Tea Scum

More lovely samples of Chen Yuan Hao await my discovery, and today I plan to drink a 2016 Yiwu tea. The sample is courtesy of a tea friend, who labeled the tea Yiwu, so I am guessing the sample is the 2016 Chen Yi Zi Hao aka Yiwu Chawang here from Teapals.

I own plenty of Yiwu teas and while the best ones have a grape top note and honey base, Yiwu teas are fairly diverse in the finer points, including leaf size and aging potential. In fact, Yiwu varietal teas extend south of the Yunnan China border into Laos where they cannot “properly” be called puerh tea even though the trees themselves do not know this political requirement. I should not necessarily generalize about a Yiwu tea before actually trying it, because the smaller distinctions make a huge difference in price.

Before I try this tea, however, please note this image of a pristine porcelain gaiwan.

Gaiwan by Inge Nielsen, Etsy

While of course this is a fairly new 65 ml gaiwan made by potter Inge Nielsen (@i.n.clay on Instagram), I tend to keep my all my tea ware on the clean side. Now I’m all for Patina, but we have Real patina and Fake patina. Patina is a dark stain left behind on tea ware from years and years of use. This patina is often shiny and a muted tea color which indicates aging, very pleasing on Yixing and other clay teapots. Patina is so desirable it is often faked to make teapots look older.  Thus, Patina is the new riche for tea heads. So much so in fact that some people must get that patina going at all costs by never wiping or cleaning off the tea ware. So you see tea gear that looks something like this.

Tea Scum

I am reluctant to share the source of this disgraceful tea ware, after all I am only poking a little bit of gentle (I hope) fun. However, the owner does have a registered government non-profit organization so I feel not at all guilty leaving off an attribution. And to be clear this org has not replied to any of my two year’s worth of emails pleading for help getting  acceptance of SNAP benefits at Yunnan Sourcing and other expensive puerh dealers because food stamps do, after all, cover tea and coffee. No one works harder than Old Cwyn on behalf of tea people for real issues despite the fact that I don’t have 501c tax-free status myself. Any complaints regarding all this can be directed to the contact form on the right hand side of this page.

Because the truth is this type of tea staining is not Patina, but Tea Scum. Tea Scum is the result of tea trapped beneath a combination of oils and minerals in water which eventually form a crust. Rather like this:

Rehabitat.com
"How to remove hard water stains"

Over time bacteria gets trapped in mineral crusts. I mean really, do you let your tea ware resemble your toilet bowl? Well maybe some do. I know puerh hoarding and trouble with cleaning go hand in hand. In the toilet bowl level one can perhaps understand this, assuming the stats are really true and 85% of puerh readers are male, so they don’t need to sit down constantly like women to do their business except after a particularly nasty shou goes south which no respectable tea collector ever drinks. Personally, I don’t keep my toilet looking like this but of course tea ware is more important than the toilet bowl. Right?

For educational purposes, going beyond the focus of my blog which is mostly confined to Tea Filth, let me show you what Real Patina is.

Two years of use produces a very light patina
Lin's Ceramics cream color cup

Any stain that does not scrape off with a fingernail is Real Patina. That which scrapes off with a fingernail is Tea Scum. Just so you know. You can pay me to try a questionable shou but not in the tea ware in the photo above. The Midwest where I live is known for the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness,” and this is not mere regional stereotyping. Cleanliness is godliness. Alas, Tea Scum lurks within the best company and not just vendors, and boiling temperatures do not kill off bacteria on Venus, something for man to dwell upon.

My advice, always travel with your own gaiwan and cup as a backup contingency. Inspect all tea ware carefully before using anyone else’s. Having a wet wipe in your wallet is certainly worth a thought if you don’t want to insult the host by insisting on using your own tea ware. You can pretend to inspect the “beauty” of the piece by holding it at a distance far below the level of the table while applying a discreet wipe, and remind the host of properly warming the wares with boiling water afterward, prior to brewing.

2016 Chen Yuan Hao "Yiwu"

 Using my pristine (for now) gaiwan, I can truly give the 2016 CYH Yiwu the attention and aesthetic it deserves. For this tea costs 1200 MYR for a full beeng which rings up at $270. Not the most expensive Yiwu out there, the Last Thoughts cake comes to mind, but well past any budget Yiwu. I have a most generous sample thanks to my friend, and so many sessions available to me.

Steep 3

The initial nose is an acrid smoke in a vegetal base which reflects in the flavor of the first two cups after a rinse, and thankfully washes away after three brews. The gold color of the brew is surprisingly dark for a tea less than a year old, but perhaps the bit of char lends some color in the early steeps. My photo appears consistent with the Teapals photo. I get more bitterness than usual for many boutique Yiwu teas. A very heavy body qi after about three small 60 ml cups causes me to pass out early in the day. 

This tea also possesses a strong throat feel that lingers long after drinking, like a ball in the throat you know the tea is there. The flavor range is representative but somewhat narrow, a single octave like G below middle C to G above. None of the thickness of more premium Yiwu teas but of course that may improve and the tea is not even out of the first year yet. This one brews long, past ten brews and thickens a bit in steeps eight to ten.

I notice how small the leaves are compared to other productions, rather like the 2002 Yong Pin Hao Red which is also a first flush spring tea. A well-cultivated garden behind these teas, and both have dry storage. The 2002 YPH is now up to $260 a cake, just $10 behind this CYH but of course you’re paying for the age in the former, and the label premium in the latter. Ah, my white wrapper 1999 Yiwu, were that tea still available, seems like bargain now at $330-ish before it sold out.

The tea has some durability in steeping, I went ten steeps and the brew still had strength, however I noticed some disintegration of the leaves. Doing a strength test by rubbing the leaves between my fingers, some turned to mush but others did not. 

Steep 9
Cloudy brew from disintegrating leaves

This affected the soup, the disintegration lent a sour vegetal flavor. This tea is still young, so one must subtract the months-old tea as a variable to some extent until the leaves tighten up more. The durability of the brew is encouraging for the long term and I’d like to try this again some months from now.

This tea is definitely a better experience than a plain drinker and really one’s collection is a determining factor. Do you want yet another Yiwu in your stash? If you don’t have a decent Yiwu tea this is a good consideration. Or if you’ve tried the YQH teas and don’t care for the Taiwanese heavier storage, this tea is a new one you can try your hand at storing dry. This is where I think the tea has the most merit for me, the opportunity to age and retain more of the top notes. Quite honestly, the leaves themselves interest me more than drinking the tea they make, just for observing changes over time. This could be one of those long-drinking Yiwu cakes as long as it doesn’t sour along the way. Care is everything and the storage challenge is intriguing.

Leaves after steep 10 when I stopped

Otherwise, the price is off-putting for anyone new to puerh tea and more appealing to those with some experience of labels. Most puerh folks need to convince themselves with personal trial and error what tier of tea various amounts of money will get. A writer telling you all this really means nothing otherwise. I can say the tea is properly situated in price tier between other teas, whether or not you feel the tiers as a whole should drop down a clean hundred bills, well that is not likely to happen. This tea will hit the $400 mark within five years, I’m sure. On the upside, this production is yearly so when last year sells out you can likely expect another offering in 2017 with give or take roughly the same price.

Cheers!

Tea Utensils

Some of my best-loved tea items never appear online

Every day I enjoy my tea ware and follow quite a few people on social media just to see their beautiful photos, from artists to fellow tea drinkers. Looking at tea porn is a very relaxing part of a puerh hobby, you can enjoy from afar what others have collected. I have more than my necessary share of tea ware, but when I think about what I truly use every day a few things shake out as essential. I’m surprised that my most useful gong fu items are utensils or accessories, because very rarely do I include them in photos. Well, my current loved but un-lauded tea pieces deserve some space.

Basic Puerh Pick from Yunnan Sourcing.

First, of course we all need a puerh pick or puerh knife. Believe it or not, I don’t own a fancy puerh knife. Yet every day I use a $2 puerh pick from Yunnan Sourcing and haven’t felt a need for anything else. This is a truly humble pu utensil, but it gets used more often than my most loved teapots.

Next, here is a pair of brass tea clamps, or gongfu tweezers.

Brass tea clamps, Verdant Tea
Winston's kitten paws on the table show why I need these.

This is an item I tossed in an order a year ago from Verdant Tea. Yeah, I know, but this thing is now absolutely essential to me, and even more valued because Dear Son does not like it. His main complaint is that it is on the kitchen counter all the time and never gets put away. He tends to move it around in annoyance which makes me extremely crabby when I can’t find it.

The purpose of these clamps is for picking up small tasting cups and rinsing them with hot water without needing fingers. But I use this set of clamps for so many things. I can pick up tea leaves and chunks from a cake and put them in a small teapot. I can pick out a stick or stray debris in my teacup without using my fingers. I can deftly pick up and turn over wet leaves in a teapot or gaiwan. I can stir a tightly compressed tea ball in boiling hot water. I can dunk and retrieve a tea bag that doesn’t have a string attached. All these functions are even more important now for my tea tweezers because I’m still feeding my kitten wet food by hand. I wash my hands really well after doing this, but I feel like my fingers must have cat food germs that I don’t want on, or in, my tea. I suppose I could wear cotton gloves for tea, but I have my tweezers instead.

Another necessary utensil for me is a tea strainer. Some people don’t use strainers. As a blogger, however, I want to use a strainer so people can see the clarity of a tea. Clarity is one factor that determines the quality of a sheng leaf and the fermentation of shou, and most readers likely want to see the brew well-strained of anything that might unnecessarily cloud the cup. I have also learned a lot from straining my tea. I check a fine mesh strainer for char or tea leaf fuzz and rinse the strainer after every pour. I notice how many steepings a tea needs to clear of char, and how much tea dust I created when breaking off the leaves. I can determine whether a tea is sour because of char. Most sheng has a tiny bit of char, but a lot of char means sour or smoky tea that is an issue for my drier storage.

Woven bamboo strainers, Verdant Tea

I own a number of strainers. Lately I use these woven Yunnan strainers from Verdant Tea. The handled one is for shou, and the no-handle strainer for sheng. You can probably tell which of the two gets the most usage. With bamboo strainers, you must dedicate each to one type of tea. I notice right away if I mistakenly use my shou strainer for sheng because the brew is very slightly colored by shou. In addition to these, I have a Ru kiln fine mesh strainer and two metal strainers. I want to try a gourd strainer someday. I feel that my woven strainers are helpful at tempering some of the metallic taste from tea or water, or maybe it’s my medications and I’m imagining things.

Wenge Wood teapot brush, EBay
And more kitten paws shoo-ed but still showing.

Then I have a wenge wood hair brush that I got for about $4 on EBay to brush teapots. The hair might be dog hair, it certainly smelled like it when I got it. One time my son borrowed it for using liquid wax on his bassoon equipment, and left it for me with dried, stuck on wax. I managed to get all the wax out by freezing the brush.

Here is a tea cup that I use often that never appears in my blog or in other tea photos. You can see right away why not.

Porcelain tenmoku glaze tea cup
by Shawn McGuire of Greenwood Studios, Etsy

Can you tell what kind of tea is in this cup? Most people want to see the tea liquid, so I use clear cups instead for that purpose. I’m in love with tenmoku glaze and I don’t need to spend a mortgage payment’s worth of money on a vintage Japanese cup when so many potters are making fine new ones under $30 on Etsy. But I can’t use these to show off tea liquid.

My last “must-have” is new this year, a tea pillow by Mirka Randová. This is the sort of purchase that I thought, “why did I need to have this?” and the thought turned into “why didn’t I buy one of these sooner?”

Stoneware tea pillow by Mirka Randová @potsandtea

This tea pillow is brilliant. The clay is rough to the touch, feels like sandpaper which actually grips the cup or teapot when I’m carrying it from the kitchen to my room or a table. My cup or teapot doesn’t slide around and won’t easily slip and fall when a cat gets under my feet. If I do happen to lose my footing a little, tea can slosh into the basin of the pillow without making a mess on the floor. I can pour water over teapots to brush them, and overfill the teapot if I want. The tea pillow is also a little hefty weight-wise, rather like an old vintage heavy ashtray. So the pillow can sit on my bed or other furniture and if a cat bounds up and over to my lap, the pillow won’t easily tip. In fact, the pillow doesn’t move at all. I needed this tea pillow years ago when I had a small child running around. I don’t even have to wash it.

Hopefully you enjoyed seeing a few of the utensils I use regularly. I’m sure we all go through phases when we use some items a great deal in our tea ceremony. Then we move on to new items as the old ones might need replacing or as our needs change. 

Royal Doulton or Yixing?

When you get to my age, the world changes so fast I can't possibly keep up. I've got enough to worry about these days but lo and behold, the Rules of Tea have changed. The BBC has posted a shocking article called "Western Manners: The latest Chinese status symbol," which reports upscale Chinese workers are taking classes on western style Tea sessions. This article is posted on a page advertising other worrying articles like "Why do we have Pubic Hair?" Such placement mitigates the shock somewhat and suggests a certain skepticism, except we have photos that show what's really going on.

Not your gong fu anymore. Photo BBC

To save you the trouble of reading the whole article, the gist of it is that people in China now view certain western style habits as a status symbol. This includes tea, and learning how to brew and consume tea western style with the whole kit of English teapots, cups and saucers. In this way, people appear more cultured, apparently, and hope for more success in business. And they are willing to pay big time for this experience.

"Before, it was about owning a big car," said Hebbert [a white guy charging over $3000 for a couple of hours of teaching western tea sessions], "Now the rich are looking for something else to make the difference."

Photo BBC taken by a guy named Seatton...Seat on?

Not enough any more to just own the Louis Vuitton, it's about the spot on the floor where you choose to stash it during tea. So, before it was the Yixing teapot, and now it's Royal Doulton. Taking a look around, how many Chinese clay teapots do I have? Uh. I'm out of fingers and lose count. How many Royal Doultons with purple periwinkles? Zero. How many no-name cups and saucers? Zero. I comfort myself somewhat with the notion of "well, I'm an American and therefore can't possibly be expected to use cups and saucers," thus shoving the responsibility for Keeping Up Appearances onto my English neighbors across the lake. After all they started it.

But this doesn't address one huge potential problem of how much money the best vintage Yixing costs, and how much many of us may have paid, only to find out we'd have been better off hanging onto grandma's wedding set. And the picnic basket set with cloth napkins too, the kind that have to be starched and ironed. Does anyone even own an ironing board anymore? I do still have Irish linen tea napkins but the bother of ironing them has long gone by the wayside for me. I've found it's much easier to simply wipe my face on my sleeve. I figured I'd get along all right in China when I visit someday, what with my gong fu technique, expert schlurping, eagerness to belch aloud, and "you can't fool me that is not Qing dynasty" shopping finesse. NOW it turns out I can't even lean back in the chair anymore and pick my nose. No sir I have to sit straight up like a lady so my stocking tops don't show, losing any advantage at all I might have over the younger girls.

Next week I won't be able to find a tea set at the local charity shops. I might have to consider dumping my Yixing on EBay before the prices tank. And for sure I will have to cancel the trip to Hong Kong that wilson was hoping (or fearing) that I might join him for. Sorry wilson, I can send you some photos instead, yes ones of me but 30 years younger than I planned. Or maybe I could go after all and we could set up some kind of deal where I can get me $3000 per session teaching American style tea. Like how to put a tea bag in a 2 cup motel drip coffee maker and pour into styrofoam cups without spilling.

Honestly I don't know why I bother. The Year of the Goat might be the year when I will go back to teabags in the stained coffee mug. I just can't absorb any more new trends. My expiration date is coming up anyway, because Blogger just sent me this notice: "On March 23rd, Blogger will no longer allow certain sexually explicit content. Learn more here."

Requiescat in Pace.