Cha Xi Collective

October this year is a challenging month for me. There’s a lot going on! A lot of it is happy: several of my friends are getting married. The most difficult part, though, is that in a week I will need to travel a long distance to move my mother to be closer to her family. I’ve been on the edge of being overwhelmed many times, but thankfully I have been able to find many moments of peace and joy,…

Today I felt like having a Sheng (raw) Puer. It’s a sunny day and nearly Fall, and I wanted something energetic but comforting. I don’t drink my Shengs very frequently and so they’ve piled up for many years. I have a whole shelf of my tea cabinet packed with them, which makes for a fun experience to dig through the hoard and figure out what to make. Today I decided to dig deeper than I have in a…

Today I went back to one of the first loose leaf teas that I ever fell in love with: Bai Mu Dan or White Peony, a fairly high quality white tea from Fujian, China. As with every style of tea, white tea exists in a wide range. There are cake-pressed and aged white teas like Moonlight White, bud-only white teas like Silver Needle, and bold broken white teas like Shou Mei. Bai Mu Dan places itself…

Shincha, 新茶, is the first harvest Sencha of the year in Japanese tea gardens. When tea leaves are harvested, farmers pick the youngest, most supple leaves of the plant. As leaves age, they become tough and their taste becomes bitter, but the youngest leaves are soft and contain a large concentration of the organic compounds that create the flavors and aromas we find appealing. Many tea plants…

I am always amazed by the variety of tea grown in Yúnnán province, the most south-western area of China. It’s extremely mountainous in the north and a tropical jungle in the south. In that large swath of land, they make every kind of tea. Although they are probably most well known for Puer, their red (what we usually call black) tea is some of the best I’ve ever had. What I don’t see as often on…

Blogs are such interesting artifacts of our past. Before my most recent post, the last post I had written on this blog was from 2019, a full five years ago. Interestingly, it was about the same thing that I wrote about last week: a trip to Japan. But that’s not really what inspired me to start writing on this blog again. It was a great source of photos and stories, sure, but the real reason was…

To old subscribers: hello and welcome back! It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here but it’s not like I haven’t been drinking a lot of tea. I decided to reinvigorate this blog a bit. To begin I’d like to talk about a wonderful experience I had in Japan this summer. This year I visited Japan’s large northern island, Hokkaidō (北海道). Mostly I enjoyed the beautiful coastlines and…

TEA

As the apple trees in the orchard near the hut begin to blossom, I sit with an old friend. This teapot I use only for Yiwu sheng puer, regardless of age (I don’t have anything older than 2003, anyway.) I know very little about this pot other than its shui ping shape. It makes a great cup of Yiwu. 

I don't write about Bai Hao Oolong enough. Here you go.

As I mentioned last week, I recently was given a gift certificate to review some teas from Adagio. A long time ago I was a regular on their sleek website with all its tea information and community resources, but since then I’ve been more drawn to smaller specialty shops. To really see what they could offer, I decided to jump straight for the “Master’s Collection” teas. My second try was their…

The pleasant review of a delightful Bāo zhǒng still being called Formosa Pouchong, courtesy @adagioteas.

Back when I first fell in love with loose leaf tea, I quickly discovered Adagio. Compared to my other favorite of the time, Upton Tea Imports, Adagio had a sleek website, a more curated selection, and excellent packaging. Their online communities provided a space for tea discussion long before Steepster. While their selection is great, their focus on mass-appeal teas and blends eventually led me…

Short answer? It’s amazing. I need to go back.

I got some fantastic recommendations over Instagram from the Vancouver Tea Society, and did a little planning. It was a pretty short trip, and I had a lot of other things to do so I couldn’t justify spending four hours in each of the (seven!) suggested tea shops. To that end I picked two.

o5 Tea was the closest option to where I was staying in Kitsilano, so that was an easy choice. I was able to taste some impeccable 2017 Darjeeling First Flush while there. The kind and knowledgable Jacob made a great cup, which I paired with an (also delicious) Autumn harvest for comparison. There were so many teas on their list that I wanted to try, I’m definitely going to have to visit there again.

I was in the city with several of my friends who had not been introduced to the wonders of gongfu tea, so I also set up a Puer tasting at Silver Crescent Tea. We drank a very smooth younger (2012) Sheng, a malty 90’s loose Shou with huge leaves, and an older (1998) 7543 Sheng. As I was talking too much with Erick and Keira I didn’t get any tasting notes, but they were a great spectrum of the Puer world.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that yet another West Coast city has such great tea, but it’s welcome news. Next time I hope to be able to spend a week just sitting and sipping throughout the city. Well done, Vancouver, well done indeed.

Hello Again...

Welp, it’s been a while since I’ve written on here. Payton has written a few things here and there but mostly my voice has been absent from this blog. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been living the tea life. Quite the opposite. If you follow my instagrams (Chaxicollective and Settingsunteahut) you will notice this past year has been full of market, classes, tastings, workshops and Japanese tea dinners! I wrote an article about my hut that appeared in December’s Global Tea Hut, I was also featured along side my friend John, from Stone Leaf Teahouse, In a Seven Days article. I’ve had visitors from near and far, some as near as next door, some as far as Estonia! (Pictures are from Steve Kokker’s Visit last Friday)  It’s been great sharing tea with new people as well as familiar friends of me and tea. 

I could update you all on these specific things but that seems much better suited for an in person chat, so come visit! instead I’d like to focus on an interesting time for tea that I haven’t seen many talk about recently: 2007.

2007 was the year I really got into tea and Puer in particular. This also happened to be a a time when there was a huge boom in the market of tea, an explosion of new factories, random origin teas and crazy wrappers. This was also a difficult time to sift through reputable sources to find accurate info about quality vendors, translations of pinyin, or even just anyone else who might be drinking similar teas outside of the local teahouse. 

There were small breadcrumbs here and there that led me to various blogs (some of which are not publishing anymore) others were just beginning or at least building on their tea practices and therefore not yet go-to places in the internet. Various forums, tea-clubs and curated puer vendors were not yet commonplace so buying tea was also a bit of a gamble. 

You can read the book Puer Tea: Ancient Caravans and Urban Chic to learn a bit more about how the landscape of tea production changed thanks to certification updates. 

Part of the mystery about buying teas around this time was that they were new recipes with new materials made by new manufacturers. In the world of tea for aging, this was unfounded. Most teas on the market before this had some level of familiarity. This meant we needed to develop new tastes, learn to store tea well and then be patient that it would turn out better in a few years. 

Though I do not have any of the first puer I bought from back then (not having many teas in your budding collection means you drink through them really fast) I have tasted my fair share of teas from 2007 and have a few cakes that I’ve been storing since 2010. Now, in 2017, we can see how many of these teas from the unknown era (as I’m calling it..) are turning out. Both in the 10 years of their life and also more specifically in the 7 years in my own storage (two houses but still in Vermont climate) 

I’ve talked before about noticing changes in puer in 7 year increments. Generally speaking, the first 7 years being the most sweet, energetic, and fruity, the next 7 being the time where the dry, woody flavors come out and the tea mellows but also the chaqi becomes both more intense but also grounding. the 7 after that is when the first inclination of the “aged” tea flavors and qi will be apparent. The old book aroma and flavor, the lucid-dreaming type qi and the viscous and also earthy flavors start to really show their true colors.  This is of course just my experience with the teas I’ve had from the vendors and storage that have purchased from. These 7 year change thing has been pretty consistent for me though, only a few teas haven’t really fit that mold (no pun intended) 

With those parameters in mind, and comparing with teas before 2007 at the 7/14 year mark, My ‘07 cakes are tasting great! Not only have they continued to taste good, they have also aged nicely in my storage. This means I have some assemblance of how a young tea will do under my care. And hope that my tea will have a bit more than personal value in years to come. This by no means makes me a puer expert or even an accomplished collector. Most of you out their hoarding tea in your “pu-midors”  likely have way more tea than I do. What this means is that I can make more informed decisions about which teas I should buy. Many years ago I would have steered people away from buying teas from 2007-2010 and instead directed them towards older teas or at least teas from established brick and mortar vendors like Camellia Sinensis. 

Now that we’ve had enough time and distance from that “Boom” there is plenty of info available just about everywhere. Lots of blogs, English language books, Instagram, great tea-clubs, and a plethora of vetted puer curators. This is also enough time to look at weather patterns tea see how tea was affected. if you liked tea from 2005 (which I do, fantastic year for puer in my experiences) check the rainfall etc in Yunnan and compare to another year. Chances are if the storage is similar, investing in a youngish (under 7 years) puer that was produced with weather the same as your favorite year, the return in the future will be quite good. You don’t have to be an expert at deciphering meteorological data, just know that if you liked how the tea tasted when there was well above average rainfall or well below average temperature, chances are you’ll enjoy the tea with the same weather parameters from a different year. 

I haven’t gotten fully into that realm yet. I enjoy most puer I taste at every age shift so maybe I’m an easy sell. I have had a few teas that tasted great young, then petered out for a few years and only this past year have really developed into something special. So don’t give up either. 

This is a 12 year-old Ripe (Shou) Puer, and as such my expectations are that it would have an earthy sweet flavor with dark liquor and ideally a pleasant mouth-feel. That said, 12 years is still barely middle-aged for a tea like this and while I don’t expect as much nuance from a Shou as I would a Raw (Sheng) Puer, this should only improve in the coming decade.

  I used 8 grams of leaf for my pot. The cake was very easy to break apart, which is satisfying to me. Having to chisel into a cake with a jack-hammer is never a fun experience. In the pot, the aroma of the warmed leaves was astoundingly sweet, but not at all overwhelming. It was tempered by a gentle scent of old parchment and mushrooms. Overall a good sign.

For each infusion I steeped the leaves approximately 45-50 seconds. That’s a little longer than I normally would infuse a Puer like this, but any less time and the broth looked much too thin. While an inky blackness isn’t always desirable, I like my Puer to have some color to it, and with the extra wait I was not disappointed.

The dusky red liquor was quite malty and creamy on the tongue. The texture and flavor reminded me of nothing less than marshmallows, yet with a subtle hint of old parchment aroma following behind.

After a few similar infusions, I’d characterize this tea as comfortable. Its notes are not overly dramatic, and the flavor is mostly sweet rather than old tasting, but the thickness is undeniable. It’s neither cloying nor dusty, and I think it will be a delightful sipping Puer.

Sometimes when I describe buying a brick or cake (Bing) of Puer, people are surprised at the cost. This one was not expensive, and moreover, you’re getting quite a lot of tea! Just some quick math: a 350 gram Bing for $35 USD, at 8 grams of leaf per pot, is about $0.85 USD per pot. One pot makes maybe an average of 8 infusions, so that’s about $0.10 USD per cup. And this is for a 12 year-old tea! A good deal if I ever drank one. So go out there, fellow tea lover, and get yourself some old Puer (but leave some for me!).

This tea is a 2012 harvest, whose leaves were aged for one year and then fermented for four months. The description on the site lists it as having a, “fresh tea taste while still bringing a wonderful earthy character” and I think this is fairly accurate. Having brewed this tea around thirteen times, I noticed both a sweet energetic quality as well as a lot of earthy flavors.

I brewed 9 grams in my Jianshui (建水) pot for about 10 seconds to start and increased the infusion time from there. The flavor I found that most stood out in the first handful of infusions was a distinct leatheriness with a bit of an iron tang. It reminded me of visiting leather workshops when I was young. Walking in, the scent of of oil, cured leather, and metal pervaded the room like an incense. The aroma of my cup was much the same. In the mouth, the leather was complimented by a lingering sweetness that gradually grew stronger as the infusions progressed.

The wet leaves gave off the dusky aroma of a wet stone cellar that was delightful. I wanted to leave my nose in the pot as the steam billowed around me. The liquor was a beautiful gold and black color in the fading sunlight of a late summer afternoon.

As infusions number four and five trickled into our cups, I realized that the leather had faded to the background and the sweetness had come to the fore. It was definitely a “wet”, clean taste and texture, bringing to mind bold black cherries. It was not a candy sweetness that I’ve tasted in very young generic Shou, but something with a bit of astringency holding it together. I’m not sure what to attribute as the source of the wetness, but it was distinctly different from the “old book” dryness that appears in so many of my older Shou cakes. I wonder if with age the sweetness will evolve to a dry texture, or if it’s a property intrinsic to this cake? Such mysteries are a source of great interest to me with aging Puer.

Over the course of a few hours I managed to derive around ten infusions out of these leaves and only reached about a two-minute infusion time. I continued drinking them the next day, and the pot continued producing a clean tasting, wet, ruddy liquor that was a comforting complement to yet another afternoon. It’s worth noting that the tea was sent to me as a sample, and the part of the cake (or “Bing”, 饼茶) which I received was the very center, which in my experience tends to last longer than the outer edges. Still, this Puer clearly has a lot of life to it and doesn’t wash away easily.

The often encyclopedic names of Puer cakes can be difficult to parse for those who don’t make it a topic of study, and with a growing market for aged tea in the West, I’m glad to see the evolution of interesting titles from reputable tea vendors like this one. I have a feeling that the fascination with real Puer has only just begun on our side of the world, and that I’ll be drinking (and sharing) many more teas like this in the near future.

We were originally going to do a rinse, but the rinse (a nearly instant infusion) was so golden and beautiful, we ended up drinking it as the first infusion instead. This proved to be a great idea.

As the liquid rested in my mouth, the aroma held a delicate fragrance. It was sweet but not cloying, like the smell of a honeysuckle bush as you walk by on a spring day.

The flavor was dry, sweet, and also definitely astringent, but the astringency only served to balance the sweetness rather than take the tea into bitter territory. A perfectly ripe lychee fruit came to mind, or the pith of a sweet orange. There was perhaps the mouth feel of a sour apple with a little bit of the texture of chalk. Altogether a very interesting and delicious tea!

One surprise was that even though the flavor was very balanced, this tea still tasted very young for leaves that were 13 years old. Perhaps the leaves were just stored in a dry place or the date was wrong, but it definitely didn’t have any of the earthy characteristics of a mature Puer.

This was a good tea to kick-start an otherwise lazy afternoon. Seven infusions later we were awake and ready to get things done. I can always recommend an energizing Sheng Puer for a productive day!

I had tried this small package of Puer once casually when we got it in the mail, and I enjoyed it immensely. I love a good raw Puer (Shēng chá, 生茶) now and then, but most of my collection is still fairly young. Older raw Puer tends to be expensive, and certainly wasn’t something I expected to receive from with my magazine.

Fortunately there was enough left in the tin for another try because I wanted to write a little about my experience. Today I brewed the last 7 grams in my Jianshui pot, gongfu style.

The liquor had a beautiful golden orange hue, like a sunset over the water. Being fairly loose, this tea does not need any rinse, nor a lengthy first infusion. The sunset appears almost at once. In fact, I had to cut my first infusion with a little extra water because it was a bit too intense. It actually felt elegant as I added the extra water and watched the tea’s deep orange fade to gold. Perhaps that’s where I saw the sunset for the first time.

Smooth and mellow, the flavor was comforting and energizing at the same time. While there was a definite sweet taste, it wasn’t the sweetness of fruit. More the earthy sweetness of oats and barley with a little bit of toasted almond. Despite it being only early afternoon, sipping this tea brought to mind the beautiful mountain sunsets of Yunnan; I think I could feel the cool breeze on the evening of a hot summer day.

At the third infusion the body became thicker with more of a eucalyptus effect, though still sweet and mellow. How enchanting! I found the heaviness unexpected for a Sheng and yet very welcoming. I wonder if this is the stage between a young Puer’s sharpness and the aged earthiness that I’ve found often arrives when raw Puer gets closer to the 20 year line.

The fourth and fifth infusions mysteriously remind me of nothing short of a Hong Cha! So rich and mouth filling with that hint of tannin. Even the liquor’s color belied its processing.

The sixth infusion went back to tasting more like Puer with a cedar flavor and a hint of an astringency along my tongue. It was still very drinkable though, and that’s with only about a two minute infusion.

Brewing this tea was quite a delight, all the way to the last drop. Many thanks to Global Tea Hut for bringing these leaves to the community. I hope to find more gems like this in the mysterious world of aged tea, and I hope you find some too.

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