While no definitive list of tribute teas exists, here are ten of the most commonly recognized:

1. Long Jing (dragonwell)
2. Bi Luo Chun
3. Huangshan Mao Feng
4. Liu An Gua Pian
5. Xinyang Maojian
6. Duyun Maojian
7. Lushan Yunwu
8. Junshan Yinzhen
9. Tie Guan Yin
10. Pu’er

Each of these teas tells stories of its own, including colorful legends of its origins, and exploits of how it became acclaimed as a tribute tea. Suffice it for now to notice the dominance of green teas on the list (1-7) over yellow (number 8), wulong (number 9), and black (i.e. Pu’er).

Armed with this information, you are better prepared to delve into the best China has to offer in teas. After all, if these were treasures dedicated to the king, shouldn’t they spend a little time enriching your palate?

Further research of your own is still advised before acquiring these teas for yourself. For example, Xinyang Maojian originates from Henan province. Similar maojian teas from other provinces attempt to imitate the style and flavor. Accept substitutes at your own risk, but just as when choosing wine, be mindful that life is considerably brief to spend time drinking poor tea. Follow the lead of kings and seek tribute teas.

Guest post provided by Jason Walker of Walker Tea Review.  Jason’s site hosts online tea tastings and video tea reviews.

In order to more fully appreciate the hundreds of teas available, here are 10 that will serve as guiding lights and points of comparison. As there can be distinction even between retailers’ teas, it is recommended that you try the same kind of tea from at least 2 different retailers or sources.

The list includes teas from the main 4 categories of tea: white, green, wulong (or oolong) and black.

1. Silver Needle: this white tea originated in China, although other countries are developing silver needles. Silver needle consists of the downy tips that are light green to silvery color.
2. Bai Mu Dan (sometimes Pai Mu Tan, White Peony): White Peony is the bridge between white and green teas. It includes more mature green leaves, silvery tips, and the stems that connect the two.
3. Dragonwell (or Long Jing, Long Ching): This Chinese green is pan-fired and shaped to give it a “grasshopper wing” shape. Fresh long jing has flavors reminiscent of steamed wild rice.
4. Sencha: A Japanese green. Sencha often resembles emerald green sewing needles. A good sencha, when prepared properly, delivers a creamy or brothy coating in the mouth and brings savory hints of seaweed and sweet spinach notes.
5. Li Shan: A Taiwanese oolong with fragrant floral scents. Li Shan usually consists of 2 leaves and a tender bud on a stem that is lovingly rolled into a compact ball resembling a small paper wad.
6. Tie Guan Yin (also Tie Quan Yin or Ti Kuan Yin): While the ali shan offers fragrant flower reminders, tie guan yin has a stronger roasted element with a rich woody or smoky touch. TGY resembles li shan in its paper-wad shape, but is distinguishable by its roasted smell and its browner colors compared to ali shan’s brighter green leaf.
7. Darjeeling 1st flush: While this Indian tea is usually classified as a black tea, it bears similarities to oolongs. 1st flushes deliver fruit notes of grape and some of the briskness of a black tea.
8. Golden Monkey comes from Southwest China, the suspected origin the tea plant. The name of this tea comes from the dried leaves that range from gold to a lighter brown. Golden monkey steeps to deliver a black tea liquid with malty, sometimes chocolate tastes.
9. Keemun: Keemun teas stand as shining examples of Chinese black teas. Several variations exist, most notably keemun mao feng and keemun hao ya, and they offer a range of aromas that extend from chocolate to peach/plum notes.
10. Puer (also pu’ erh): Puer is unique in its processing. While many teas depend on an oxidization process to develop flavor, puers rely on a bacterial process for fermentation (think wine or cheese). The result includes both sheng (i.e. raw) puer and shu (aged), the latter one known for earthy tastes and a dark, inky brew.

As you begin to taste these teas, don’t forget to make notes on the smells, textures and colors. A journal can help you immensely when you search for your perfect cup.

Guest post provided by Jason Walker of Walker Tea Review.  Jason’s site hosts online tea tastings and video tea reviews.

One of the notable aspects of this tea was its beautiful, rich color. The first time I made it I was not aware of quite how striking the color was because I used a serving pitcher that was made of yixing clay. It was pretty in the white porcelain lined cups, but in a subsequent brewing I used a glass pitcher, and was impressed with its bright reddish orange hue and sparkle. It was a sunny afternoon, and the tea shone nicely with the sun coming through the window and into the liquor.

Like many pu’er teas, this pu’er can stand up to very long steeps, which affects the number of flavorful steeps one can get from it. In each tasting that I did, I found the third steeping to be the most interesting and flavorful, and by the fifth it had dropped off considerably in its intensity.

TeaSource’s description:

The steeped cup has a lovely deep black/red color with a wonderful dark aroma. The liquor is very smooth and thick (almost brothlike), with great depth and richness to the flavor. It also has a slight sweet note, with no harshness or astringency.”

Normally, I would not brew pu’er tea in a glass teapot, but I wanted to see what this particular tea would look like as it broke apart and brewed. I couldn’t see any coffee-bean like thing in the pre-brewed cake on either side. But I also didn’t know whether or not a coffee bean would completely dissolve while surrounded by aging pu’er tea.

As the tea brewed it didn’t exhibit any unusual characteristics. The coffee bean did not jump out, or rise to the top, or become visible in any other way, so I figured it had absorbed into the tea. It also didn’t jump out at me as a flavor in the taste of the brewed tea, which tasted kind of a like a camel’s breath pu’er or another “forest floor” type pu’er. Those teas sometimes look like coffee, and they can have a flavor sort of like cheap diner coffee, which has a certain charm under the right circumstances. But there wasn’t anything that really struck me as coffee-like in this brew. And after thinking about how many coffee beans it takes to produce one strong cup of coffee, I realized that one lonely coffee bean wouldn’t stand much of a chance against the overpowering volume and flavor of the pu’er tea engulfing it.

I would hazard a guess that if you brewed some of this tea and then brought it to three non-specialized primarily coffee drinkers and three non-specialized primarily tea drinkers and had each of them taste it without telling them what it was, you’d probably get six different answers, scattered between tea and coffee.

The tea is interesting, but more so as a novelty than a tea one would want to drink a lot of. If you’re looking for a more traditional pu’er, try these 2003 Fang Cha Mini Cakes, also available from Teahouse Kuan Yin. They’re quite wonderful in taste and form. The coffee bean fang cha cakes themselves are available in the store, but not on the website. They are worth a try because they’re interesting and they are quite a novel product. I recommend drinking the tea in front of evangelical tea drinkers while they’re in the midst of a coffee abolitionist tirade, and telling them that what you like best about the tea is that it’s almost just like coffee (which it isn’t). Then run, or just hope they don’t have a heavy edition of the Cha Jing to chuck at your head.

While looking for more information about this coffee bean pu’er tea, I found another post about the very same tea on the Coffee Hero blog.

The coffee bean fang cha is made, or at least distributed, by this company, but I can’t read enough Chinese to figure out where the actual product page is for it.

I picked up a couple pieces of this 2003 Fang Cha Pu-erh at Teahouse Kuan Yin a couple of weeks ago. I don’t believe I’d ever seen pu-erh in tiny squares before. They are about an inch and a half wide.

They brew into a wonderful, sweet pu-erh that lasts for at least six infusions. Each infusion tastes better than the last, releasing more of the flavor and character of the tea.

Part of the appeal of these small pieces was that they are the perfect size for my yixing tea thermos. So all I have to do is toss one in with boiling spring water on the way out the door in the morning and then I have tasty tea all day, each time I add water. I am not one to spend any more time getting ready in the morning than is absolutely necessary, so I like the convenience of this way of tea.

One thing I found interesting was that the character on the front of the little package is 檟, which in Pinyin is “jiǎ,” an old term for the camellia sinensis bush.

It’s a flexible tea, able to taste consistently good using different brewing methods. I put it through three different trials. First I tried it in a Chinese yixing thermos on the go with hot water replenished throughout the day. Then I brewed it traditional gongfu style in a yixing pot. And finally I tried making it in a more typical American method, using a fairly large teapot and infuser (as shown in the accompanying photograph). It worked quite nicely with any of these methods, yielding a consistently enjoyable liquor for at least five infusions.

Since it’s loose rather than caked it is a little more accessible to the typical tea drinker than caked or brick pu-erh teas, since most people in this country do not have a pu-erh knife and tray on hand. It produces the rich red liquor typical of good pu-erh teas and tastes best in the second and third infusions.

One thing to note when brewing this tea is that unlike most cake and brick pu-erh teas it does not need an initial rinsing infusion. The first infusion will taste perfectly fine, although the most robust flavors will be released in subsequent brewings.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a way to introduce the fine art of tea to your cats this pu-erh is probably not a good choice. The cat shown in this picture didn’t like the smell of it at all. (My cats don’t actually drink tea, but they always investigate to make sure that it isn’t something that they want to taste.)

The most reputable online retailer that I know of for high quality pu-erh teas is Hou de Asian Art. Their top-shelf aged pu-erh cakes can run into hundreds of dollars, so they’re probably not a good route for initial forays into the world of pu-erh. But for dedicated pu-erh devotees and investors they can be an excellent source. Their online information about pu-erh teas is well worth a visit to their site in any case.

At a more proletarian level, both Tao of Tea and Rishi Tea have perfectly respectable and delicious pu-erh teas available for purchase online. I recommend the mini tuocha or “small bowl” types as a good starting point. They are easy to use and transport and will afford consistency in the amount of leaf used each time. These teas, and most other pu-erh teas, can stand up to five or more infusions. In my experience the second infusion generally exhibits the best flavor.

The video below provides a brief glimpse into a pu-erh factory on Nannuo Mountain in Yunnan, China. The manufacturing process is quite an interesting one.

The article about pu-erh titled A County in China Sees Its Fortunes in Tea Leaves Until a Bubble Bursts published in the New York Times this week is worth a read. I think it’s a little sensationalist and under-researched, but it is interesting. I just don’t think that they have a very good sense of the historical continuity of the tea industry in China.

The two gaiwans pictured are uncoated yixing (zisha clay). They are ideal for pu-er and darker oolong varieties. Greener (lightly oxidized) oolongs or Chinese green teas are much better suited to porcelain-lined, solid porcelain or glass gaiwans. Brewing in zisha vessels will imbue green oolongs and green teas with a very unpleasant undertone.

The nice thing about this method is that it is very portable. It can be used without a great deal of extra equipment or fuss just about anywhere.

“Some anthropologists and archaeologists have known for years that the ancient Chinese regarded cicadas as symbols of rebirth or immortality in much the same way as the early Egyptians thought of the sacred scarab. Unlike the latter case, however, few western entomologists are aware of cicada symbolism used by the early Chinese. It is not mentioned in any English language entomology textbook of which I am aware. It is noted in Lucy Clausen’s remarkable little book, Insect Fact and Folklore.

Writing in Japan, the colorful and prolific Lafcadio Hearn in his charming essay on cicadas (“Sémi”), reported: “In view of many complaints of Japanese poets about the noisiness of sémi, the reader may be surprised to learn that out of sémi-skins there used to be made in both China and Japan-perhaps upon homeopathic principles-a medicine for the cure of ear-ache!”

“Cicadas are fascinating insects. They are large, conspicuous, and attract attention with their interesting “songs.” No wonder the ancient Chinese accorded them such a high position in their folklore and in their art. Watching cicadas can engender awe in the observer. One student remarked that he had always considered cicadas rather magical, and could easily see how they came to have spiritual significance in old China.”

Excerpts are from Cicada in Chinese Folklore on the Cultural Entomology site.

Wandering through a Chinese tea store in the Vietnamese area of Portland a few weeks ago a bin of these intriguing objects caught my eye. The things are very hard and dry, with a slightly citrusy/dusty scent lingering about them. The store had very little English signage and no descriptive information about these teas aside from the price, but I knew that I would be able to find additional information about them later. I had tried a pu-ehr aged in a mandarin orange that I had liked quite a lot and this seemed even more unusual and interesting. And the packaging and presentation of this tea was impossible to resist.

Chinese Tea for You has some additional information about the manufacturing process of this tea. The teas are available for purchase, but the cost is considerably higher than what I paid in Portland, which was less than $10.00, if I remember correctly. Excerpted from the product description:

Our Pomelo Tea is made by first scooping out the flesh of the pomelo. After packing the empty shell with a mixture of oolong tea, pomelo flesh and licorice root, the pomelo is steamed and compressed several times before being stored for ageing. This cycle of processing takes about two months to complete.

During the processing and ageing, the taste and aroma of the pomelo and licorice is infused into the tea, giving the brewed tea a unique flavour.

This is the only tea I’ve ever purchased that required pliers and wire cutters to access. Once the wire framework was removed the “lid” portion of the pomelo shell pried off relatively easily and I was able to break off pieces of the tea with a Pu-erh knife. The pre-infused tea had an interesting acrid smell and the tea broke up similarly to most other Pu-erhs. I brewed and served it using traditional gong fu methods in a yixing pot. Here are my tasting notes:

infusion #1: The first infusion was steeped for 20 seconds and yielded an acidic, slightly bitter liquor. It was light amber in color with very strong grapefruit-like notes.

infusion #2: The second infusion was mellower, yet very complex. The citrusy taste was quite pleasant, surprisingly giving the tea a flavor reminiscent of a ceylon tea.

infusion #3: In the third infusion the astringency of the pomelo was quite stronger than the astringency of the tea. It left very interesting flavors throughout the mouth. None of the infusions of this tea had any of the earthiness common to Pu-erhs. It had a distinct “dustiness” but more of paper than leaves.

infusion #4: The fourth infusion was more citrusy and even tangier on the tongue, with a stronger aftertaste. The acridity had faded, but the pomelo flavor was stronger, overpowering the tea flavor. all mustiness was gone from the taste at this point and it left an interesting feel on the teeth.

infusion #5: The fifth infusion was not as interesting in flavor although still very tangy on the tongue.

The infused dead leaves had a rather horrid smell, nothing like the fascinating aromas and tastes of the tea itself. I would recommend this tea to anyone with a sense of adventure. I found it quite enjoyable.