Category Archives: Places

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.

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.

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!

Drinking Tea

Zha Bao Ming was in the shop recently so HM wasted no time in procuring brushes, ink and paper for him to whip out some pictures to order. Here’s one of them, on the eternal theme of drinking tea in bucolic surroundings.

Peng Zhe, head of Xishuangbanna Tea Association was also here and had Zha Bao Min do a ‘King of Ban Zhang’ piece of calligraphy – doubtless destined for a tea cake wrapper next year!

Make Tea According to What You See (More on wilting)

The expression in Chinese ‘kan cha, zuo cha‘ is saying ‘Make tea according to what you find, according to the situation.’ or as my grandfather used to say “Conditions determine.”

In light of some recent online discussion on withering tea, I thought it worth revistiting the topic here.

The debate centers around a couple of issues; Why are some Sheng ‘greener’ than others. The second issue is the supposition that the degree of ‘green-ness’ in a young Sheng Puer is determined largely by the length of time that the fresh leaves are withered.

This is a fair assumption, but it’s a partial reality. Wilt time, as previously said, will have some affect on the flavour and appearance of tea, but so also will the provenance, the type of trees, the season, the method and degree of drying and also the method of drying the pressed cakes. Last but not least, how long the mao cha is stored for prior to pressing, and where the tea is subsequently stored will also impact the teas flavour and appearance.

Two most common reasons that a Sheng Puer will seem more ‘green tea’ like are these:

Shaqing/frying temeperature: a higher temperature (say 90 + C) will do this.

The tea isn’t sun-dried and the temperature of drying is a little high.

Habits vary in different areas, and from season to season. Some farmers do not wilt at all, others wilt in the spring but much less in autumn. Wilting may be done for 40 minutes or for a few hours.

‘Kan cha, zuo cha‘ – A farmer is less looking at his watch than looking at the tea, feeling it, smelling it in order to decide when to start each step of the process – from picking to drying.

As teas from different regions and different farmers vary, so do ours. What works well for one tea, may not work well for another. No two teas are made exactly the same. What we strive for is to produce quality teas from different regions that maintain their uniqueness.

Conversations – On 'Where's it from?'

I was talking with a friend, Xiao Zhang, who runs a tea shop near ours. She had just got some Autumn Lao Ban Zhang mao cha for which she already had a probable customer. Whilst sampling the tea I asked her if she would be prepared to tell anyone who asked exactly where the tea was from – i.e. which tea farmer.

An emphatic ‘No’ was the answer, adding that she doubted if anyone locally would be willing to divulge which family or farmers they were getting their tea from.

Here’s the dilemma:

Developing long term relationships with tea farmers has some difficulties: If you have developed or are developing a relationship with a tea farmer, it’s still fragile, even when it may appear quite solid; you have an agreement to purchase a given quantity of, say first flush spring, tea from a given tea farmer but, if someone comes along behind you and offers more money for the same tea, it is tempting for the farmer to take it. In the Xishuangbanna area at least, no-one would be surprised at this kind of incident; tea farmers have gone, in 10 years or so, from more-or-less subsistence living in many cases, to having money to spare. But it is uncertain. It makes sense for them to ‘make hay when the sun shines’. The guy who buys your tea this year, might be gone the next.

The person who offers more money may have fewer requirements than you do and may, if they get the tea, walk away with a lesser quality tea than you might have got from the same farmer. But you still didn’t get the tea and may have to go back to ‘square one’ and find another source of tea that meets your requirements. This often can take considerable time and effort.

I realised in talking with Xiao Zhang that this highlights a fundamental difference in tea producers/suppliers attitudes:

Those sufficiently remote from the region likely need the names of mountain, village, tea farmer, to give credence to their merchandise. They also will understand the appeal that there may be for many westerners in buying a product which has a story behind it: this tea was made by tea farmer X in village Y, etc. even when the veracity of such claims may be hard to prove.

Chinese people generally, particularly here in a small city, in a rather less developed corner of China, are somewhat less removed from the sources of their food. The food supply chain is less of an abstraction than it has become in the west. Imported products are still relatively few, and even fruit and vegetables from neighbouring provinces are often eyed with suspicion. So, whilst local people in Jinghong are well aware of possible food growing practices ( it is quite common to bump into someone you know who will offer some fruit or other saying, “These are from my uncles’ trees, they don’t have any chemicals on them.”), the mantra of provenance for selling foodstuffs is less developed in China,and is less understandable than it is in the west.

Local tea merchants rarely need that credential, and their proximity to the growers means that they at least believe there is a chance that they can keep their relationship with a given tea farmer, and also, that they could lose it.

Suppliers remote from the producing region would, I suspect, rarely imagine that they have anything other than a tenuous link with the producer, so are less worried about others interloping. So, whilst the notion of complete transparency is honourable and justified, in reality, it would, for the time being at least, appear unworkable for the majority of tea merchants and small tea producers near centres of tea production.

There is another problem: we have a steady flow of people who come in the shop with ‘their hands in their pockets’, by which I mean, they do not openly declare their intentions. Sometimes, somewhat after the fact, we might understand that they have come to Xishuangbanna looking for tea, with the idea that they too can go up in the mountains and buy tea, take it home and sell it. If it happens to us, it happens to everybody.

And why not? They’re free to do so. But it would make little sense for anyone involved in the tea business here to give away too much information about their own contacts. The idea of a more open declaration is, for the moment, here in Xishuangbanna at least, rather remote.

Horse's Mouth

Tea Tales from the South