This past weekend I took the opportunity to try some tea that I purchased from Michael Coffey of Tea Geek quite some time ago. This tea is, in essence, very large leaves from the bushes of a pu’er varietal simply dried and tied into bundles. As described on the Tea Geek blog:

[This] limited availability product tries to reproduce, as well as the tea-makers knew, how tea was made in Yunnan before the widespread use of compression.  This would go back to when tea was considered a medicine, not a beverage.  It clearly draws on how herbs are collected and dried–the leaves are tied together by their stems in little bundles that were hung up to dry.

I didn’t really try to anticipate what the tea would be like before I brewed it. I assumed that it was going to have its own unique characteristics, and indeed it did. Rather than following instructions for breaking up leaf from stem and brewing in a bowl, I chose to brew the tea in a tall tea glass so that the leaves could remain intact, and so I could see them as they infused. I used boiling water and brewed the tea for about two minutes for the first infusion.

The dry leaves had very little scent, but as soon as they began to steep I could smell the distinctive scent of very young sheng pu’er. The taste was also easily identified as coming from the same plants that produce pu’er cakes, although clearly having undergone considerably less processing than any other tea. If an experienced tea drinker were handed a cup of this tea’s brewed liquor without any information he would be able to identify its origin as Yunnan, China easily and immediately.

The tea remained vibrantly flavorful through three infusions, but had mostly lost its punch by the fourth. It was a little surprising that it had as much flavor and personality as it had. With such a humble appearance and primitive preparation of the leaves it would have been unsurprising for it to yield a mild and uninspiring brew. But instead it conveyed the core essence of the pure tea plant. Rather than a novelty experience of what tea used to be before people learned how to process it into the many types of fabulous teas we value today, it really showed how much information is in the pure leaf already, even with so little craft transforming plant into beverage.

Read the Tea Geek blog post to find out more detail on this very interesting tea.

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• ATB Blog Carnival: AdagioTeas’ “Roots Campaign.”
• How I generally brew shu pu’er
• Da Hong Pao among the mists
• New storage for pu’er

In addition to the interviews and photos available on Adagio’s site, a new arm of this project, scheduled to launch this month, is an opportunity for consumers to communicate with the farmers by writing them notes on pre-addressed postcards which are available in Adagio’s retail stores.

The tea selected for this group tasting by ATB members – and currently the featured tea in the Roots Campaign – is a Pi Lo Chun which was grown and produced by Huang Jian Lin in Dongting, Jiangsu, China.

Note that Adagio spells the tea name, “Pi Lo Chun,” the farmer spells it “Pi Luo Chun” and the Pinyin Mandarin spelling is “Bi Luo Chun” (碧螺春). The name translates literally as “green snail spring” and this delicate green tea is universally recognized as one of the historical ten famous teas of China.

Huang Jian Lin has been close to the tea industry his entire life and tea farming has been the only job he has ever worked. His farm near Tongting Lake only produces Pi Lo Chun, so his days are very focused on protecting the tea field from overgrowth of weeds and on the short plucking season in the Spring.

The following brewing instructions are from the interview of Huang Jian Lin:

Pi luo chun is very tender. Do not use boiling water with 100 degrees centigrade. Better use the water with 90 degrees centigrade. Second, use glass cup to brew the tea. Do not use teapot with lid. Because pi luo chun needs more air for brewing. While waiting for the tea to be cool down, you can enjoy the beautiful green soup with pleasant aroma from the glass cup.

I used a couple of different methods to brew this tea, determined by previous encounters with Bi Luo Chun and experimenting with what I like. The first was in a glass gaiwan with cooled water and four steeps for about 30 seconds each. This is generally how I brew Chinese green teas, and it always brings out the best from the teas. The other method I used was to cool the water in a tall Chinese tea glass and add the tea when it got down to 160° Farenheit. This method achieves results similar to what you would get using a traditional glass tea thermos, and the tea does not get bitter even with such a long steeping time as long as the water is not too hot.

This type of tea is one that can exhibit very different qualities depending on how it is brewed, so my recommendation is to experiment until you find what works for you.

Here are links to the posts from other contributing ATB members:

Black Dragon Tea Bar
LeafJoy
Notes on Tea
The Tea Enthusiasts’s Scrapbook
Tea For Today
Tea Pages
Teaspoons & Petals
That Pour Girl
Walker Tea Review

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
• How I generally brew shu pu’er
• Da Hong Pao among the mists
• New storage for pu’er

The steps and the accoutrements:

1. I almost always use Crystal Geyser spring water for shu pu’er (and other teas). It’s affordable and works just as well or better with tea as some of the more expensive spring waters I’ve tried.
2. When brewing shu pu’er I always use the Kamjove electric water kettle for heating the water to boiling.



3. I generally brew at the tea table with the small, blue-green Yixing teapot that has been dedicated to brewing only shu pu’er teas. It is quite small and works perfectly.



4. I use boiling water and rinse the leaves with a very short initial infusion that also serves to warm the cups and pitcher (fair cup).
5. The first drinkable infusion is about 1 minute long.
6. I almost always use a glass serving pitcher (fair cup) because I like to be able to see the rich oranges and reds of the pu’er tea liquor, especially when there’s light coming through it.



7. The cups vary more than the teapot, but the cups I use most often with pu’er are the unglazed plain Yixing cups. They’re small, thin and very nice to drink from.



8. The number of subsequent infusions varies depending on what a particular tea is able to yield, but it’s generally at least 5, and each one is usually also about a minute, but sometimes longer if the tea seems to need more infusion time.

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
• ATB Blog Carnival: AdagioTeas’ “Roots Campaign.”
• Da Hong Pao among the mists
• New storage for pu’er

In my opinion, such a reputable tea needs to be accompanied by preparation vessels and tools that match up with its elegance, so a few weeks ago I acquired the teapot in the accompanying photographs below for the explicit purpose of using it only for Da Hong Pao. I have a different Yixing Gongfu set that I had been using for all types of WuYi Oolongs, but I decided that Da Hong Pao needed its own teapot, and that it ought to be one that was more regal in appearance.

I looked at several teapots, but this was the one that I really liked the look of much better than any of the others. It was also the one that felt the best in my hand. I was told that Da Hong Pao would need a teapot with a broad surface area, and the shape of this one is ideal.

I seasoned the vessel with a small amount of one of the slightly lower grade Da Hong Pao teas that I had, and a few days later the teapot was performing perfectly on the tea table, brewing really well, and looking quite wonderful, especially when the tea was drying rapidly on its surface as it steeped the tea.

As an aside, I don’t know if it’s the time of day or the change in the atmospheric conditions due to the onset of Spring, or perhaps even the shape of the teapot, but the most recent tea session of Da Hong Pao (a very lovely example from Canton Tea Company) resulted in a very impressive display of steam in and around all of the tea objects. Of course, it would not be out of the question that I simply became fixated on steam for a time and thus paid more than the usual amount of attention to it.

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
• Chado: The Way of Tea, at ArtXchange
• ATB Blog Carnival: AdagioTeas’ “Roots Campaign.”
• How I generally brew shu pu’er

The thing has a number of excellent qualities, including very thick walls and solid construction. It does have a minor chip on the edge of the lip, but it is not prominently visible, especially when the lid is on, and the vessel should not seal since it’s being used for pu’er anyway, so that’s not an issue.

After I bought it and brought it home I scrubbed it out thoroughly and then aired it out in the fortuitous brief period of sun that we had last weekend. It did not have any odors clinging to the inside part of the clay anyway, which was good. I don’t think that it had ever been used for storing anything with a strong, lingering scent.

I broke up one of the Xiaguan shu pu’er cakes into fairly large chunks and now they are occupying this very nice container. The remarkable thing about this excellent storage container is that I found it in a thrift store and paid less than $10 for it!

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
• Chado: The Way of Tea, at ArtXchange
• ATB Blog Carnival: AdagioTeas’ “Roots Campaign.”
• How I generally brew shu pu’er

But there are indeed some fabulous and exquisite green teas from China, some of which have been well-known and respected enough to get regularly included in the “Top Ten Chinese Teas” lists, most commonly Bi Luo Chun and Long Jing (Dragon Well). And there are other lesser known but wonderful green teas that we’re lucky enough to encounter here in the United States. Lan Xiang Xian Zhi (Orchid Fairy Twig, 蘭香仙枝), sourced by Life in Teacup, is assuredly one of the nicest I’ve run into lately.

This rarely exported green tea comes from Jiangxi Province, situated near the middle of the southern part of China. It is very lovely, complex and for the most part unlike any other tea I can think of. The tea has a very interesting pre-brewed appearance. The leaves are tiny and very narrow, but mostly straight rather than curly like Bi Luo Chun dry leaf. They’re rich and varied in color and have a nice grassy-sweet scent. The brewed liquor yields a nice grassy, alpine-lake quality, a little like heavily diluted mint or lemon.

I brewed this tea using slightly cooled water, and initially steeped it for about 20 seconds. The brewed liquor had a warm, silky quality to it and a delicious aroma. Its underlying tones and variation from infusion to infusion deemed it exceptionally unusual. It held up to five very satisfying infusions before it began to lose its character.

Interestingly the only two green teas that I can think to compare it to are Gushan Baiyun (Drum Mountain White Cloud) from Fujian Province and Trà Móc Câu (Fish Hook Tea) a green tea from Vietnam. But these other teas are only slight references and pale in comparison. The Gushan Baiyun I have tasted was good, but not nearly as interesting as this Lan Xiang Xian Zhi. The Trà Móc Câu I’ve had was of considerably lower quality and did not have anything close to the special, delicate flavors of the Lan Xiang Xian Zhi, although it did have a vague similarity in the sweet, slightly pleasantly bitter character of the brew.

The tea I tasted was last spring’s harvest and is not currently available for sale on Life In Teacup, but I would recommend trying to get some of this coming spring’s harvest if it becomes available for sale.

Read more about this tea on Life In Teacup’s blog: “Two Great Teas of Jiang Xi Province (1) – Orchid Fairy Twig 蘭香仙枝”.

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The third and final part of my interview with Nigel Melican is now posted on Cha Dao. Excerpted:

Cinnabar: The attempts at growing one place’s regionally-specific tea in a different location seem strange to me, because if you’re taking a type of tea varietal and growing it somewhere else, with a totally different climate and different soil conditions, it’s not going to taste the same. It seems like the more reasonable approach, rather than trying to reproduce a traditional kind of tea in a new place, would be to figure out what works best under the new conditions, and represent the tea as a new type, but perhaps that’s not as marketable.

Nigel Melican: If you look at consumers, they often go for what they know. Someone who knows a Sencha will always, given an unknown tea or the old-fashioned one that they know and love, they’ll choose the one they know and love. But you’re right, that’s what they ought to do, and it’s what I push people in Africa to do, to take the plants that they were growing for CTC tea, and do wonderful things with it.

The fellow in the photo above is certainly a handsome little frog, but you wouldn’t want him darting among the young leaves of your tea plants. He is a Phantasmal Poison Frog (Epipedobates tricolor), one of the poisonest of the poison arrow frogs.

The photograph is from Wikimedia Commons. The reason that this post is accompanied by a photo of a frog will be evident if you read the last part of the interview.

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• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
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• World Tea Expo 2011
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The second part of my interview with Nigel Melican is now available for you to read on Cha Dao. Excerpted:

Cinnabar: I guess there are really two focuses of organic farming. I wasn’t even thinking about how it affects the end product, because it seems like that’s not the same conversation. The impact on the land is quantifiable and obvious, but the land doesn’t know the difference between a molecule of nitrogen, whether it’s certified organic or not, right?

Nigel Melican: No the land won’t, but — and this is why there’s the argument — people say that organic meat tastes better than inorganic meat, and often it does, because the guy who grows organic takes better care of his animals, is a better animal husband, and that shows up, and it’s the same with plants.

C: And that’s clearly the case with tea. If you’re using practices that end up contaminating the end product with dangerous toxic chemicals, the end product is going to taste bad, so that’s not going to fly.

NM: Ultimately you’re right, but if you had — God forbid — tea contaminated with mercury you wouldn’t taste it, and similarly, many of the ways that you fertilize don’t have an effect on taste. Where you do have an effect with organic on tea is that you’re putting on less nitrogen. Nitrogen leads to fast growth, and fast growth tends to be more about kilograms than it is about quality … so slow growth, as in the spring flush. Everyone says, go for the spring flush. That’s because it’s growing slowly, and the quality is definitely better. So organic should come out with slower growth.

C: But in reality, the quality of a lot of product that’s labeled as organic tea is terrible.

NM: Yes.

The image above, of mercury on cinnabar is from a photograph by Parent Géry on Wikimedia Commons.

Note: Cinnabar is a compound of mercury, and I have a strong affinity for the toxic element in its liquid metal form as well. But I wouldn’t want my tea to be tainted with it!

Note two: For an additional connection of tea and mercury, milliners during the Victorian period often suffered from mercury poisoning due to the use of mercury in the process of transforming fur into felt for hats, thus we have Lewis Carroll’s “Mad Hatter” and his uproarious tea party. In addition to insanity, mercury poisoning produces hard looking red skin, which I would expect to result in those afflicted looking a little like they were made out of cinnabar.

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• World Tea Expo 2011

I have had an array of tea-related experiences ranging from exquisite to unremarkable, in many different locations and situations, but I found it pretty easy to call to mind what was probably the worst tea making experience I’ve had so far. Ironically, it was during World Tea East in Boston, 2009.

Wanting to keep my traveling stuff as simple as possible, I did not seriously consider packing an electric kettle or any tea ware for use during the few days on the other side of the country, but I did toss some good tea into my luggage. I’m fairly certain that the tea I brought was Competition Grade Tie Guanyin. Obviously it’s a green oolong, but I must admit that the package looks entirely unfamiliar to me now.

As expected, I tasted some wonderful teas on the exhibition floor, but back in my hotel room my options were pretty dismal. As we all know, aside from decent tea leaves, the absolute minimum of elements one needs to produce a decent cup of tea are: good quality water and a clean vessel that heats water to the right temperature. I had neither of these in my hotel room. Naturally, I needed to prove that making tea under these circumstances would be as bad as I anticipated, so after returning from a day of Tea Expo experiences I put some tap water into the hotel-furnished mini coffee maker (without a filter or filter basket), positioned a styrofoam cup below where the hot water would spit out, and flipped the brew switch. After the infernal machine sputtered the last of its hot water into the cup, I tossed about a teaspoon of leaves in and waited about five minutes.

With high grade lightly-oxidized oolongs like the Tie Guanyin I had with me it’s pretty hard to oversteep the leaves into something that will be unpleasant to drink. However, bad water heated and passed through years worth of stale coffee film and lime deposits can ruin anything. And this marvelous tea did indeed taste pretty awful.

Unfortunately, in this case there was really no remedy at hand. I drank the tea anyway so I’d be able to describe how awful it was…in the interest of science, of course. I had to console myself with promises of better cups of tea in the near future, after I returned home after absorbing a goodly amount of excellent tea information and meeting some wonderful tea people.

Here are links to all of the other contributor’s posts for the Blog Carnival.

Black Dragon Tea Bar: J-Mo’s Wedding Rehearsal Dinner

Cha-Cha-Cha Adventures with Tea: Most Difficult Tea-Making

Tea Pages: Tea Troubles

Tea Snobbery: Tea and learning to Always Get My Tea

That Pour Girl: Tea Blog Carnival No. 6

The Sip Tip, February ATB Blog Carnival

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• Da Hong Pao among the mists
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• The art of tea art: Infusions at SLAB Art
• Infusions: an exhibit of teaware by local Pacific Northwest artists

Sometimes tea comes to me from completely unexpected sources. A couple of months ago I began working on a project with a woman who had spent a considerable amount of time working in China on business development, in coordination with the US State Department. During the course of our initial conversation talk turned – as it so often does – to tea, and specifically Chinese tea. (Amusingly, this meeting had taken place in a coffee shop, and both of us had valiantly tried to find some sort of palatable tea to order from the menu before we even introduced ourselves to each other.)

At our next in-person meeting, which took place a number of weeks later, she handed me a small, brilliant red and intriguing packet, and told me that one of the Chinese exchange students who she had hosted over the holidays had given it to her. She didn’t know anything about the specific type of tea that it was.

I like the challenge of trying to figure out what something is with very little obvious information, so I looked forward to trying this mystery tea.

When I first opened the package I was struck by a very nice aroma, and noted that the leaf looked like a very nice quality tea, and indeed it brewed into one. My guess was that it was probably some sort of Wuyi Oolong, possibly a medium-grade Da Hong Pao. The packaging is almost useless in providing clues to what tea it is because in the area that I think tells about the tea, the Chinese characters are very small, lightly printed in metallic gold ink on metallic glittery red foil. I don’t think I could read it even if it were in English.

After the tea was gone I flattened out the package and I noticed that there was a faint picture on it. The picture looks to me like it’s a drawing of a mountain, which would seem to indicate to me that it might indeed be from Wuiyi Mountain. Whether it’s Da Hong Pao or not I can’t say for sure, although it does look and taste quite similar to other teas I have had from that same region of China.

Addendum following Charles’ comment and some more research: The answer might have been right in front of me all along. The characters on the left are on the front of the tea package. The three characters on the right are “Da Hong Pao.”

Possibly Related Posts:

• 恭喜發財 – Happy Year of the Water Dragon!
• Pure Pu’er
• ATB Blog Carnival: AdagioTeas’ “Roots Campaign.”
• How I generally brew shu pu’er
• Da Hong Pao among the mists