Two teas I met at Kaizen

About a week ago, there was a Japanese day - Kaizen - in Prague. It was not purely japanese though and some puerh was there to be met.

The first, one was 2009 Luo Shui Dong Gushu from Bílý Jeřáb (White crane) tearoom.
It is one of the Bílý Jeřáb's private pressings and it costs $46 per 200g cake. I'm not too keen on Bílý Jeřáb as they generally tend (or did so in the past) to add larger markup than I consider reasonable, but they at least try new things, pairing tea with food and wine in new ways and all that - in other words, they probably are one of the best tearooms in Prague and they have their own character.

I had just one session so my notes are more of a tweet, rather than a serious tasting. First, I was surprised by the tea being served in a kyusu teapot. It sort of worked though. Then I did not like too thick cups, but again, it's just that I am quite used to my own stuff.

I did like the tea itself. It is a really solid Yiwu - very thick and sweet, with sugary-fruity taste. It has some additional subtle tastes that make the experience interesting. I guess it may be a regional feature of Luoshuidong, but I did not have enough teas from there to draw such a conclusion. 

There is a quick huigan and a lovely cooling feeling which lasts many steepings. 

Not a bad tea. I would not pay this much for it, but single-village old tree Yiwu will hardly be cheap anytime soon so the price is probably not too far off.

The second one, which I bought from shengmu.cz stand, was a tiny 60g Yukang Jingmai minicake:
I paid $5 for it which I know that was too much, but I wanted to have some Jingmai at home and a box from Chawangshop (which has this tea for $1.40) is already on its way, so I thought that $5 will not kill me. Btw., vendors here sell it for $6-8 - what a lovely markup. 

I was first afraid whether a decent Jingmai could cost this little (I'm working with Chawangshop price) - after all, it is less than $10 per 400g cake equivalent. But the minicake smelled allright at the stand so I took one.

And it is actually not bad at all. Of course, we're talking about tea with no cooling feeling and no notable qi on one hand. On the other hand, it is very much Jingmai-like, very strong, punchy and fresh-fruity. The fruitiness is not flat and does develop nicely between steepings which lends good and unexpected complexity to the overall performance. The tea can be quite bitter, but the bitterness transforms very quickly. Perhaps too quickly as there is not that strong aftertaste coming from transformation of the bitterness. 

I like it as it is a good, fresh, strong young puerh, which, once forgiven the not present qualities of old trees, performs surprisingly well. I think it is way better than <$10 per 400g. If nothing else, it beats Guanzizai 2010 and 2011 Jingmais in my opinion.

2009 Yong De Da Xue Shan

Shah has recommended this tea to me recently and I am glad he did (i.e., thanks Shah!) for two reasons - first, it made me discover finepuer and sampletea, second, it made me discover this particular tea.

Although I think that Yongde is a sort of darker brother to Mengku, dry leaves smell in such a way that I could hardly tell it is not Mengku. On the other hand, I'm quite miserable when it comes to telling things about tea based on the aroma of dry leaves.

And a detail... it looks like there are spider legs in the bottom left corner, does it not?

Wet leaves smell good, pleasant and very much "going together", nothing sticking out. There is a soft-ish mixture of wood barkk, leather, darker fruit (plums?) and a bit of incense. Here, I believe that the incense aroma is quite natural, it just appears in some teas.

The taste is quite alike to the aroma - the liquor is sweet, fruitish (ripe plums), woody-leathery and a hint of incense. This could sound like a light pleasant drink, but it is a bit "darker" - not in color (in that too) - rather in the dark/light side of Force. The taste is slightly muted (by the thickness of the liquor I guess), but not too badly.

The bitterness is low, but the small piece of bitterness does not transform too much (it's the kind of bitterness I associate with wild growing trees). On the other hand, astringency is quite high here. 

Although the taste is quite nice, the best in this tea comes, I believe, after the taste. The cooling feeling is quite good and lasts many steepings - it's like tiny crystalline spiders wove a cooling net all around the mouth cavity. Then, a pleasant and "friendly" energy embalms the mind. When I consciously awoke from the nice state of peace, I realized that the tiny bit of bitterness still does not transform, that the aftertaste is not particularly interesting and that the high astringency makes a slightly unpleasant feeling in mouth. But all these things are forgotten of one wants to "live" the tea, instead of mere analysis.

This tea is a bit different from what I usually drink, but it is not different enough for me not to enjoy it. I actually enjoyed it a lot. I like how the tea does not have significant weak spots (I guess that the high astringency should age away eventually) and it has certain components amply developed. It is a good contrast to the 2003 Bada which surprised me by its great taste and very nice feeling afterwards, while this tea had "only" nice taste, but performed great after the liquor is swallowed. 

The 500g cake costs $58, which is about $46 per 400g cake and that is a very good price for such a high quality tea. Good that it has not been made by anyone famous for I'm afraid it could be sold for a lot more money.

2003 Bada Gao Shan Bowl

After a batch of samples from pu-erh.sk, let us slowly move over to finepuer (and sampletea), an establishment which looks very nice. Their sample prices (i.e., the ratio of sample price to the price of whole cake/tuocha) are excellent, compared to pretty much anyone else. For 10g, you won't pay much more than simply cost_of_the_cake*10/weight_of_the_cake. 

Is the quality of their tea good, however? Now, I can not say for sure yet, but based on several tastings and smelling of most of the samples, it seems that finepuer&sampletea will become a member of My favourite vendors club.

I received three of such flat boxes of samples, each containing 12 pieces:

Expecting ordinary sample bags, I was astonished by the supercute little boxes waiting inside:

Is the packaging practical too? I believe so. The paper boxes are sealed in plastic, then there is the box itself and the tea is in another thick plastic bag inside the box. 

When you look at the sampletea website, you will see how tippy this tea is. Indeed, my sample is similarly heavy on tips:

The dry leaves smell of meadow flowers and fruit, very pleasant.

Steeped leaves smell better - complex, the sweetness, well mixed with garden fruit. There is a particularly strong "aftersmell" of meadow honey. Now I feel that if the tea tastes similarly and feels good enough, it might be a real hit.

The liquor of the first steeping smells of ripe garden fruit, a bit of longan and a bit of camphor. The taste is pretty much great even in the first steeping. Honey and ripe garden ripe are in basically perfect harmony. Towards the end of the taste, sweet dry wood appears. However, even the dry wood is silky and pleasant.

Even though the liquor feels (and is) thick and sweet, the actual taste is very intense and pronounced.

The second steeping gives stronger taste, which is similar in character to the first steeping. When one oversteeps the tea, certain hongcha tones appear. I do not mind them, but I prefer to keep the liquor a bit lighter:

Luckily, the cooling and tingling feeling does come in the second steeping and stays with me for many more steepings to come.

The aftertaste is long and quite complex and transforming - it's like dancing fireflies - so much fun to look (taste) at. It is complemented by nice hui gan.

With time, the fruitiness and honey taste gets weaker and the wood becomes stronger. That is why I thought, when around  4-6th steepings, that the tea is not really a top piece. Then I realize that it is simply the effect of perfect-ish first two steepings and that the tea is still lovely. Not as complex as great Yiwu or Bulang, but it is different and also very pleasant. When I realized its undoubted qualities again (and reading a haiku about whales singing in the morning), I thought:

Whales sing in Japan,

tea tray glitters here,

I am happy too.

What was very important to me was the good mouthfeel which lasted until the last steeping I have had. Not that many teas can do that. Also, when I smelled the wet leaves that I left in a container overnight, there was no smell at all - the tea has apparently captivated me enough so I squeezed every bit of taste out of it.

Hot tea

cools like a whale

that goes down.

The wet leaves are quite unbroken and in good shape, considering this is a 2003 tea:

I really liked this tea and I guess I will buy a bowl if it is available. For me, the tea does not have any real flaw, while its taste is a refreshing mix of already known tastes which works very well. I was afraid of its tippy nature slightly, but I do not think that the tips would behave impropertly. The extra fruitiness that they give to the tea does not overwhelm the rest, nor makes the tea weak overall. If I count correctly, this tea costs about $110 per 400g which is a sound price in my opinion.

I wonder whether all these recent "boring" pine&citrus Badas will age into such a tea as this one. If so, another thing is whether they would age so well here in CR too. I guess that I will never know - after all, there is little reason why they should. 

2012 Pu-erh.sk Mengsong

The last of pu-erh.sk 2012s...

Dry leaves:

A detail:

A detailed detail:

When one looks at the dry leaves of this Mengsong, it is obvious that it is much less tippy than the rest. That may be a sort of advantage as tip-heavy teas probably won't be as strong in the long run. On the other hand, I would not say that other pu-erh.sk are too tippy. Just more tippy than this one.

Wet leaves do not smell too terrific at the first glance, there is the kind of green aroma as when you have a really neglected old garden, with all sorts of flowers and weeds growing on top of each other and you cut it - and it gives this aroma. Another approximation one could say is "dark grassiness".

But - the aroma luckily does not stop there and gentle fruity tones and a good bit of animality (which is like leatheriness, but, well, more animal) appear, and since the moment they appear, the aroma is very pleasant.

In the first steeping, there is more presence and thickness than actual taste - some grass, fruit and a bit of chocolate is there. The mouthfeel is rather strong, cooling and particularly minty, not only it cools like a mint, but it also tastes of menthol.

In the second steeping, there is the presence and oily thickness too, but the taste is stronger, sugary-grassy, rather like a more normal good young puerh. The minty mouthefeel keeps going, slightly disturbed by light persisting bitterness. Good thing that astringency is low.

This is how the liquor looks. Are not  bonsai a good tea tray? I think that especially larger pines would work very well:

The third steeping is similar, but the fruitiness, altough still distant, gets more pronounced. Nevertheless, the whole tea is like if someone is talking to you behind a thick glass.

The whole experience with this tea is pleasant, but a bit too distant - I think that the big thickness does not do too well to the tea.

Actually, in the wake of the blending post, I found that this tea is way better when mixed with Pu-erh.sk 2012 Youle - both 1:1 and 2:1 mixes worked well. This way, the fruitiness of both teas combines into a wide and complex taste aspect and it is no longer overpowered by the embalming thickness.

Overall, this is a very nice tea - really thick, with reasonable taste and nothing which could disturb you. At $40 per 400g, you could do a lot worse in today's young sheng. I still think there are better teas around 2004-7 for this kind of money, but in premium young sheng, there are not many cakes for this sum.

2012 Pu-erh.sk You Le

Now, the one I've been looking forward the most from the 2012 Pu-erh.sk bunch. I really like the You Le (or Jinuo shan) teas made by Jinuoshan TF (some of them, while not all very good, are available from YS and Chawangshop).

Dry leaves smell rather interesting, not just green 2012-iness, but fresh apricots too! Goodie.

Wet leaves smell quite good and rich, heavily sweet (it is a good, textured sweetness) and with sort of heavy floweriness. A slightly disturbing glue-ish aroma is there, but it is not really annoying or anything. I guess it is just too much of the floweriness in one place.

The taste is much alike how I imagined these young Jinuoshan teas to be. The sweetness is still there, with good Youle fruitiniess (which I find somewhat similar in some aspect to Jingmai fruitiness; here, it is mostly like apricots), meadow flowers and a bit of young "spring flowers" (Lily of the Valley, or blooming acacia). These spring flowers are like a light kiss of Mao Xie or green TGY, but go well with the rest. I guess that they will be gone in a while anyway. The tea is reasonably bitter and astringent. It's better not to push it too much in my opinion.

An interesting mouth-drying feeling happens when one sips the tea.

Aftertaste is long and fruity, a nice piece of silky bitterness tends to stay on the palate, numbing it a bit. Although I have waited for significant cooling mouthfeel in vain, the after-taste performance as whole is good.

The taste is not too long, but I believe that this shortcoming should be repaired by certain period of aging. 

Around 4th steeping (the exact steeping when it happens is, of course, dependent on how you steep the tea...), the floweriness tends to go away, being replaced by more intense taste of apricots with rather strong sugariness and a some mushrooms (I guess that's what is left of the flowers in the tea). There is still a pronounced bitterness, but it dances away rather quickly and does not annoy one in any way.

It seems that the apricot taste tends to go away next, leaving us a generic mushroomy-sugary liquor which is entirely inoffensive, but not a heavy hitting superhero either.

I enjoyed this tea the most from the 2012 pu-erh.sk offerings I think. However, let me note that I do not think it is as much a matter of quality (the rest is of good quality too) as matter of style - I just like Youle and I tend to be much more picky when it comes to more "conventional" style of puerh. I think this tea is quite accessible - not all young Youles are (e.g., Guanzizai Youle).

Also, it is fun to taste this tea after I've had countless litres of  various Jinuoshan Youles. It's as if you have a good friend you have known for years and then you see photo of him when he was young (i.e., drinking this 2012 Youle), it's fun to try to interpolate when the said friend's nose started to grow, how his facial bones moved as he developed and all that. 

Now, this tea costs the equivalent of $56 for 400g which is a lot compared to Jinuoshan's Youles (and I do not think this tea would be better, it can not be, given its age, obviously), on the other hand, if you enjoy young puerh, consider giving this tea a try - it is cheaper than most young fancy puerhs and for me, it is more interesting than most of them.

Further reading:
Cha & Kung Fu
Tea dropping
The harmony of tea (in czech)

Several thoughts on blending

Introduction

I'm recovering from an illness which ment no tea. Today I could feel tastes at last and I do not feel too sick - which means tea time! Now I'm meeting Banna Gu Yun for the first time and it could have hardly left a better impression. But as I do not have any tea notes ready for publishing, this post will not be about a particular tea.

I wanted to write about my experiments with blending things for some time so why not now? I admit I'm an amateur blender, but some observations might be interesting to someone.

What were my blending experiments like? I took ten or so different cakes of different areas and tastes, tried to write a "taste vector" for each of them, started blending them in various ratios and made notes about the resulting things. 

Experiments

Initial failures
My initial attempts were generally bad as I tried to combine teas which were too different. E.g., I combined sweet, full tea with little taste with a tea that was rather thin, but had a strong fruity taste (Mengku), expecting fuller sweeter, pleasant fruity tea. Nope. I got a rather boring thing with hints of good things happening, but the tea did not work overall.

Although it is a heretical statement, these thick, uninspiring teas with hints of interesting things going on reminded me strongly of the 2009-10 Xizihaos I have tasted (and the 2007 Dragon and Phoenix too, to an extent) by its character.

Anyway, there were positives about this phase too. I learned that too much of something in a tea may hinder good mouthfeel (well, Man'E style bitterness does for sure). For example, the Pa Sha 2006 when alone, has a really nice mouthfeel, but it is not really top notch because something blocks it. But add it to something with a bit of cooling mouthfeel of its own and it makes that bit a huge chunk of cooling feeling.

Some successes
I must admit that out of my many initial trials, as little as 10% came out better than sum of its parts in my opinion (and in many cases, the result was worse than the minimum of its parts). But with time, the hits were much more frequent than they used to be when I started. Why is it? I started combining teas that have something in common. And that is the most important thing I learned - only when I combined teas that were close in some aspect, the result worked.

Hypothesis

I offer the following simple idea - too simple to be true, I know, but it is a reasonable approximation I hope. At least, it is consistent with my observations. It basically is - take taste vectors of teas and sum them up.

Our idealized tea, represented by a histogram, will have two important aspects to watch for - the aspects that are more intense than 100 (arbitrary units) form the main, intense taste. The aspects that are more intense than 50 help in complexity. The numbers 50 and 100 mean nothing, they were chosen to illustrate the general idea only.

a) very different teas blended
Let us have three teas:

What does the histogram mean? Y axis is the intensity, X axis means tastes - you may think of 5 as of honey, 7 as dark fruit, 9 sugary sweetness, 11 light fruitiness, 13 floweriness, 15 grasiness... it really does not matter what it is exactly. We may see that all three teas have reasonable intensity (4-5 bars), i.e., have components stronger than 100. They have 7 bars of complexity (i.e., a bar more intense than 50) and little in common.

Now we take a third of each and put it together to get a blend of size of the original teas... we get:

As you can see, there is no component that would provide any sort of "main taste", i.e., there is nothing of sufficient intensity. You can, I think, sort of meet this in the XZH Banzhang/Yiwu blend - areas which have very little in common - and the result is hardly impressive, nothing stands out. The feeling of complexity may be there, but the tea has no theme, no character.

b) similar teas blended
Now, let us consider another three teas:

These teas do have something in common (but they are not the same, of course).
Their blend:

This is obviously very different from the previous blend. The tea still has 5 bars of intense taste (and they are quite balanced, nothing stands out too much), but it has 9 bars of complexity, i.e., we just created an about 30% more complex tea than any of its single components! 

Self-criticism and mini-conclusion

You could object that teas are not as one-dimensional as I displayed them. I agree - the features do not have to be "together" as in my images (it was simple to generate this kind of data, that's all). But whether they sum up to something interesting or not does not depend on actual positions of a feature in a histogram.

Also, you could say that some components will not simply sum up, but that the interactions will be more complex. I definitely agree here. But I hope that the importance of these nontrivial influences is not large enough to make my hypothesis completely wrong. And, above that, as I have no way of describing these nontrivial influences, I can not work with them really.

Also, I have not covered the aspect of aging. On MarshalN's blog, I believe, there has recently been raised the question whether blended tea ages similarly to pure components aging separately and then being blended. I do not know anything about that and so I could not incorporate into my model either.

As a proof-of-concept, I can safely say that even with simple "adding histograms", I could get much better results than by random blending. I.e., the model has at least some predictive capabilities which is good. Thus, I think that it might be helpful to blend your own teas, considering their features, trying to combine what they have in common rather than to patch one tea by another completely different, which "fills" the desired hole in a taste histogram.

Also, what the model says and what is my experience too, it is not really worth it to combine too many teas. Ok, some big factories may have made multi-component blends, I offer an explanation in the next section.

Why blending?

Indeed, blended teas often have more complexity. Why are single mountain cakes made then? The nice explanation is that smaller, "boutique" vendors like western connoisseurs and want to give them "single-origin", pure, clean experience. 

I tend to be more pessimistic trying to explain the single-mountain phenomenon and I believe that it is simply money-driven (or it started as such). Let's go back in time and ask ourselves - why were teas blended? With the few factories and huge productions, it was pretty much impossible to make a huge heap of tea from a single mountain as the single mountain just did not have enough material to make the desired amount of cakes. The blending had  to be employed then. That is the explanation I mentioned above - if you need to have a huge amount of cakes, then you have to use a lot of areas to get the necessary amount of leaves. It may not make the result much more interesting than if you used 3 areas only, but the 3 areas would not give you enough material.

Smaller producers, e.g., western eshop owners doing their own productions, were in completely different situations than the past big factories. Not mentioning the lack of knowledge of blending, if you do not have enough money to buy a lot of materials, let's buy from several single mountains, do not blend it, and make the bug (not blended tea) a feature (single-origin tea). In some areas (whiskey), e.g., single malts are rated higher than blends, so the process of making it a feature is made easier. People get used to the single-origin tea and want more and more of it - happy seller.

I do not want to sound like I'm against single-origin teas, not at all - it's fun to talk about Guafengzhai taste, how it is very different from Gaoshanzhai, you have that Banzhang transforming and Man'e non-transforming bitternesses and all that - it is fun. But with blends, you may really get those 9 bars of complexity, while you have only 7 bars with the single-origin cakes...

Some more of Petřínka and 2012 Pu-erh.sk Man Nuo

Let us start with some more photos of Petřínka spring. I go there in mornings on my bike. It is usually quite early, which means less people, less cars on the road and overall pleasant experience (once one gets over getting up).

And when one turns around, it looks like this: 

Just about five minutes of walking, a lovely garden where I like to drink tea in the morning. Given my glass, I can not take a reasonable, more wide-angle picture. I'll take the wide-angle camera with me sometime and will show the entire garden.

This is my pocket teapot - a handy one, 1 pot = 1 cup, so there is no need for pitcher. The pot and cup are filled with the 2012 Pu-erh.sk Man Nuo. 

I like to sit there in the morning, reading my favourite haiku collection - Chrám plný květů [A temple full of flowers]. I like it because it is low on "western" explanation and they generally make good sense (e.g., explaining cultural traditions to which a haiku refers). The issue with some zen-oriented translations/works is bad attempts at prosaic and "reasonable" explanation by the translator or someone close to him, so that your run-of-the-mill Johnny the woodcutter knows all about "that zen teaching".  Similarly awful effort is making such books for local philosophers. For example, I was glad when I found Mumonkan in one of our bookshops at last. Upon opening it, I was horrified by rather weird explanations and off comments of some chap, which pretty much spoiled the book. The average length of word was 10 or so, all some isms, something like: "the (european) philosopher XYimides said B, while YZ said A, capturing the ethereal essence of paradigm of the entity called zenbuddhism, which contrasts with fugilitarism of anti-militaristic scientopatophysicist DE"... It is funny how some people have to make simple things difficult so that they can explain them to others.

Nevertheless, the morning tea session was without any such unpleasantries. The combination of fresh air, good tea, birds singing, bees humming and good haiku, is most uplifting.

Here is a (pseudo)haiku of my own which occured to me that morning:

What a beautiful garden this is, with no one inside,
I enter.
A nice garden, think the people coming by.

I could go on for hours on the beauty and cleanliness of Haiku... 

However (lucky for you), this is a blog about tea, not about haiku. Back to the Mannuo and the afternoon, more analytic, session:

The dry leaves smell like fine young Bulang leaves - no smoke here, so far so good.

And another pointless detail:

The wet leaves bring happiness - smelling like good, sweet Bulang, rather dark, promisingly promising.

The taste is very solid too. It starts like a rather ordinary good Bulang, but without sourness, without smoke or any other unpleasantries which sometimes happen to young Bulang.

The liquor smells sugary, nothing unusual here (given that this is young premium tea - young Bulangs can smell pretty awful at times).

The 1st steepping is light on taste, nicely sweet, but woody, without anything overly interesting. The strong mouthfeel is very promising though.

The liquor is a bit more orange than one is used to in this young tea, but then again, why not? Leaves are in a good shape.

From the 2nd steeeping on, good taste of garden fruit starts complementing the sweet woodiness, creating a good harmony. The bitterness is strong, of course, but not disturbing and it does transform well (into light fresh aftertaste). I like it more than the Bada aftertaste, part of which did never really transform. The mouthfeel of this Mannuo is very nice (stronger than in Bada) and lasts long, accompanied by good hui gan.

Around the 6th brew or so, the garden fruit starts disappearing, leaving grassy-woody sweet water. Fine, yet a bit ordinary.

The tea is a mixture of various grades of leaves (btw. would be someone so kind and enlighten me on how to determine a grade? Is it dependent on varietal? Or is it just a conversion table of size x to y = grade z?):

What I do appreciate about this tea indeed is its high thickness and sweetness, while the taste is clear and strong. Even the bitterness does not kill the taste. The components of this tea play well along one another. I'm curious to taste the 2011 version to see the difference.

All in all, this is a fine, "propertly" done tea - good taste (for a young tea), good mouthfeel, good strength. Whether you want to spend $80+ for 400g of good tea, that is up to you. In this genre, I would much rather buy 2006 Haiwan Pa Sha Ancient Arbor or 2007 Boyou Manlu, both way cheaper. I think the former to be better overall, the latter being slightly more tasty and slightly weaker feeling in mouth, also a bit thinner than the Mannuo. Still, I'd prefer to drink the 2007 Manlu over this young Mannuo. Of course, you might say "But wait, in five years, the Mannuo will be a gem". Of course, it is possible (and it is possible that it will not be a gem too). However, when it is 5, the Pasha/Manlu will be about 10 years old, being pretty much on another level. Maybe in 20-30 years, the advantage of the 5 years will go away and  this Mannuo will prove itself to be a great value. Maybe...

To finish up with a positive note, for a change - I am glad that pu-erh.sk can do a "world-class" young puerh. My issue is with  prices vs. quality of young tea in general, not with pu-erh.sk.