One Year, One Kilo Fu Zhuan Brick

On January 1 of this year I started a project of drinking up my 2012 CNNP Fu Zhuan brick tea. A full kilo (1000g) is about the same size as 3 regular size beengs of puerh. I chose to drink this Fu brick as my morning cuppa this year with the idea of paying attention to my tea purchases and whether or not buying a full kilo brick is a wise purchase. In terms of dollars, Fu brick is very much a value purchase and I paid around $65 for this brick, or 6.5 pennies per gram. 

When I started the tea back in January, I estimated drinking this brick up would take me until May if I drank 7g per day, or October if I drank 7g every two days. As it turns out, I have been drinking around 7g every two days because I can get 6 steepings from a portion and so one session lasts me for two days. Based on the size of the remaining brick, I still feel I'm on track for finishing the tea in October. 

Comparing my current photo of the tea with the one I took for my last update, I can see a real difference in the level of golden flowers. The last photo I took was in back in March at the driest point of winter in my house. The flowers are tiny so click on the photos to see close-up.

March's photo

Now in June, my new photo shows improved growth of golden flowers. 

June photo

We had a few weeks of very hot and muggy weather in late May. While I do have a window air conditioning unit in the house, the AC unit does not get all the muggy water out of the air and my house is still quite warm. The Fu brick sucked up all that heat and moisture. The brick is not as heavily encrusted with flowers as it could be, but the current state is definitely an improvement. Having a Fu brick in the house might be a good gauge to judge my storage conditions, because I can see actual results quickly. It's a "good" fungus, and better a good fungus than a bad mold! I feel reassured that a tea can bounce back from dry winter conditions. The brick has also loosened up some, the tea comes off now in these odd rounded-ball chunks that I have to break up. 

Now well into six months of drinking this tea most days, alternated here and there with a bit of hongcha, I am fairly accustomed to this tea. When I drink something else on a day or two, I find myself missing the Fu brick and feel glad to go back to it. On the other hand, this tea is also somewhat bland and simple compared to puerh tea. It is not very interesting and not complex. I have to give my respect to CNNP teas for the workhorse daily teas that they are, and in terms of puerh doing better for $65 a kilo is probably not possible. For Fu brick tea, however, I feel Mojun's Fu tea is so much more flavorful for not much more money. If I feel inclined to buy more Fu Zhuan tea, I will definitely buy something else over this CNNP, but it's a really small complaint for the amount of tea I am getting with this one purchase. 

Because the tea is not terribly interesting, finding more to say about it is rather like a coffee drinker trying to talk about Folger's. I like to think Fu brick tea is helpful for my digestion but I honestly don't notice any difference on the days I drink hongcha instead. Maybe the gut aspect of it is more noticeable for people who don't consume anything else that might help the gut, but I eat yogurt and kimchi on many days too, so I have a gut luxury in my diet. 

If my Fu tea looks vastly different by the end of the warm summer, I will do another update here and post a new photo. But if the tea looks fairly similar to my photo here, I will just update and give some last thoughts when I finally finish off the brick. 

Monitoring My Purchases 1 Kilo 2012 CNNP Fu Brick

Happy New Year! 

With a new year ahead of us, in a burst of probably short-lived optimism I am going big with my tea drinking. Actually this is less about optimism and more about realism at this stage of my life. Facing up to my considerable tea collection I have a need to really monitor past and future tea purchases and focus on exactly how much tea I am drinking, to enjoy what I own and gird myself in the event of tempting new teas dropping in my favorite shops. Right now I am confident in my ability to enjoy what I own, but less so facing the event of a whole year of tea releases without buying something. One way to get real is to focus on drinking up things like this 1 Kilo 2012 CNNP Fu Brick I bought back in 2016, and wrote about briefly at the end of that year. 

I really need to get honest with myself about how long it takes to drink up teas like this, and the only way to do it is make myself drink it every day until it is gone. Now, in the mornings I usually enjoy a large mug of tea with my first set of meds for the day. The teas I drink in the morning are not sheng pu, but rather things like hongcha or oolong. In December, however, I decided to drink up all the excellent Mojun Fu brick tea I purchased at the World Tea Expo in 2017 as a morning tea, even though I normally think of fu brick as an after-dinner digestif. But in December I discovered Fu brick is quite agreeable and comfortable to drink in the morning when the tea has a few years aging in it. I feel confident in committing myself to taking a few months to drink up a full kilo.

Drinking up a full kilo, mathematically speaking, depends upon how much tea I brew per day. I plan to use my Teforia machine for brewing, and I often like to use the same set of leaves for two days in a row if I can because I am lazy and don't want to rinse out the leaves every day. Determining how long it will take me to drink up this brick depends on whether I go two days on my teas or just one day, because obviously going two days means twice as long to drink up this brick. Right now, the math on 1 kilo of tea drinking 7g per day means I would finish the brick sometime in late May. If I go two days on 7g of tea, I'm looking at drinking this brick until mid-October this year. 

This is a sobering reality and why I am going to do this. Once you get past 55 years of age, thinking about how long teas take to drink is quite a different dimension than when one is under 40, for example. If 1 kilo of tea is going to take the better part of a year, which it looks like it will, I need to think about just how many of these years I have left in my life. Now I can certainly drink my sheng and other teas later in the day, and this 1 kilo of tea is just my morning beverage. But how many years do I have left to enjoy teas?

Thinking this way puts a different spin on tea buying. Committing to nearly a year on a kilo limits me on drinking something else. It also challenges popular "wisdom" in tea circles which suggests that you need a tong (jian) or more of a tea to really "know" that tea. But if that tong will take you a year or more to drink, how does it feel after age 50 to think you maybe only have enough time left for 20 jians of tea? My parents died earlier than that and I have health problems, not to mention this pandemic. Do I want to spend more than one year on any single tea, or would I rather enjoy as much as I can of the many teas I own and have a nice variety on my tea menu?

I am suggesting to myself, rather strongly, that the idea of buying tongs after age 40 is probably not a good idea, even when the tea is excellent, either in value or in quality. A tea needs holding and storing for at least 10 years. Some people might plan to sell their teas after a certain point, but I don't plan on doing that. Realistically one cannot expect or possibly even want to spend a whole year or more on a single tea when you only have 10-30 of those years left. Do you want to limit your life to only 10 more teas? 

Back to the idea of holding teas to sell, the idea of selling teas is nicer than the reality. I spent a decade selling stuff online, and I can't face doing the shipping any longer. It's easy to list stuff for sale online, but shipping is even worse today than it was when I quit doing it five years ago. Nowadays Amazon has spoiled consumers to expect fast shipping. If you don't get that package out in two days, people will be emailing looking for their tracking number, especially when they are spending $100 or more on a purchase. You cannot count on the same good health you enjoy at 40 when you reach 60 and beyond. Finding boxes, wrapping, printing shipping labels and driving to the post office takes a huge amount of effort when you are older and do not feel so good on some days. Afterward you get to deal with the eventual crop of unhappy customers, because that is a reality of doing business. All that will feel worse especially if you're fire-sale-ing your tea, which you probably will be unless you are sitting upon some extremely rare and desirable teas of the most excellent storage. 

Second brewing here, lighter than the first

Don't get me wrong, buying tongs at a young age is a nice idea if you really love the tea. You will have twenty years to age that tea before worrying about drinking it. But think about how many tongs of tea you actually want when it takes a year or two to drink that tong and you only have 20-30 years left. You're down to 15 tongs that you can reasonably drink assuming you can keep up 7g a day until age 70. Do you really want to commit the precious years you have to only 15 teas, or would you rather have a collection of many more single teas and enjoy as many tea experiences as possible? Of course if you have a family who also drinks with you then the metrics change a bit, but most of us in the west are single drinkers, not members of a four person family where everyone drinks tea. 

So, in the short term I am going to commit to drinking up this kilo brick as my morning tea. I brewed up 9g yesterday and it turned out rather stronger than I like. The Teforia I use because I am lazy expels the liquid forcefully through the leaves and completes 3 steepings per carafe. So, my first carafe is strong. I noted a fine nutty flavor, no storage notes to speak of and a pleasant feeling in the stomach. Today I brewed the same leaves again and got a much weaker cup. I am on the fence a little because I should optimally reduce the leaves down to more like 5g and change them every day, but I doubt I will. 

This 2012 Copco brick is fairly good, with a nutty flavor and only a few small sticks. I purchased it originally from a Hong Kong seller who since closed down his website and only sells on eBay now. Fu brick is fairly green until about 5 years or so when it starts to darken. In addition to my considerations on how long a kilo will take out of my life this year to drink, the reality of this brick in my collection is that I never found a decent storage solution for the tea. I had it in a plastic bag half open for the four years I have owned it. 

I feel bad that I bought a big brick like this when I had no room to store it properly. I am fortunate that the large size of the brick kept the interior with some golden flowers intact, but definitely not as much as I like to see on Fu tea. Someone in a more humid climate or someone who stored this tea decently should aspire to a fully encrusted brick of golden flowers. I can really taste the difference of a well-crusted fu brick, it has a tangy zip on the tongue that my brick is lacking. The tea is decently aged enough to drink, but less than optimal amounts of flowers. Fu is not a very expensive type of tea, so I don't feel as bad as I would storing a sheng tea badly, but that's why this brick is neglected, all my storage is stuffed full of sheng puerh. I need a separate solution for fu brick and just do not have it. Thus the tea is drier than it should be, though on the positive side any touch of Hong Kong, of which there was little to none anyway, is gone by now. 

So, I anticipate that my new project to drink up this brick will finish sometime between May and October, leaning more towards October at this point. I will post on Instagram at some point showing more progress on the brick. The project will be a success if I tire of this tea and convince myself that I have no business buying a full kilo or more of anything at this point in my life. 

If you want to buy Fu brick tea, I notice that Yunnan Sourcing has added more fu brick teas to their site, including on the US site. These teas are fairly expensive, and most are still green. To get an aged one you need to look at 5 years and older. You can find fu brick for about half those prices if you're willing to put up with eBay. I notice that the seller I bought from still has Copco Fu bricks on eBay, his name is tea8hk if you want to have a look at those, but I see plenty of cheaper $40/kilo bricks elsewhere on eBay. Heicha teas are more popular nowadays on western tea forums as people are looking at drinking options that cost less than sheng puerh with far shorter aging cycles. I hope more US sellers start to carry heicha teas, especially if they can find exceptionally clean examples. 

Mojun Fucha Fu Zhuan

Over the past week, I attended the World Tea Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. After reading OolongOwl’s travelogues of various expos in her blog over last few years, I decided to put this trip on my bucket list. When I received an offer of a press pass to the Expo from Aaron Kiel and investigated the costs, I allotted the remainder of my tax refund to cover the trip. One additional very attractive reason to go was for the weather. My climate has experienced unseasonable rain and humidity for some months now, and I seriously needed to air my skin and dry out my sinuses. Two days of Vegas weather and all of that cleared up for me. A day spent in the resort pool and riding the monorail before the Expo left me feeling fairly fabulous.

At the Tea Expo, I recognized OolongOwl right away standing at a puerh tea booth. All I had to do was observe the faces of everyone standing around trying the teas. An experienced puerh tea drunk is easy to spot amongst a crowd of hesitant puerh newbies. I couldn’t get close to the booth with the crowd, so I waited for her. She allowed me to tag along for some of the exhibits and I learned a great deal watching her at work. I met a number of other bloggers and learned that

1.      My blog is thoroughly tasteless and inappropriate.

2.      I lack business cards. Everyone seemed to want one, and it never occurred to me to get blogger business cards.

3.      I really, really like puerh and brick tea.

4.      The tea industry is impressive and full of friendly people who care about forming a community.

OolongOwl and I found a tea booth fairly early on that obsessed us for much of the remaining days at the Expo, Mojun Fucha tea, a Shaanxi-based company that researches and produces Fu Zhuan brick tea. When we spied the booth with a huge 1 kg brick chipped open to expose the golden flowers, we got enthused right away.

“Golden flowers Fu Brick!” Oh goodness, my mouth waters.

Two men at the booth lit up with surprised expressions.

“You know golden flowers? Americans do not know Fu brick.”

“Oh yes we do,” I said. “I own quite a bit of Fu brick tea, and we discuss vintages as well.”

I thought of our heicha discussion topics on Teachat. I tried to start a conversation about the difficulties of growing the flowers in a drier climate. But I had trouble conveying understanding with the language differences, though the Mojun Tea representatives were more than competent in English. The booth had 1 kg and 2 kg bricks of green Hubei style heicha, and boxes of tea bags with darker Anhua style tea.

2 kg Fu brick

OolongOwl and I kept our initial visit at this booth short and sampled a few small cups of dark Anhua style heicha. After all, we had a good acre of other tea vendors to cover. But just around the corner this tea hit me full on with a head tea stone. I started feeling oddly woozy like I’d smoked a joint. Strange for a heicha. This tea was my first of the day and I think Owl’s second tea sample. We got to drink a good amount of a vintage 8582 from another vendor I shall cover in another piece, but after this I had to admit I was thoroughly baked, and that crazy heicha from Mojun Tea was the reason. We both sat down just wondering over this tea. I passed out at the hotel after a bowl of soup.

The next day, I had to get to the bottom of this heicha we drank. I returned to the booth and told the reps I was willing to become their vendor and sell east of the Mississippi and I felt pretty sure that Owl could handle the west. But please gimme more to drink. This time I drank one of the green Hubei style teas. The rep introduced himself as Xiangdong Zhou.

“You and the other lady understand Fu brick,” he said. “Many people come by and taste our tea. They say ‘okay’ and ‘very nice’ but I feel they do not understand.”

I felt determined to drink as much tea as possible and not leave until I bought whatever we had yesterday. At first, Zhou did not want to sell me any tea, so I decided to get more information and asked about the displays at the booth showing maps and information about Xixian New Area in Shaanxi.

Booth display

“Xixian New Area?” I asked pointing at the maps posted on the back of the booth.

“Yes, Xixian New Area. We have new district at the top of the city. This is where the factory is, we have our research and cultural committee. You should visit our factory!”

You can check out this company's website at mojunfucha.com. 西咸新区金叶茯茶有限公司-西咸新区金叶茯茶有限公司. Zhou told me about the Fucha Park and the hopes that their company can reach out to western customers with Fu brick teas. He also introduced me to an American friend of his, a man who said he has known Zhou for sixteen years.

I managed to purchase a box of tea which Zhou said was the tea we had on day 1. I was surprised to find out this Anhua dark style tea was actually brewed from tea bags! He agreed to sell me a box for $50 but then also gave me an additional box of a different tea and a large cello bag full of samples

The kilo bricks retail for around $85 or so. The Hubei style tea of day 2 also produced a heavy stoner sensation that I began wonder if the Mojun Tea company has a mission to get the country tea drunk. The tea was brewed very lightly too, I didn’t feel I got a full taste of the brew despite the fact that I had dry mouth and munchies and needed to pass out again. Once back home I planned to brew the tea more to my preferred strength. Zhou is a delightful person and I really enjoyed meeting him and heck yeah, I would love to tour the factory.

Back at home, I start to read about Xixian New District. It is, of course, one of several economic projects in the area, but I see now how special it is. Can you imagine a Fucha Park dedicated to Fu tea culture? The website says “The Fu Tea Culture Industry Park has established a cultural industry chain centered on Fu tea, with tea production, research and development, experience and cultural shows, to drive the economic and tourism development in neighboring towns. The Fucha town is planned with low-density housing and business and a simple and unsophisticated style thanks to a blending of tea culture and Guanzhong folk and life culture in its construction.”

That sounds wonderful to me. I wanted to tell Zhou about my state of Wisconsin with our history of agricultural projects, and how we too develop economic research and factories in new areas of towns, even the small town where I live, and how we both live in areas that try to put the modern housing areas away from the older, cultural sections of town. His area has historical buildings and artifacts from centuries ago that are saved for cultural appreciation. My town too has kept the 150 year old area of town for the appreciation of tourists and city people, and built the newer housing and technical college further away. I could not say any of that because it would take too long to explain and is somewhat off track from the purpose of Zhou’s work at the Expo.

At home, when browsing the Mojun website, I found a download file with a small article on the tea. In it, if you click on the blue link for “Fu Brick” you go to Baidu, the Chinese wiki article for Fu brick tea.

We know that raw green/yellow tea material for Fu brick comes from Hubei and then the dark black tea component is from Anhua, Hunan or Fujian areas. The tea materials were historically shipped in bamboo baskets to Shaanxi for processing into Fu brick. The Hubei material historically made part of its journey via water transport through Wuhan. After that, bricks journeyed south to the Xiamen area for water transport westward.  

On Baidu, I read that during the Second Sino War after the Fall of Wuhan, all Hunan material was diverted over to Shaanxi and special efforts made to continue making brick tea by opening a People’s factory there. The tea must keep shipping even during a horrible time for the people who need this dietary component in the far west. So the tea then went west from Shaanxi instead of southward for sea shipping. After the war ended, the production was then handed back to Hunan, but as Zhou explained to me, the golden flowers germ did not grow as well on the bricks as it had in Shaanxi, which is partly what led to the creation of the Xixian New Area.

I put together a map to help me imagine the journey of the tea over the last century.

Journey by various types of tea.
I have shaded the Wuhan area to
show how the tea would have
crossed the war zone area

The Fall of Wuhan affected the movement of the raw material tea to Shaanxi, yet materials would make it there to the People’s factory, so Fu brick teas continued to be made away from the war areas. As I read these lines in Baidu, the Fall of Wuhan, and the Wuchang uprising flashed before me, the river floods where the yellow tea might have crossed. If my heart is like a house, the subfloor falls out from under me and I am free falling, floating.

The Baidu articles refer to the decisions to do everything possible to continue making brick tea as  “an act of love." This is indeed the best metaphor possible for everything that was done by the people of China, keeping this tea in production during that whole time of war. What a great effort this must have been with human lives as the cost on all ends from leaf to brick to tea, human lives in the making, and human lives on the line too if the tea was not made. And I visualize tracks in a mud road, the same tracks used by the nuns of my own order in Wuchang, the paths of the students and the tea. I have written all this, several years ago in my post about Sister Rosa teaching me of those years in the Wuhan area.

Now, I am a rational person, and not completely an idealist nor a historical romantic. I know the layers of great complexity around human events that we cannot wholly simplify. But when I see historical connections, I will not deny them. The fact is, Zhou’s profession today in the Shaanxi Xixian New Area rests on the history of war years in Wuhan, on pivotal decisions made then to divert tea materials to Shaanxi to the People’s factory there. Likewise, my profession as a teacher and a tea blogger today rests on the nuns of my order in Wuhan at that same time, from Sister Liu and Sister Chen, and Sister Leclare from Wuchang. I doubt either of us would have met attending a Tea Expo in 2017 without all this history.

Like I said, I don’t go looking for these connections but I cannot “unsee” them. My life has many of these. Indeed, what else can we do except to marvel? I stopped reading and researching Mojun tea at this point. I tried to do other, non-related tea reading but my subfloor is gone. The pictures of the war years in Wuhan and the stories of Sister Rosa just will not leave my mind. I see Zhou standing before me when he tracked me down elsewhere on the exhibit floor to give me yet another box of tea. I needed to think and cry a little for another day, in a good way, before resuming my research and tea drinking.

Anhua dark style Fucha, "Cherish Red" by Mojun Fucha

I purchased about 200g of brick teas in tea bag form but the ones I purchased are new, dated April 2017 and not up on their website yet. I could not justify buying a whole 1 kg or 2 kg brick when I already own 1 kg bricks of heicha at home. As I found at the Expo, the tea bags we were served there gave me the same tea stoned feeling at home. I did some experimenting with the parameters. First, I took one of the 3g bags of dark Anhua style heicha called “Cherish Red,” and tried the tea in a 100 ml Jian Shui teapot. I used the whole 100 ml capacity because this tea has strong effects on me.

The date shows this is a recent production.

This 3g/100 ml is nevertheless stronger than what we were served at the Expo for sampling. Here I can really taste the dominant flavors of red/black tea along with betel nut. The early steeps have a red wine nose and slightly plummy flavor. The tea is rather fine in the tea bag and some comes through my teapot into my strainer, but this mostly stops once the tea fully expands in the water. I got about eight flash steeps before the tea weakened. I noted a mineral taste contributed by the tea pot and then decided the tea pot and gong fu method are unnecessary for this tea after passing out again on my bed.

Gongfu style in Jian Shui

Next, I steeped the Cherish Red tea bag western style using a Kamjove tea pot with the filter top. The top actually has a super fine filter and I could empty the tea bag into it, but just decided not to bother and mostly use the Kamjove as a pitcher and brewed the tea in it. I used about 4 minutes of steep time and then took my huge pitcher of tea with me to play a video game. I enjoyed the relaxation this tea gives, more diluted, rather than passing out. The tea is also very good cold when steeped western style. In fact, it would make an interesting alcohol tea cocktail. We had some tea/wine cocktails at the Tea Expo served sangria style with fruit. I’d say double the tea drunk if you use these teas for cocktails.

"Blue Dancers," by Ed Martinez
Mid-century art on my floor of
the Westgate Resort, and the old
gold hallway wallpaper.

 Mostly I drink puerh that a real puerh fiend would enjoy, yet this dark Fu tea bag might appeal to people who prefer red/black tea, or who can’t stomach puerh and yet want some of the heady enjoyment that puerh tea brings. Many heicha teas can be a bit skanky with storage issues that must be aired out, or rough with sticks. This tea is clean enough for a spa crowd, in my opinion.

Western steeping in Kamjove brewer sans the lid.

Because of Mojun’s research as a government initiative to introduce a fine heicha product to western tea drinkers, I contacted a couple of western puerh vendors with the information to check out these teas and consider offering them for sale. While the company has a website and Taobao, ordering is much more accessible with western facing vendors. With any luck, we will see these products soon in a favorite online store.

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I have more to cover from the Tea Expo in coming days

Random Notes on Decent Drinkers

Over the past year or so I’ve tried a number of teas that really are quite good, but they didn’t yield much creativity for me in terms of writing for this blog. Mostly I write on whatever I think is remarkable or a curiosity. But I’m sure you’ll agree that while we all want very good teas in our collection, we still have many which are more daily drinker teas. Some of these are very enjoyable and still worth noting, at least for myself to remember them.

2012 Yunnan Sourcing Da Qing

This cake is an annual production of “old arbor” gushu. Recent years have received mixed reviews. I had two sessions with this four year old production via mrmopar and like this tea very much. Fruity and floral, still quite green, with large leaves and stems. Rather expansive, not so much a tea high but a nice caffeine/theanine reaction, more than just a lift, expanding body awareness maybe. 2012 was a good year for puerh and it’s not easy finding the good teas from this growing season.

No dry storage issues, beautifully stored. I have had at least a dozen samples from mrmopar’s storage which I’ve covered here on this blog, and was also featured on TeaDB. Mr Mopar lives in Virginia and stores his teas packed into old fridge pumidors with an occasionally running fan and humidity packs as needed. He has been storing tea at least five years. Any doubters about storing tea properly in the west haven’t tried his tea yet. I know he’s invested in the best teas possible and will have a decent stash in the coming years when I plan to pitch a tent in his yard and never leave.

2008 Nannuo Loose Maocha Beautiful Taiwan Tea Company

Picked up a bag of this with a order earlier this year. The page for the listing said “more info coming soon,” but I see that info still wasn’t posted in October and now the tea is no longer on offer. This company is based in the US and sometimes resells white2tea and others. I think I paid $13 for about 50g.

No excuse storage.

As you can see, I have a storage problem. I am now out of storage and am using a vintage pig pitcher to store this tea. Back in the day, open pitchers like this were common in farm houses. Milk is brought to the house in a metal pail where the cream is allowed to rise and then skimmed off. I can buy milk in plastic bags here which are market as a way to take up less room in the landfill. So I could actually use this pitcher if I wanted, but the plastic bags can’t be recycled as plastic milk jugs are, so I just buy milk by the jug.

A big family could easily drink up the milk in this pitcher within a day, so it didn’t need a cover or a lid. I’m using a napkin and rubber band, and have no excuses for this behavior. I can’t recommend this storage option even though I normally recommend stoneware with covers for puerh in dry climates. Just do as I say and not as I do.

Still really green. Maybe it wasn't processed right.

Primarily a hay flavor, nice long leaves. The tea seemed a bit too dry and slightly flat.

Loose leaves were pretty though.

Not my favorite loose tea ever, the next one is more to my taste.

2015 Spring Mannuo Gushu Loose Maocha by Chawangshop

2015 Mannuo Loose

Mannuo area sheng is rather difficult to find as a single tea, so earlier this year I added a double order of this $15/50g to another larger tea order. The dry leaves are huge and this is one of those teas you need a larger gaiwan to appreciate unless you want to break up these lovely leaves, which you don’t.

Stoneware container I made in high school.

I’ve brewed up this tea about three times and just don’t have anything remarkable to say about it. It’s pleasant. The tea has notes of hay and flowers with a nice mouth coat. The tea is still rather green. Need to brew a lot of it to make up for the lack of compression. I combined my two bags into a large crock to preserve the long leaves.

Long leaves.

Loose tea is beautiful, but more than a little of it gets to be a storage issue since loose tea needs so much more space. I noticed that puerhsk now has a Mannuo as well, at a higher price point. Still, with few examples of Mannuo around, it’s worth picking up some this year along with an order.

Only a year in and this one seems to be settling well.

Chawangshop is one of my favorite places for decent drinkers and vintage tea ware at budget prices, and puerhsk usually has very fine tea and teaware for more discriminating tea ware hoarders. Don’t be fooled by the shipping in your cart at Chawangshop, it’s a quote and the final shipping won’t be tallied until the order is packed. The final total always comes in lower than the initial quote.

2015 Poundcake by white2tea

People thought I was either crazy or doing a stunt for the blog when I brewed up all 100g of the tea club butt plug last year. I wasn’t doing either, I simply couldn’t figure out a way to chip anything off of the highly compressed plug of tea without injuring myself. I found the early plug rather wet at the time, and it broke down after eight steeps. I purchased a cake of this and then served it at a tea class, which used up half the cake. This production is sold out now, but a 2016 version is available that I haven't tried.

Revisiting this tea now, the leaves have firmed up quite a bit in a year’s time, and the brew is now a thick golden yellow. I noted sourness in early steeps, probably similar to what Hobbes mentioned in his recent review. Either this tea is starting some sort of funky fermentation stage, or it doesn’t do well dry. I will crock up the tea and see if it is correctable.

Wisconsin workin' men

2015 72 Hours by white2tea

I first sampled this tea about two weeks from pressing in the summer of 2015, and drank it a couple more times during the summer that year. I liked it then, and like it even more now. The tea is now firm and brews up a thick yellow, still sweet but bitter when pushed, this has remarkable longevity. Lots of florals, some vanilla, likely a northern tea but one of the better examples.

72 Hours, or in my case, 96 Hours

I got 24 steeps in a recent session over a period of four days and could have coaxed out even more. This tea is damn good. It's well worth the money, when people write to me asking what to purchase from white2tea, this is one I recommend getting now. I expect it to deepen and develop more complexity. Also nice is the compression is lighter so the leaves are easy to separate intact, better to age in my crock style storage. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one pushes 30 steeps at least someday which makes the price per gram easier on the wallet. If I had extra dough I’d get me another one.

2002 Old Stalk Lincang Bamboo Stuffed Raw by Bitterleaf Teas

I received a sample of this tea, an odd pale colored chunk that brews up reddish. I think this tea got bamboo-stuffed quite wet and composted a bit, in other words, partially fermented. It’s a raw sheng that got part way to shou probably early on. I liked the smoothness of the early steeps, but after about four steeps, I started to feel a bit queasy. After two more steeps I couldn’t go on. The tea is still quite lively on the tongue. Maybe some humid storage might work out some of the in-between fermentation. I just don’t think it’s ready for me to drink now. I prefer the sold out WMD Mansa, or the WMD Mansa huang pian which is a nice bargain at $24.50.

Rummy Pu Shou by LiquidProust Teas

My friend LP sent me a few samples of his teas, this one among them. I’m not a fan of puerh stuffed in wooden booze kegs. This one smelled very strongly of rum right out of the baggie, which reminded me of my stepmother’s stale rum and coke glass the morning after, and thus nauseatingly of my childhood. I aired it for several months. When I brewed it, the tea retained a slight bit of rum scent which was a bit more pleasant. But the tea tasted mostly like cardboard and didn’t benefit from my airing. Maybe people who like boozy puerh would enjoy it more when fresh.

LP also sent me an old 1990s-ish puerh tea bag, a shou that smelled like my grandmother’s pantry. Brewed it up in an Eric Soule clay teapot. I rather enjoyed this warming drink after rinsing the tea bag well in cold water.

1990s Puerh tea bag, liquidprousttea.
A visiting Mr. B's coffee mug, I ain't claiming that as mine.

A cold water rinse will get rid of any off flavors in shou. The tea was quite strong for about four steeps and petered out, but I liked the powdery grandma smell that comes from long storage. You can fake a booze flavor, but you can’t fake-age granny’s closet. Still, gotta give props to LP, he’s sent out a lot of free tea this year to people new to puerh.

2012 CNNP ShouZhu Fu Zhuan Brick 1000g from tea8hk

Evidence of my insanity.

I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought a 1 kilo Fu Brick last spring. But I can blame jayinhk and Acupuncturist on Teachat for the idea. I purchased the tea from the seller’s website which is now shut down, but the seller still has items on EBay. The tea has two listings, one at 10% off here.

Good taste for crazy.

The tea arrived with nice golden flowers throughout already and I kept them up over the summer, but they didn’t grow as large as I wanted. I’m still trying to get a nice crusty Fu Brick and am likely to fail in my too-dry climate. 

tea8hk packaged this very well. The tea has the original box
and then a sealed heavy plastic bag. 

And I don’t have any decent storage option for a brick this large. But the tea has a lovely betel nut flavor, totally smooth and drinkable with a dark orange color, and more aging to go. Maybe I should store it in the bathroom.

2016 Misty Peaks

You can hate on me, I don’t let too many morals get in the way of good tea. I really like this single farm tea, it’s not bad at all. The cakes are now in the Great Shrinking and down to 100g this year. I speculated earlier this year that the farm’s tea may have jumped in value, and so Misty Peaks is getting less to sell. A recent marketing email seems to confirm this, as the company recently announced that it will branch out into other teas and tea ware. 

It's still good tea.

I now have three years of this Yiwu-ish tea stored together in the same vintage crock by itself as an experiment. This year’s is quite tasty and mild with not much bitterness, the empty cup has a strong floral and honey aroma. For experimental purposes this tea is ideal, because I am fairly sure this is a single estate tea and can track its development as a crocked tea without other variables interfering. The leaf is quite durable and can be pushed with warmth and humidity. It doesn’t break down in boiling water either.

1993 Zhongcha Menghai Orange Mark from inpursuitoftea.com

I got to taste this beauty in New York and am obsessing over it ever since. This is the most sticky and pungent of aged puerh teas I’ve ever had. By sticky I mean dark syrup and literally sticky on the fingers. Naturally they don’t have enough to sell. Most really aged teas I’ve had are either rather like dry leather, or humid stored. This one was perfect, and what a treat it was in good company. I got my eye on this company now as their website does have a few aged offerings. 

Various Puerh Teas Macha Tea Company, Madison WI.

Likewise, I have my eye on Macha Teahouse in Madison. Wisconsin finally has a puerh teahouse done right. Most people seem to buy matcha. But puerh is served on a bamboo tray with as many gaiwans and refillable hot water teapots as you need. You can sit on a barstool pub-style and knock 'em back, aged and young teas are available. This is exactly how a puerh tea drunk like me wants it. I can watch the matcha buyers drift in and out and they don't know what they are missing. So few tea houses let you do the brewing and make a mess over a bamboo tray. And if you aren't comfortable brewing yourself, Anthony will help you with the brewing.

I did drink all that.

The shop also sells teas from Yunnan Sourcing and white2tea. I got so tea drunk there I don't remember what the hell I drank or where I parked my car. A session is $13 no matter what tea you pick, and I can easily run up a tab. They also serve meat or vegan and gluten-free meals on Fridays and Sundays and bakery every day. I plan to go back and wish I could go there every day. I doubt you'll find a more agreeable puerh tea house in the midwest USA. Definitely check out the photos at the link above if you want to see a pub style tea house done right.

So these were several tea experiences I didn’t get much time to write about over the year. I haven’t yet formed any conclusions overall on the new teas this year, so many are still too green and wet. I also had a very wet summer where I live, unusually so and my teas are now in great condition. Over the winter I plan to continue drinking through my stash to check on various teas. In fact I still have teas I’ve never tried, like the 2015 Pin which many people say tastes quite good now. I’m betting on 2016 Head as one I will like when it settles. I also have some wet stored teas that required months of airing and need to be sampled as well. The delight of a puerh collection is tasting through and enjoying them like fine wine and whiskey in all stages of development.

CNNP Duoteli Yellow Box Super and Premium Heicha Dark Teas

Heicha time

The weather is turning cooler here. Well, sort of. We are still getting unusually warm weather for early November and in fact have not yet had a killing frost. The meteorologists are talking about breaking late frost records as old as sixty or seventy years. I’m sure the cold will hit any day now, and so I’m dusting off and rinsing out my clay teapots in anticipation of adding darker teas to my sheng routine. Yes, that means heicha, dark oolong and shou puerh teas.

Reverse view of the boxes

Luckily I have some new teas to try. Early last summer I noticed Chawangshop adding new heicha teas and more seem to appear in the shop every month. Chawangshop has the largest inventory of heicha that I trust for clarity and for the best flavor, although I am also hearing about some good heicha over at Yunnan Sourcing that I need to try too. Last June, I purchased these Liu Pao/Bao teas at Chawangshop and they arrived when the weather was too warm for me to drink them. Now I can give these a try without overheating too much.

(2010/2015) Duoteli Yellow Box “Super Grade” Wuzhou Liu Pao250g $18

This tea comes in a bag with two small punched holes at the top of the bag. The reason for this is because of its five year warehouse storage combined with the fact that this tea is not yet fully aged. The Tian Jian grade is due to the smaller, tippy leaves and the tea power they contain, unlike some liu pao heicha which are made of larger, lower grade leaves. Liu Pao is first oxidized slightly, like red (black) tea, and then fermented like shou for a few weeks. Then it is stored for several years packed in bamboo baskets and finally pressed or boxed for sale. The Yellow Box Liu Pao is a 1970s packaging design which hasn’t changed much.

Super Grade Yellow Box, note the tiny leaves.

Opening the bag I get a whiff of a fine musty warehouse, and the dry tea is exceptionally clean. This means the warehouse storage is already done for me, and I in the west can simply store this in my drier climate with a good chance this will age beautifully without a lot of work on my part. But I also need to work out some of the musty odor. Loose leaf heicha like this tends to give up its “money steeps” in the first five brews, unlike puerh which requires numerous brews to work off the storage. I need to get this tea in a condition where a single very quick rinse leads to excellent steepings right away. So, my session with this tea is as assessment of its current state and contemplation on where I think the tea might go in the future with a bit of storage.

I brewed a good heaping tablespoon of leaves and just enough water to cover them in my Jian Shui teapot which I reserve for dark heicha and wetter shou puerh teas because the clay tempers the storage a bit and rounds out the sweetness. I use boiling water for all steeps. Need to be quick on the rinse and the pouring of this type of tea, because it brews up strong very quickly.

Clarity is evident in the view of the spotty glaze on my cup.

Halfway through the first cup, the body heat hits like a truck. I’m an overly warm Slavic person and heicha like this makes me sweat and my feet swell up like a touring camel. This is a tea to drink in winter after a meal of roast beast. I need to be freezing cold to drink this, as are the folks in colder climate areas of Asia who use black heicha teas with milk or butter to supplement their meat diets and add calories in winter.

Surprisingly, this tea is still quite bitter despite the six years in damp storage, and well caffeinated. It is very powerful in the mouth with bitterness and hints of tangy dark fruits beneath the storage character. The tangy, metallic bitterness lingers in the mouth for about an hour or so, as well as the stomach and I feel hungry. Heicha like this is meant to supplement and digest a heavy meat diet. By “digest” I mean it gets the food moving through my digestive system, getting rid of that overly full feeling from a heavy meal. Drunk an hour after a meat meal, this will help remove the sluggishness and get mouth and stomach juices going with a bit of astringency. The storage character gets a bit minty after about three brews.

Leaves show some green left to age in the Yellow Box.

The storage flavor and bitterness still here means the tea is nowhere near its best yet. I remember the excellent 1980s Tian Jian I bought last spring, which is now also back in stock and one of the best heicha teas I’ve ever had, beneath a similar storage character where I found heavy sweet fruits and betel nut. This 2010 Duoteli Super Grade has the base material to develop deep fruit and a syrupy thickness in ten to twenty years. I got seven steeps before the flavor quit, even though the tea still had quite a bit of dark color. Maybe some aging will extend the brews to a couple more.

A dark Jian Shui teapot is a must for black, damp heicha and shou puerh.
By Crimson Lotus Teas who specializes in these.

You can get a 25g sample of this tea in a Wuzhou heicha sample set that Chawangshop is offering for $12. I highly suggest trying it in a sample first unless you already know you like wetter stored teas and you are prepared to let this age more. Of course it’s drinkable now, but I must be clear that it’s a tea for sampling at the moment and not something a tea beginner should run out and buy. It will not have the complex character of puerh, and I think only experienced drinkers know what I mean about tasting a heicha tea for further potential. Heicha is what it is, a quick digestif and, in my case, a good substitute for the shot of Jaegermeister I used to drink after heavy pasta. Yes, Jaeger might be gross, but a small shot is a good digestif and not the swilling beverage some people regret drinking too much of. My new Duoteli is a tea equivalent. I will store it in an unglazed clay jar to work off the storage over the winter.

2009/2013 CNNP Wuzhou Premium Grade Liu Pao 8110 200g $18

This tea helpfully includes a can for storage, one of those with the second interior lid, making the can useful later on for storing oolong tea. The production date on the can is marked as 2010, Chawangshop states that the tea has “buds” from 2009 spring harvest, and the can also has 2011 on it.

Unboxing the Premium Grade Liu Pao.

I have a feeling the tea contains leaves from several years that were processed together, first oxidized lightly and then fermented like shou. After fermentation, the tea was packed into large bamboo baskets for three years before packing into this can and box for sale.

This type of can keeps tea dry
and is useful later for storing roasted oolong.

Visually the tea is not very different from the Yellow Box, but the storage is much lighter. Just a touch of basement on the wet leaves, quite perfect really. This tea is also much further along in fermentation without the green pieces of the Yellow Box tea. 

Premium grade has a little rougher leaf.

I notice this tea is a much thicker, more syrupy brew but I’m not sure thickness in heicha translates into more flavor. Liu Pao really isn’t a tea you drink for complexity anyway.

A reddish brew shows this one is more heavily fermented,
but still qualifies as medium/heavy.

Slightly tangy on the tongue, this tea is very smooth and ready to drink now although a bit more resting time might fade out the slight storage flavor. My dark Jian Shui teapot tempered this level of damp perfectly into a mineral flavor. The brew is reddish brown like shou and more typical of the Liu Pao teas I have in my collection. Very comfortable to drink but lacks the intensity of the more lightly fermented Yellow Box. This one fades out in five brews or so, again more typical of Liu Bao. It also lacks the lingering flavor in the mouth of the Yellow Box. But the tea is clean and I can easily feel comfortable suggesting it to a heicha newbie. However, of the two teas the aficionado is going to prefer the Yellow Box for value (50g more for the same price) and for the aging potential. The Yellow Box is the more intense tea by half, but the wetter storage justifies the lower price equal to the drier stored 8110.

I did not see any golden flowers 金花 in, either of these teas, and I don’t know if they were inoculated to produce jin hua. Golden flowers called eurotium fungi are often grown using wheat as a base and then the wheat-grown spores are added to the tea, so something to consider for people of gluten sensitivity. Personally I love jin hua and crave that tangy flavor. My attempts to increase jin hua growth over the summer on my Fu Zhuan bricks produced a consistent growth of small flowers throughout, but not the huge flowers I see coming from more humid climates. I’m still chasing the fabulously crusted Fu from my friend in Washington, DC that I tasted last summer. My success in growing highly floral jin hua may be limited because of my drier climate but I plan to keep on trying.

Some bits of green, but mostly ready to drink.

Chawangshop now has nearly one hundred products listed in the heicha category. Browsing through them all now, I see many that I would love to try, such as the 1990s bricks that were added just recently. Highly aged puerh is out of the world price-wise for most of us, but border teas are low priced and still available from the 1980s and 1990s. Heicha is worth buying now while you can for an easy and comforting drink. For old people like me, heicha aids our slower digestion and irregularity. Heicha like these boxed teas are very warming to cold bones in the winter too, easy to store and convenient to brew up.

Late 1980s Hunan Tianjian Tao Yuan

1980s Hunan Tianjian by Tao Yuan

Over the winter I splurged on tea and accessories because what else is there to do in winter except shop? One of my more questionable purchases is this pricey heicha, late 1980s heicha from Chawangshop. This tea made by Tao Yuan FT originating apparently in Shaanxi has seven types of  tea leaves, all first grade spring leaf. According to the listing, today only three types of leaves are used. Chawangshop states that this is the highest grade heicha they have on offer, and the tea is notable for “perfect storage” and pine smoke incense nose. Well, now how can I resist that? Even though 25g costs $24, which is crazy pricing for heicha. One hopes it lives up to the hype.

Another splurge of the winter is this antique English pearwood tea caddy. I’ve always wanted one of these. Sometimes they are apple-shaped.

Pearwood Tea Caddy with copper key.

This caddy I bought is preserved as an antique, complete with tea gunk lining the inside. Most antique people will tell you never to clean an antique, but if you plan to actually use that antique, you have to clean it. So, I decided to clean mine up today while sipping away at this late 1980s heicha. I’m glad I cleaned it out, because the lining is pure silver with no corrosion, and a cute little copper key emerged from beneath the layers of gunk. I oiled the wood and serviced the brass lock and now everything is working smoothly. You’ll notice the ivory inlay, which is a bit rough, but nicely yellowed with age.

Silver lining cleaned up nicely.

My plan is to store the rest of this heicha in the pearwood caddy. The little box of heicha is about the size of a cigarette pack, and the tea is inside a plastic bag in the box. Unfortunately, the plastic bag opened up somewhat during shipping, and I weighed the bag at 22g, losing 3g of tea altogether in the shipping box. Shipping hazard. The baggie is really packed full, so any punch to the little box is enough to burst it open.

Just a few of the 7g I used.

The box itself has a strong odor of wet storage when I received it, like something in a wet basement. Of course I liked the vintage looking box and aired it out for a couple of weeks, and finally placed it in a sunny window which got rid of the smell. But the wet storage smell is still trapped in the plastic bag within, so my efforts to air this didn’t extend into the tea. Never mind, this is an odor I can work out of the tea on my own. I weighed out 7g to give the tea a try in a Jian Shui teapot.

Rinsing heicha is a tricky business because heicha gives up most of itself in the first few steeps, so a rinse risks wasting the liquor. But wet basement, oy, had to rinse it, even though I think the second rinse did start to show liquor that next time I won’t waste. Here is a photo of my first steeping then.

First steep

Gotta love the color. The first cup tastes all storage, and again heicha has no room to waste on early steeps, the tea will be done before that storage odor goes. Two cups in, and the leaves in the pot smell incredibly minty. I guess this is the “pine smoke incense,” like a mentholated cough drop. Of course the wet storage contributes a little bit to the mint, and alas the mint doesn’t really translate into the cup right now.

What I do get is one surprisingly lively cup of heicha, tasting around the storage. Still some bitterness in the leaf, very astringent, tingling on the tongue. My mouth really dried out after a few cups of this. Qi like a rolling, swirling ball in the middle of my back, very energizing. In fact, I feel better now typing this than I have all day long, after a somewhat dodgy night’s sleep. The tea has a bit of a sour note , which is likely again that wet basement. I feel fairly certain I can air this tea out a bit more and bring forth even more sweetness, now that I’ve ditched the smelly packaging in favor of a tea caddy.

Second steep

So, I have only 15g left of tea now, enough for about two similar sessions, though I might ration out a smaller session and hope for three. The pot still smells so very minty after five steeps, perhaps I should boil the leaf. Why not, when I’m somewhat tea drunk already I always want more.

Steaming pot after the 5 minute boil

The tea requires a full five minutes of boiling. I probably went a bit high on the water amount, using 400 ml for the 7g of leaf. But well worth it, the boiling gives me the best cup of the day in terms of sweetness and less heavy on the storage. As the tea cools, the storage flavor returns, but super hot the cup is sweet, slightly woody with a tinge of mint, cool on the throat and active on the tongue, the way this tea is meant to be.

Tea fogged up my camera.

You can see how much green still remains in the tea leaves. I wouldn’t mind having a few hundred grams of this tea crocked away on a shelf. But the price is certainly too high for large scale hoarding. I’m going to make do with the 15g I have left, let it finish airing and look forward to a treat of it next fall.

Still some green left to go...

Gotta say I agree with the tea listing, this is one rare tea indeed and if you can stomach the price, well worth it to try this tiny leaf heicha from back in the days when tea leaves held a bit more punch. Plan on removing the packaging and airing the tea a good few months! I've tasted it for you, so don't waste your grams trying it straight away, let it air out fully.

I think I can get another good boil off these leaves for a few more cups, I’m at nine total now so maybe 12 total after boiling again. Still very mouth-drying long after drinking. Oh this is good stuff.

This is likely the last heicha I will drink for the season, as we are now heading into warmer summer days. My tastes turn now to cooling teas to combat the summer heat and swelling of my legs and feet, and I look forward to trying some of the new puerh teas out this year.