2014 Hekai Ripe and 2013 Xigui Raw

This 2014 Hekai Ripe is one of those “what the h***?” teas I found in my stash recently, and then tracked down where I bought it from. I bought this cake from puerhshop.com during a period of insanity last year when I needed more ripe teas to store for my sister. I like Hekai tea in raw form, and hoped this cake might be as nice.

Puerhshop is one of those somewhat guilty shopping sites for me. Located in Troy, Michigan, the online tea store focuses on low markup, no-frills and mostly budget puerh teas. Given the location, you can expect the collection is kept in dry storage, however you can find plenty of humid teas on the site, as well as newer Menghai teas. Here you are getting the traditional “factory” experience teas. In a sense, the inventory is a bit like a Taobao or Aliexpress shopping experience without the shipping hassles. The downside for me is I can easily spend a lot of money very fast and indeed I have spent quite a bit both times I have placed an order. But I got a lot of teas for that money, all in the drinker category.

Puerhshop uses some sort of testing kit to test for pesticides on their teas. There is no way a single test kit can identify all the possible pesticides in teas because pesticides can drift over from other crops. So the kit probably identifies some of the major pesticides, but I do not view this as a guarantee you are getting “organic” tea. With factory teas, usually you are not getting organic, and with puerh, organic is not necessarily better tea. But collectors and drinkers who buy factory teas usually have a good idea of what they are buying and prefer the taste of recipe teas.

This ripe tea made by Yunnan Shunda Tea Co. and is supposedly is single-origin and premium smaller leaves, such as you might find in a Phoenix shou blend. The cake I got looks better in person than the photos on the website. I thought the tea might be a bargain because of the gram weight, a 400g cake. The extra grams are in the thickness rather than width, so the cake is the same width as a 357g. The $32.99 price is therefore $0.08 per gram.

I went heavy and brewed 15g in about 150ml of water using a Jian Shui teapot. I definitely recommend using a dark clay teapot dedicated to shou or heicha for this tea, such as Yixing or Jian Shui that holds heat and tempers heavy puerhs. The tea is heavily fermented. I noted a heavy fermentation smell to the leaves, and a dirt/soil smell. I rinsed the tea three tea times which got rid of most of the soil and fermentation odors. A cold rinse prior to the hot rinses might help speed the clearing without losing brew, and I will try that next time.

Four steep after three rinses

The tea brews up dark, and very thick with the parameters I used. The liquor is brown with a bit of a red ring, and the clarity is hard to see until later steeps. I should have gone lighter on the leafing to get a less heavy brew, but I like my tea heavy. In general I either brew shou very thick like this, or I use a pinch of leaves and grandpa my shou in an Yixing mug which will also produce a dark brew because the leaves stay in the mug.

The drop behind the fish dried thick like blood.

This tea really reminds me of white2tea’s White Tuo from a couple of years ago, long sold out now. The White Tuo had the same dirt/soil and required months of airing out before brewing, but that tea was also much older than this 2014 vintage, so the fermentation flavor had departed from the tuo. This one has something of an old sock odor, probably not the best fermentation. 

Probably best to read the Chinese and skip the English if you can.

At the same time, the tea is very powerful and I had a bile reaction (white stools) probably from overleafing. The reaction was two days in a row while drinking the tea and departed when I stopped. The tea had a lot left to go. A risky and medicinal strength shou.

Heavy fermentation.

2013 Xigui from Teavivre

Teavivre wanted to send me some puerh samples. I don’t get many vendors asking to send me samples. The few vendors who try offer teas I do not drink, and the vendors clearly have not read or looked at my blog. But this vendor offered puerh so I said okay. The initial offer included a stuffed mandarin which I cannot have so I asked if they could substitute their Hekai or possibly the Xigui instead from their catalog. I got both.

2013 Xigui sample from Teavivre

I used to buy non-puerh tea from Teavivre, but then stopped buying tea from them for two reasons. One was that for awhile their website had a hack and several Steepster people lost money on credit cards. The last time I attempted to purchase nearly two years ago my browser refused to complete the transfer to Paypal, claiming a malicious third party intercept. I also found a pubic hair in one of the puerh samples. I find hair all the time in puerh, but I draw the line at pubic hair. Not that the company has any control over such things, yet the experience left an impression. I know people order all the time from Teavivre so maybe the Paypal issue got fixed. In any case, if you order from them make sure to order via Paypal.

A nice sample chunk

Many people are interested in Xigui tea because the prices for this area have skyrocketed over the past couple of years. Puerh heads have speculated that white2tea continues to offer some form of premium Xigui ever since the 2014 Autumn Apple Scruffs which I still regret not buying. Teavivre sells a 357g cake for $90. The tea has been in their catalog for a few years, and some buyers have posted short reviews. I brewed up the entire sample of 8g. I cannot recommend their suggested 3-5 minute brew time, a gong fu brew suffices.

The 2013 Xigui has some suffering from sample packing, in that the brew seems a bit dry and muted. I don’t have any idea how long ago the tea sample was packed. I am not a fan of pre-packaged samples as very often the teas can be packed years ago, not the same as a sample freshly chipped from a cake. The tea seems much younger than four years old with no evidence of real aging.

Window shot on a rare sunny day in winter

I liked the floral aroma in the cup after the first three brews or so. The tea took awhile to open up and present with some thickness, which is better than getting all the thickness in early steeps. The leaves are small and broke down a little with boiling water in a porcelain teapot after nine steeps, which is a shame because the tea clearly had more to go. I would like to try the tea right from the cake. 

Not much aging here.

The price is fairly good and the tea has a Lincang profile, which is about all I can say about whether or not it is Xigui. The tea gave me some burps and a bit of a tea drunk. I wouldn’t mind trying a full cake, but the tea falls in that nether middle region of drinker tea. The price might be too high for some, but not considering the size of the cake, yet the price is higher than the Xigui tea ball I bought last year. Again, this is another tea to try at your own risk. I cannot say whether you will like it or whether it is a good buy.

Lately I am a creature of extremes with puerh. Sometimes I drink really cheap drinkers or I drink really great tea. That middle area of “okay” tea is the tricky nether zone for me. Some folks stay firmly in the cheap tea zone, or maybe in the mid-tier area of drinker tea and are content. I want to pony up the cash for tea I cannot live without, and anything less than that I will go cheap. The middle zone still leaves me scratching my head. Tea is subjective indeed and puerh is every man and woman for themselves. Unless you have $1k to spend.

2014 Xigui Ball

2014 "Xigui" tea ball 250 g

I’ve been busy getting ready for the upcoming trip to NYC for the Saveur Blog awards. I want to thank everyone who participated in the crowd funding at GoFundMe, the trip fund is now at $1210/1400. There are no words to express my gratitude at this opportunity to go and get away from my son for a few days, and attend an event like this. Right now I’m cooking away trying to get some meals in the freezer for when I’m gone so there are no more complaints. Next week I’ll post some updates to my blog while I’m at the events, so stay tuned! The fund is still open until it reaches $1400, if anyone else wishes to participate. Until I leave I’m also still mailing t-shirts and tea samples from the crocks to those who wish to get a shirt, see link above right.

My real plan for the trip is to bring along some puerh tea and see how many people are willing to give it a try. I’m going big with a super nice tea too. Why not drink the good stuff, right? So I’m bringing my 1990s Yiwu from white2tea for brew heaven instead of cocktails. We will see how many brave foodies there are in NYC.

In the meantime, I’m moving my puerh collection off the porch with the flooding rains we are having. Humidity is great but then seven inches of rain is a bit too much, remnants of Hurricane Paine. Now, I live on the opposite side of the continent from hurricanes but this one is actually drifting up to my area in the form of torrential rain. This is an unfortunate event for the farmers here trying to get corn and soybeans dried down to harvest. Even when the rain stops, which is not likely for another week at least, the ground is too muddy for combining crops. The machinery will get stuck in the fields. Prices for grain are so low now too, just adding to more to Hurricane Paine.

While moving my puerh, I came across a tea ball I purchased last spring on EBay and decided to crack it open. This is a 2014 “Xigui” tea that I’ve had on my Watch list for well over a year. The tea arrived last May during a hot spell smelling like wet daisies and green tomato vines. So I let it enjoy the summer heat until now to air out. I bought this tea because I have several friends who like Xigui tea, assuming it is real Xigui, and I have a friend obsessed with tea balls.

2014 "Xigui" 250g tea ball

This tea is made by Gu-Zi-Qin, which I understand to be a wholesale brand. I’ve seen this brand on Alibaba and a few other places. For awhile I was watching a 2012 Xigui, but that was fairly pricy at $149/357g so I didn’t buy that before it sold out. This tea ball is 250g for $34 including free shipping. I’m assuming the tea ball is the same tea as the 357g 2014 Xigui beengcha the same shop sells.

Surprisingly, the tea ball is less expensive at 14 cents/gram than the beencha, which sells for $68, or 19 cents a gram. You’d get a better value buying two of the tea balls and get 500g for $70. My expectations are always low for EBay and for wholesale puerh brands. Having a list of cheaper teas though can help one avoid buying more expensive teas when trying to stick to a budget. Since I’ve been watching the Xigui productions from this wholesale label for nearly two years, I can say they do sell out eventually just like tea anywhere else. The EBay seller of the tea ball also has a 2016 label in stock.

The "hole" is more of a nipple.

My opinion thus far is that this tea is likely autumn tea. The tea ball is hand compressed, which means hand formed by twisting a cloth full of steamed leaves and pressing the tea together. So the tea leaves separate easily from the tea ball into large, long leaves with minimal breakage. No worries for tea pick injuries! Also, this is good news for storage as more heavily compressed tuos are harder to age in my climate. And if this is indeed Xigui tea, the tea should be consumed within 5-10 years at the latest since it is likely to fade.

Top side of the ball.

Initial steeping shows the tea has tightened up, though still green of course. The soup is a clear and dark yellow gold, with some respectable thickness. Processing is remarkably clean with minimal char, unexpected for a wholesale brand. 

Nice long leaves, minimal breakage.

This tea has floral and honey notes with a light bitter finish. A very pleasant cup, and I’m of the opinion this is definitely northern tea. It doesn’t have the punch of a spring tea picking of course, but enjoyable to drink now or let sit for a few years. This tea wasn’t done after eight steepings before I moved on to something more pungent. I’m certain it’s good for at least 10-12 brews.

Second steeping

The wrapper is a cloth-like paper tied with a ribbon so the tea ball is easily retied into its wrapper for storage. This tea is a nice stocking stuffer for your puerh loving friends in real life, which of course are many. I’m kidding. But I know some of you participate in Secret Santas with your online tea buddies, and I’m sure that any puerh lover or puerh newbie will enjoy this as a treat regardless of their taste in puerh. I forgot to take a photo of the wet leaves, but picture green and wet.

Next week I’ll write from New York, stay tuned!

Grease Your Local Politician 2006 Xigui

I shook the hand of my first politician at the age of four, a Wisconsin Congressional Representative standing in our driveway. My father's pride was on the line when he introduced his oldest child and I was scared to death. Then I realized I could pretend to be someone else, so I put out my hand and said "how do you do?" At the height of his law career in the late 1980s, my father managed to lubricate his way all the way up to the US Senate. The story behind Crimson Lotus' new 2006 Xigui cake is that the source material is from a bribe of sorts to a local Yunnan politician, who has apparently accumulated a massive stash of puerh payments over the years. I know a lot about bribes and as I consider the tale of the 2006 Xigui, I can't help but sift through everything I learned from my dad on political grease.

Recently sourced by Crimson Lotus Tea.

My father campaigned for Jack Kennedy in 1963 in Madison, WI, an effort that earned him a payoff of an appointment as a district attorney to a small rural county in northern Wisconsin. Just fresh out of law school, my father became the youngest appointed DA ever in the history of the state. Back then the governor appointed district attorneys. Today these positions are elected by voters. 

"Your dad would never have won an election here," a former sheriff told me who later worked for my father as a private investigator, driver and drinking partner. "He just has the wrong last name." We had a Polish surname in a county of mostly Scandinavians. Maybe cash is how my father solved a dilemma of too many consonants.

I know cash talks with politicians because they just kept coming over. A family dinner at our house was a rarity, for we always had company. Dinner began at 5 p.m. with hors d'oeuvres (horse's doovers), usually some sort of fish filets, fried or pickled along with vegetables, cold sliced salami-style sausage, cheeses and crackers. And copious drinks. Dinner at 7 often consisted of steaks, potatoes and salad. And more drinks. If my father didn't have professional politicians or priests at the house, then it was the neighbors. Even the neighborhood dogs stopped by hoping for a piece of freezer burned meat, and rarely left disappointed. Often the party went all night and we stepped over passed-out bodies lying in puke the next morning. I learned to sleep to the sound of our tinny upright piano (my room was in the basement, just off the bar) and bellowing singing. Those who survived the night left with a check or cash in hand. My dad liked drinking buddies and drinking was his price, though to be fair he had offered fine food in return. But you can see why I retired to the convent early, entirely skipping the boozy college years. When you grow up in a party, you're done with all that before you reach the actual legal drinking age. And I wasn't alone. I surveyed our community of nuns, and 47% of our 600+ community members identified themselves as survivors of a similar childhood. 

Dad held court every night like he fancied himself Henry VIII, but it wasn't always his bribe going out the door. Far more often people offered him gifts instead. But these gifts were not strictly bribes, they are what you could call "in lieu of's." Rural areas are surely the birthplace of the "in lieu of," the payment offered instead of cash, and my lawyer father accepted all kinds of payment. My father did divorce work for women who had nothing to offer in cash, but he accepted their defunct wedding rings instead. Farmers paid for legal services in loads of manure, cords of wood, plots of land, half a hog, guns, fishing poles, and even leather gloves. Later as a parish nun I found myself forced to accept "in lieu of's" though I never charged anything personally for my services. 

"Tell us what you like, Sister." 

"I'm already getting a salary," I said to people over and over. Wrong answer. People still wanted to pay me for a home visit or just for doing my job. When I said I liked bran muffins, fresh fish filets (I did miss one thing from home) and maple syrup, these items arrived at my office regularly every week. Accepting these small food gifts was easy enough only because of my father. Sometimes people want to give. What are you gonna do? The price of refusal is just rude. Maybe "bribe" isn't a good word for the bran muffins or for the 2006 Xigui. Perhaps the tea is really an "in lieu of," which means the local people appreciate a nice guy, and he likes nice things. After all, he could be worse and sometimes you're better off propping up an average joe just to keep a current situation afloat instead of risking an alternative. 

5 Grams

What strikes me, though, about the Xigui "bribe," is why tea? My dad offered a service, and so accepting something other than cash was a favor to people who didn't have the money. But politicians usually want cash. Why not ask the farmers to sell the tea and bring back the cash? Or buy tangible and portable wealth like gold jewelry or Fendi bags? We can see from our perspective "over here" that tea is a kind of money, but tea is a local crop and it grows every year. Neither my father nor local officials here want bushels of corn, dried milk or cranberries though all of these, dollar for yuan, are certainly worth as much as tea. These crops grow every year, we can always get more.

What people really want is money, they don't want something they have to figure out how to sell on their own. "In lieu of" gifts are worth it only if you really need the item, or if you're doing the other guy a favor. But bribes are always cash. Always. So I can't entirely understand why this politician accepted tea. At best I believe this tea to be an "in lieu of," a wise local official willing to do favors and overlook an actual cash debt. I just don't buy the bribe story, myself. Unless he already has Chanel hidden in the garage.

Glen from Crimson Lotus generously sent me a sample of this tea when I asked, so to be clear he wasn't looking for me to write all this today. I brew up 5 grams of the tea, Just in case the tea is really fabulous, I save the remaining 5 grams for another session. 

Steep 2 showing storage, later steepings turned lighter yellow.

After two washes, my first taste of the tea yields a flavor which I always call the "tea mall" scent. For the leaves indicate dry storage gone bad, brown leathery dried out leaf with a slight taste and odor of incense. Maybe not literally incense, but I cannot describe the flavor of sour dry storage any other way. This is a flavor I most often find in teas from EBay or from tea mall sellers. What I'm guessing is that the tea was put up wet and then dried out, really really dried out. The leaves get this accordion pleating, like a dried out bellows. When tea like this stays dried out long enough, all the water in the world never really straightens out the leaf, returning it to a condition similar to that when young and fresh. And the char from the wok on the leaves imparted more than a little of the flavor, but gone from smoky to something like incense, the smoke didn't really integrate because the tea got too dried out. 

Most recently I've seen this type of dried-out leaf in samples from Sample Teas, larger online tea vendors (the kind that have hundreds of teas), Taobao and EBay. It's as if the tea sat in a tea shop for ages and didn't sell. Or maybe under the floor boards of a local politician? Lots of people like this storage flavor that I call "mall tea." I'm just not one of them.

Having said that, I got really stoned on this tea. I don't mean over-caffeinated, or a tea drunk, or even qi. I mean stoned. Like when cannabinoids deteriorate you get that fuzzy head instead of a clear head and then you get the munchies. One of my friends on Steepster tried this tea and reported she also got tea stoned. This effect is similar to what I get off white2tea's 2005 Naka, but the leaf quality in the Naka is much better and the price is higher accordingly. As today's session went on, that awful storage flavor eventually went away. By cup number eight or so, most of the leaf had lost the accordion pleating which I don't usually see. This tea has been rescued from the poor storage literally by a hair. Or maybe even months or days just before complete ruin. 

Later cups past 8 I get a pleasant grapefruit sour flavor, which is rather nice for me since I'm unable to eat grapefruits anymore due to a medication interaction. The soup turns a lighter lemon yellow and the leaf appears more normal by steep 10 when I took this photo. The tea doesn't have much body, but again this tea has been rescued from a bad situation and clearly the processing is local with the uneven wok burn. 

Leaf after 10 steeps.

My friends over at Tee Talk in Germany have been discussing this tea recently. Few of them have prior experience with Crimson Lotus and thus have not partaken of the rather decent shou puerh that this company sells as a mainstay. I also favor the Jian Shui teapots that Crimson Lotus sources directly. Shipping costs are always a factor. The description for the 2006 Xigui recommends drinking the tea immediately, and I have to echo that suggestion. Storage is not going to fix the unfortunate drying that happened to this leaf earlier on. The leaf quality seems to rescue itself in later steeps, but just barely. If you really want stoner tea, then pony up for the 2005 Naka from white2tea, but if the price is just too much for your wallet, then the 2006 Xigui from Crimson Lotus Tea is worth considering. 

Requiescat in Pace.