrong direction. (You’ve heard of Gunpowder tea – this is cannonball tea)

It has to be dried in a low temperature oven because, despite all the beating and squeezing, the moisture content in the centre is still relatively high so normal air drying would run the risk of the centre of the thing going mouldy.

The end result is rather pleasing – a solid lump of tea!

A Question of Wanting

Shizuto Masunaga is seen as the author of ‘Zen Shiatsu’ and Akinobu Kishi is said to have been his foremost student.

Some years ago, whilst I was studying shiatsu, I had the good fortune to study with Kishi on a couple of occasions. At the end of one day, a student asked a ‘nuts and bolts’ question about what to do if something was or wasn’t happening, which sounded like it required a ‘nuts and bolts’ answer. “This” said Kishi, “is a question about wanting.”

I have come more and more to the notion that this response could equally apply to tea.

Our preconceptions, which are cobbled together out of our experiences and our perceptions of those experiences, inevitably affect the way we perceive each new experience.

Let me try to clarify. We drink a tea for the first time, we form an opinion about it: we either like or we don’t like it, or we are indifferent to it. If it is one of the first two reactions, we will probably go on to determine what it is that we do or don’t like about it: the fragrance, the flavour, the bitterness, the sweetness, the aftertaste, etc.

But useful as the ability to judge is, there’s a problem with it: Even the same tea, can taste different at different times, not necessarily because the tea has changed (which it does, all the time) but because I’ve changed, my perceptions are not static, they are also in a state of flux. Sometimes, I drink a tea and it appears to be quite mild, but on another occasion, it can taste surprisingly bitter. If I drink tea in the morning, before eating, my perceptions are keener. If I drink after a eating, they are dulled considerably. Sometimes, much less obvious factors are going to colour our perceptions.

So we approach tea A, expecting it to taste like ‘Taste A’, but it doesn’t. It tastes like something else. If our opinion is fixed, we will doubtless be disappointed, but if we are open to the experience, not ‘wanting’ anything, we may see that there are qualities in the tea that are different from those we were expecting, but they are also good.

Horse's Mouth

Tea Tales from the South