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Getting Baijiguan

I got this nice gift from a fellow tea lover in Poland: four neat 8-gram packages of Baijiguan. China’s most famous oolong tea, the king of Wuyi cliff tea, still made from the original millennial tea trees or their direct clones.

Incidentally this is one tea I’ve never tasted before. I’ve had the other three of the Four Famous Bushes: Dahongpao, Tieluohan and Shuijingui, but not Baijiguan. On anybody’s way of tea, it’s good to have a goal out there to reach.

So it was with excitement that I opened the bag. It will take a better grasp of Chinese than mine to decipher the info on the bag; all I know is that this tea is from 2010. At first sight this is a very surprising tea. It has a very low roast and the leaf is a mix of various light greens – way less oxidised than the norm in Wuyi. Apparently this is typical of Baijiguan, but how to approach this? (See here for photos of Shuixian, a typical Wuyi tea). The leaf aroma is very subdued with hay and toasted bread.

On my first attempt I dumped the entire bag – 6.8g of leaf after sorting out the debris – into a 100ml gaiwan. Treated like all oolongs with boiling water and perhaps 40 seconds of steeping this tea was frankly unpleasant. A murky light beige colour, very little aroma in the cup and a completely flavourless palate ending rather bitter. The next few infusions were no better. I had obviously mishandled this tea but was nonplussed by the profile with a mixture of low and medium oxidation leaves this tea tasted like an unsuccessful modern Darjeeling. To save the day I quickly brewed some 2008 Shuijingui – Baijiguan’s marginally less famous sibling – that I bought from Dragon Tea House. What a good tea! Wuyi at its chocolatey, honeyed, high-roasted best but also with an unusually intense plummy fruitiness – outstanding.

It was only after 7 or 8 infusions, with the leaves fading away that the BJG revealed some pleasant low key elegance and an almondy flavour distantly reminiscent of Dancong oolong. So there was hope, I thought. For my next attempt I halved the dosage and used an excellent quality shipiao clay pot from Taiwan I usually dedicate to Dancong from Tea Masters. Following my experience with Dancong I also used very brief infusions at the beginning: starting with perhaps 8 seconds. The result was far, far better than my first attempt in gaiwan. Very light in colour. Partly thanks to the clay pot that emphasised the fruity notes rounded off the whole, but partly after the brewing parameters helped the tea’s finesse come forward, this Baijiguan now showed some real textural interest with light notes of white almonds, dried fruits, a bit of dried herbs; bitterness was never allowed to dominate in any of the ten infusions. The patience was also good, although in all truth it’s a rather light tea that never delivered a very intense flavour.

I still have my reservations about this: looking at the expired leaf I think the oxidation is a bit random, with some bruised leaves and some totally green; it just doesn’t seem so well handled. The lack of flavour intensity especially at mid-palate is a problem. But when ‘got right’, this tea at least has personality. It comes closer to a Dancong than other tea varieties in Wuyi.

Disclosure
Baijiguan was a gift from a friend (not ITB). Shuijingui and the shipiao pot were my own purchases.

Icing tea

We’ve gone through one of the most torrid summers ever here in Poland. My last year’s moanings have been put into perspective by several weeks of 35+C weather. Hot tea is a no issue. So I’ve been forced to jump on the ice tea bandwagon, and come up with my own recipe. You’ll find hundreds of these on the web (here’s one I really liked, with a deeper insight into ice tea Japanese style) and here’s mine.

Generally I dislike cold tea. I prefer to drink it fairly hot, and while there’s interest in sheng or oolong tea that has cooled down a little, I find room temperature tea really a little repulsive. So the idea of preparing ice tea required overcoming a bit of self-resistance. I started my trials with the type of tea I drink regularly in the summer anyway: Japanese green. It might be a weird choice for some – intuitively a tea drinker might be wary of overinfusing a sencha leaving it, as you should with ice tea, over several hours on the leaves. In my experience it’s enough to opt for a lighter, less fragmented leaf type like the 3rd Prize Asamushi from Hirumaen (reviewed here). I still had a bit of this left when receiving the new vintage and so using it for ice tea sounded sensible. The result is surprising. There’s a lot of texture to this ‘Iced Asamushi’ with all its glutinous umami character, but also some sweetness. It’s immensely refreshing in a vegetal sort of way.

These small delicate leaves will open completely even when infused with cold water.

But admittedly that injection of savoury umami might be beyond the comfort line for some. I think the expected taste profile of ice tea is something fruity and sweet. A fruity black tea might be a good choice; for me, a tea that works wonders is Dancong. This Chinese oolong is gorgeously aromatic and over a few hours of infusion in the fridge, will produce a brew that’s wonderfully scented with dried fruits, flowers and almonds. It’s a good moment to use up that unexpensive Dancong you’ve a bit too much of, like this $9.90 thing from Yunnan Sourcing that I found of fairly good quality FWII.

Some people prepare ice tea with tea that’s been brewed with hot water and then chilled. With Dancong this is dangerous, as it’s a type of tea that can release quite a bit of bitter tannins. That’s why I prefer to cover it with room temperature water in a large glass jar (think 6–8g of leaf per 500ml water) and then refrigerate: the leaves won’t open totally (see photo above) and the release of tannins will be limited. Sometimes I also add a spoon of good quality brown sugar, to boost the fruitiness. The result is the exact opposite of the ‘iced asamushi’ described above – but every bit as delicious.

Disclosure:

The two teas reviewed above and the brown sugar were my own purchase. The glass jar is a family gift.

2009 Nada Nannuo Qiaomu

We’re slowly seeing some 2010 teas being released: shincha from Japan, first flush Darjeeling, Chinese green teas. Puer takes a while to manufacture and so usually shows up on the market a few weeks later than other spring teas, but the first cakes of 2010 are already with us. There’s one series of releases that are eagerly awaited by tea fanatics: the private puer pressings by Nada. Nada personally travels to Yunnan province every year to select the raw tea leaves and have them processed and pressed. His stringent quality standards and personal control over the entire production process are among the factors that make Nada’s green puers very special teas.

The 2010 releases are expected in a few weeks’ time (see Nada’s Essence of Tea website), but in any instance you’ll need to hurry as these cakes tend to sell out extremely quickly. Last year, the four labels were out in a matter of days. I was late, and all I could pick up was a set of samples of the Naka, Bulang, Nannuo Old Tree and Nannuo Plantation. (I later got two cakes on the secondary market but had to pay over three times the release price: the latter is actually very competitive, adding to the fever of securing these teas).

Here’s a look at the 2009 Nannuo Qiao Mu cake (the original price was £18 / 357g cake). The leaves are small, clean, impeccably sorted, with a medium loose compression and separating rather easily from the sample. They have an intense if rather elegant aroma of dried autumn leaves, sweet tobacco, but mostly sweet peaches: it’s an unexpected and exciting aroma to find in a puer tea.

I brew this with a conservative dosage of 3g / 80ml in a porcelain gaiwan. The colour is not so light: orange-peachy. And it’s peaches again that dominate the brewed tea aroma. The taste is smokey and dry, not as vegetal as young sheng often is. Clean and invigorating, and not too aggressive; with short steeping this tea is very easy to control bitterness-wise.

The second brewing is a delight: remarkably fruity for a young sheng, with plenty of apricots and peaches filling out a broad palate before a slightly dry (but everything but bitter) finish. As the fruit gently fades over the next few rapid infusions, the register shifts towards a bone-dry, no-nonsense, structured puer with barely an impression of tannic dryness like in a very good red wine; no real bitterness. Infusion #4 also releases an amazing buttery texture close to a gaoshan oolong from Taiwan. At the seventh brewing I give up (the tea doesn’t).

The leading impression with this tea is purity. It is crisp, energetic, leaving the mouth refreshed and cleansed. The leaf selection is impeccable. It is remarkably approachable for a young sheng, though exactly the opposite of an oolonged early-drinking factory stuff. Impressive (and imressively direct) puer. It will be exciting to receive the 2010s from Nada (this year, I’m on the reservation list).
Disclaimer

Source of tea: own purchase.

2009 Hailanghao Laoman’e Wild Arbor

I have a large stash of 2009 puer to review, having stocked up heavily on the vintage to lay down and enjoy over the next few decades. Today I’ll start with one of the more serious teas: the 2009 Hailanghao Laoman’e Wild Arbor green puer. Sourced from Yunnan Sourcing, it is still available at $48 per cake; see product page for info on this (it is actually 2008 tea that was pressed and released in 2009).

Hailanghao is enjoying a fine reputation for their recent releases, especially their more ageworthy teas from selected villages. This is one of them. As aficionados will know Laoman’e is a village in the Bulang district that produces very structured and austere tea similar in style to the Laobanzhang, and increasingly being proposed as a model of the long-term puer genre when Laobanzhang is falling victim to the puer hype and mindlessly downgrades its own production (see interesting article about this here).

This 2009 HLH release is precisely that. It is an extremely powerful tea. And a very good one at that. The leaves are finely processed, very loosely pressed (separating a sample is done within seconds with no damage whatsoever), and – important for long-term ageing – very well dried too. The smokey, meaty, almost gamey aroma is a good indication of what is to come.

In short, this tea is overpoweringly bitter and structured, no matter how brief you keep the infusions. In my case, with a standard dosage of 5g / 120ml, even 10 seconds for the first and 7 seconds subsequently resulted in a nearly undrinkable brew.

The colour is darker than expected, peachy, almost beige, far from a young-tea yellow, which together with the meaty aroma suggests a bit of slow oxidation to the base tea (no doubt a result of one year of ageing before pressing). The lid and tea aroma is subdued, a little generic, faintly sweet. While chunky and powerful, the first infusion is actually only mildly bitter, leathery and woody in taste, with very impressive intensity and persistence. Surely there is little ‘fruit’ and the whole is austere but the balance is there. Subsequent brews are increasingly challenging as the bitter decomposed wood dryness dominates the aftertaste. Leather and meat too, and there’s a mildly disturbing mushroomey note developing, robbing the tea of some cleanliness. As the tea cools down there is a pleasant sweetish yun sensation adding to the strong bitterness.

This Laoman’e is true to its reputation, and is one for the hardcore puer fanatic. I can’t see this tea appealing to a novice: the strong bitterness and idiosyncratic profile would surely turn most people off. I feel more respectful and admirative about it than sensually attracted, but there’s no question it’s a balanced tea that has all the necessary elements to age tremendously well even over 15 or 20 years. I just feel a little stupid drinking it today. Like a strong red wine from, say, Madiran or Montefalco, it just needs considerable time to settle. (At least 6–7 years would be my guess here).

Whether it’s worth the asking price of $48 depends on your bias towards single-cru tea: you can have four cakes of the Menghai #7542 for the money but they won’t be so distinctive. I’m glad to have both.

Source of tea: free sample thrown in by Yunnan Sourcing to my order.

2009 Hojo Lapsang Souchong

Lapsang Souchong appears to be the gateway to the world of tea for many people. Amidst a diet of no-name blacks and teabags it’s often the first tea people identify with a name and flavour. Perhaps because the latter is so much stronger than most other teas’?

Attila Homonna brewing Lapsang Souchong…

Even during a winery visit and tasting you can be treated to a cup of Lapsang, as shown by Tokaj vigneron Attila Homonna (read post about him here) when we met him in January. (To everybody’s surprise, being a champion of limpid dry white wines, Attila used a hefty dose of sugar with his Lapsang).

…and enjoying it.

I threw in some Lapsang with my recent order with Hojo Tea, eager to pay a new visit to my own gateway to the world of tea. The remarkable Hojo website includes a very thorough description of this tea that literally whets one’s appetite. I was particularly curious about the dried longan fruit taste, and the declared balanced smokiness.

To say this tea is unsmokey would be a gross overstatement. The smokey notes are very present and in a long brew of 2 minutes or more the aromatic profile is not so very different from a standard commercial Lapsang. It’s in the flavour that the gap is revealed: Hojo’s is a very clean tea, balanced, smooth and juicy, never degenerating into the bitter, woody, murky notes of cheaper Lapsang. The first impression is of a medium strong smokey taste applied to a fairly high-quality leaf.

Akira Hojo interestingly encourages to taste this tea in a tasting glass. I found this inspirational, but instead of using the whisky sniffer-like stemless tumbler you can see on Hojo’s website, I used a tasting glass especially designed for sweet wine (Schott-Zwiesel Top 10 series).

It’s really an interesting experiment. The colour of the tea appears much lighter than in white porcelain, and is a very transparent reddish. What this dessert wine glass does is to make all the aromas subtler. Although it’s hard to pinpoint exactly, there is a myriad of subtle understated aromas in succession: smoke of course, but also dried fruits, honey, nuttiness, smoked meat, baked fruits. One thing that doesn’t really work is taking a sip. It’s an often overlooked aspect of wine tasting glasses but a glass’s rim, or lip, vitally influences how the wine tastes in mouth. Here, the tea appears thin, tart and astringent, because the lip is far too narrow (compare mentally to a tea cup which is far wider, and makes the tea’s entry in mouth completely different). This particular glass was designed to make very sweet wines taste more balanced, and so it’s natural it emphasises acidity and tannins at the expense of sweetness. Lapsang would require just the opposite.

But another conclusion of this tea-in-glass tasting is that this Lapsang benefits from being brewed very light. Moderate amounts of leaf and flash brewing times render a tea that’s less dominated by smoke and has good subtlety and complexity. But at $45 / 100g I found this a tad pricey. (A 30g purchase is available).

Source of tea: own purchase.

2008 Dahongpao

Dahongpao is one of the four classic oolong teas of the Wuyi region. A status roughly equivalent to a Burgundian grand cru such as Richebourg or Clos de Tart. Accordingly, there are many imitations that make you wonder what the fuss is about. This expensive Dahongpao shows why the reputation is well deserved.

2006 12 Gents Dabaihao

Time for more puer today. Here’s the 2006 Dabaihao cake from the 12 Gentlemen company, available through NadaCha for £28 / cake.

I reviewed four teas from 12 Gents back in March 2009 (see links below and archive link on the left). I have a weakness for their productions: they process some impressive leaves and have a very elegant, subdued, sweet style I enjoy very much. That being said, these are pricey teas, and brewing this sample from Nada made me realise they more often than not lack a bit of expression and oomph.

The dry leaves look very similar to the 2006 12 Gents Yiwu, and quite different from the 2007 Yiwu and Menghai: while the latter have small leaves and tight compression, both 2006 cakes are loosely pressed and consist of impressively intact, large, healthy leaves that have a glorious sweet tobacco & vanilla smell. Contact with the uninfused sample couldn’t really be better.

I’ve had several sessions with tea, both in porcelain gaiwan and in yixing clay pot (the latter surely more successful, with more body and juiciness). No matter how high you dose (I’ve reached 7g / 140ml which is about as much as I can put into my pot without squeezing the leaves) this tea is fairly unintense and light-bodied. The initial infusions are particularly puzzling, very simple, light-coloured, low on fruit, dominated by a beany profile, with a smokey hint on the finish the only real point of interest. Yet there is also notable patience in the xiangbei [aroma cup] which is one of the lovelier I’ve encountered of late, starting with sweet tobacco and evolving lengthily into caramel and candies; it’s really a very ‘long’ smell.

You have to push this tea quite a bit, with a high dosage and brewing times as long as 1 minute by infusion #4 to coax any intensity and character from it. A bone-dry tea, broad-shouldered, architectural, mineral, smokey, never too bitter though with more than a hint of dryness at end (emphasised not the lack of much flavour at mid-palate); notes of mushrooms, a bit of wood, white beans throughout the sessions, a mere hint of smoke.

I really wanted to like this tea in order to keep my positive feelings about the 12 Gents production. But in all honesty, as much as I was looking throughout the session for the tea to finally reach a satisfying extraction, it never happened. It just lacks content; it’s thin and vague. On the positive side it’s clean and noble in aroma, and both the dry and infused leaves are a joy to look at. But it’s just not enough to justify a £28 cake.

Source of tea: own purchase.

Guest tea

Went to a friends’ house today. We’ve had cakes and Saracco’s 2009 Moscato d’Asti, and tea. I brewed my 2008 Otowa Karigane (it’s going stale now, but people enjoyed it nonetheless; a tricky tea to brew in a large pot, though) and 2008 Teamasters’ Oriental Beauty. The hosts also offered their own tea, and this is where the surprise came. They’ve been to China for business in November and brought back a pressed bing [cake] of puer tea, and a gaiwan with assorted cups.

Well, it might not sound so romantic but I’ve never seen a bing of tea in Poland before. Even tea aficionados in Poland focus exclusively on black and green tea, and ‘puer’ here denotes a rock-bottom commercial loose-leaf ‘slimming tea’. So it was quite some fun to play an away game of brewing puer in someone else’s equipment.

The tea turned out to be a fermented [shu] tea from CNNP: the ubiquitous Yellow Mark, most likely the latest vintage on sale (2005?). Fairly ordinary tea, though well-made with a reasonable leaf grade, and tolerant in brewing. Being unfamiliar with it (and drinking almost no shu at all) I’ve dosed a bit too high, and several 10-second infusions came out dark and concentrated but not too bitter or earthy; a good sign. Bonuses came in the form of the hosts’ porcelain kettle (first time I’ve used one; it actually yields a nicely sweet water) and some good exercise at pouring six cups from a 140-ml gaiwan (at home, it’s two or three). We learn every day.

1990 Menghai #9062 Brick

Overbuying tea is commonest of vices. Tea is cheap (mostly), vendors carry a large range of potentially interesting stuff, and then tea comes from far away where shipment often makes up a large portion of your payment (so it’s sensible to buy a bit more than you would from a shop next door).

I ordered a dozen samples of aged puer from Nadacha in the summer, hoping to go through them in a few weeks and perhaps make some buying decisions. But soon afterwards I had four orders of 2009 Darjeelings, then a large batch of Taiwanese teas from Teamasters, and now I’ve just bought two dozen 2009 puer cakes from Yunnan Sourcing. And so the time to taste through the Nadacha samples has been very little!

I must make it a commitment for 2010 to buy less tea and be more systematic in my tasting. I’m toasting to this ambitious undertaking with this 1990 Menghai #9062 Brick (see Nada’s product description). At £78 it’s a fairly inexpensive tea for its age and producer; this is because the brick itself is a mixture of sheng [‘green’ puer] and shu [‘ripe’, or artificially fermented, puer], lacking the dimension and complexity of a true sheng.

Let’s look at the leaves. They are fairly dark, with minor amount of white ‘frosting’ of age, and have a faint smell: cavernous shicang [‘wet storage’, fermentative aromas] and decomposed wood. The spent leaves are interesting to look at: you can clearly see the mixture of sheng (the larger, dark brown leaves that unfold completely) and shu (darker, almost black leaves that remain rolled). Both components look like a reasonably high grade, with large, good quality leaves of which many are still intact; the shu leaves are not the usual non-descript mulch. The mix is quite rustic, however, including a generous helping of twigs and stems.

I’ve brewed this tea several times with different techniques, and can say it’s quite unsatisfactory with long steepings. Anything beyond 30 seconds for your first brewing will result in a very wet storage-dominated profile with a vegetal decomposed-wood bitterness on end I’ve found unpleasant.

The best approach to this tea is a classic gongfu series of short brewings in clay pot (I’ve dosed exactly 5.2g of leaf for 120ml of boiling water, rinsing once and brewing 15s, 15s, 25s, 30s, 30s, 40s, 3m). It’s hefty, powerful tea, delivering quite a bit of colour from the beginning, and a good intensity of wet storage-driven, stoney, mineral, woody taste. The first brewing also provided a nice warm mealy, fat textural touch, but afterwards the tea failed to deliver this promise and showed rather one-dimensional.

First infusion (15 seconds) in yixing teapot.

It is quite unaromatic, and even using an ‘aroma cup’ that usually helps to magnify the bouquet only resulted in an interesting first progression from shicang through toasted grain to caramelised sweetness; subsequent infusions were pale and uncomplex.

This tea is not very patient, as soon as the 7th infusion it’s become quite unintense and losing interest. Even though short steeps help control the vegetal bitterness on the finish, it’s still there in varying proportions, and is my greatest criticism about this tea. Although quite aged, it still has power left, and the sheng and shu elements are by now nicely fused, but there is no complexity or structure and essentially the tea has little to offer beyond its chunky shu-driven power.

It’s an interesting opportunity to taste a mature tea from a leading producer but I feel no need to go beyond my 15g sample.

Disclaimer
Source of tea: own purchase

2008 Rougui

Let’s continue the Wuyi theme with another classic tea from this region of China: Rougui. The name means ‘cinnamon’ (in the meaning of ‘cassia’)
and refers, predictably, to the heady spicy aroma exuded by both dry leaf and
brew.

While not as ubiquitous as Shuixian, Rougui is
a fairly common tea. This example from 2008 is again from the Dragon Tea House
on eBay, and I bought for the extremely modic sum of $8 / 100g (interestingly,
the 2009 now on
offer at this merchant has increased to $18).

This is proper tea: it becomes obvious as soon
as you look at the leaves. They are long, intact, and well taken care of. There’s
a distinctive and nicely nuanced spicy aroma, perhaps of cinnamon tree bark if
you insist. Far less roasted and chocolatey than your usual Wuyi tea, and
surely less than either of the Shuixian I reviewed a few days ago. The tea’s
medium body and moderate roast are also obvious in the colour, which is never
darker than a deep orange-amber.

The tea’s ‘attack’ when you take a sip into your
mouth is strongly spicy, indeed redolent of powdered cinnamon, but the whole is
not very distinctive in flavour: from mid-palate on it recedes into a fairly
vague Wuyi typicity, before a well tannic and perhaps slightly mineral finish.
I have found that the most enjoyable sessions are those with a very high dosage
(6–7g / 100ml of water) and short infusion times. There’s never much roast in
the foreground but a very strong spiciness especially in the first infusion
(later, it tends to wane rather quickly).

The short-livedness of the cinnamonny aroma and
the somewhat cloudy appearance led me to think this tea could actually be
a fake. I mean a tea artificially flavoured with powdered spice. Mind you,
should my intuition be confirmed, it’s been done in a fairly subtle,
well-handled way, but I couldn’t help thinking that heady tree bark aroma was a
little too obvious and disjointed to be really natural. (It’s fairly common to
see China’s most popular tea sbeing counterfeited by artificial aromatisation: ‘Milk
Oolong’ – see review here – is another frequent example). Looking at the wet leaf it’s obviously a plantation tea: leaves are thin and fragile with litte structure, but processing has been good.

Dragon Tea House are a reputable merchant and I’m
keen to give them the benefit of a doubt on this tea, which if you disregard
where the spicy aroma is coming from, is actually a nicely balanced, moreish
tea that’s excellent value for money.