2015 Chawangpu Mengsong Old Tree and 2015 Menghai Cheng Shuang

Oh yeah, more tea.

This posting will conclude my round up of reviews of Chawangshop's 2015 collection that I chose to try. The last two new 2015 Chawangpu cakes I ordered recently represent the more budget end of the price spectrum compared to the finer 2015 Hekai Gushu and aged 2015 (2005) Bulang Old Tree. With the better Chawangpu cakes at already crazy low prices in the $30-odd range, the budget side ends up at half that again, just in case you're buying tea from your penny jar instead of your credit card.

200g cake

I've had Mengsong tea before, and in fact one of the teas used for my fermentation experiment last winter was a Mengsong gushu, and I found the straight up spring bud rather on the light side, taste-wise. So here in this 2015 Mengsong Old Tree I welcome a blend of larger and older leaves from the tea tree to round out the cake with a bit more flavor, and am not disappointed. I brewed this up on the strong side at 10 grams per 100 ml and the tea kept going after 10 steeps. I think I went 12 before I gave out on it, and the tea still had more to give. Brewing this heavy on the leaf side gave the tea more body as well, the tea isn't exactly thin but I like the thicker body when I can get it. Some teas will never get thicker when you add more leaf, and some, like this one, will offer a bit more reward by going heavy. I could still taste the long kuwei nearly two hours after a cup. Again, we're talking about a budget offering.

Leaf variety visible here.

The tea cup is light yellow and pleasantly bitter, and more so than I expected. This is a healthy blend for aging, and while the fruity Hekai gushu is more enjoyable fresh, the Mengsong is a choice for storing away. I find myself wanting a bit of humidity in this. The processing is impressive again with very little char and no smokiness in the tea. In fact, both of the budget teas I'm trying here have much better processing than similar priced teas that many of my tea buddies are buying on EBay.

Second steep.

Seriously people, I know... "good" stuff on EBay, or at least so you might believe, but take a step up. I can understand budget issues that mean you can't get into the real expensive puerh but the good news here is you don't have to.

A few buds, combos and big leaf picked out on the left.

This isn't tea that will knock your socks off and leave you wondering where you put your shoes, but it is quality leaf and deft hands at the wok, and the steam can wasn't left to sit on the heat too long. What you get on EBay, in general, is poor processing more than anything else. Or bad storage that you have to hope you can fix. Why gamble when you can spend your budget right the first time and control the aging yourself?

Not convinced? Okay. So you don't want the $22 cake I just mentioned?? Which comes in at just over $100 a tong? How about this $18 cake which only totals $90 for a tong. One full kg of tea for under a hundred bucks, and that's what this 2015 Menghai Cheng Shuang gives you. 

Menghai the Old Standby

You can fit 5 of these cakes into a $5 stoneware bean pot from the thrift store and have an entire tong of tea plus a fully portable aging set-up for under $100. At $18 per cake, this Menghai area tea is exactly half the cost of the Hekai gushu and again another one for aging.

Blend of two villages.

The tea is described as a combined two village harvest prior to the first week of April 2015. The cake is certainly pretty enough. But when the hot water hits the gaiwan, I can smell some dry storage and wonder if a handful of autumn leaves are in here. Some of them seem to be puckered and dried out just a little. 

Maybe at two months post harvest, it's conceivable the villages might have picked some older leaves in March and kept them on hand for buyers and that explains the dry storage I need 3 rinses to pour off. After that, the leaves are opened back up to their fresh appearance. I notice some older reddish leaf, and I like the leaf combination here, big leaves, buds, 1 bud and two leaf combinations, all different colors of leaf. The tea has more fruity and floral aroma than the other teas I've tried so far, and the usual Menghai bitterness. 9 grams is plenty per 100 ml.

Third steep.

I sort of am getting that regular ordinary Menghai taste, and if I bought this from Dayi I can certainly get the same experience, but instead of getting these pretty leaves I'd have a pile of chop to celebrate my 2015 spring. And that brings me back to my point earlier. I started drinking puerh in 2009, and I own exactly one Xiaguan that I bought for myself, and one Dayi. I also own a massive pile of samples of these factories, samples sent to me from tea buddies either to test their storage or just as part of a simple exchange. None of my Chawangpu teas were provided free for my review, I receive no samples from Chawangshop aside from the usual one in the box. I don't know Honza and I've never exchanged any correspondence with him.

I enjoy picking out a full variety of leaf.

The only real criticism I have of Chawangpu's house teas is the wrapper. I love the design, of course, but again this year the entire collection has the same wrapper, varying only with the couple of Chinese characters. I'm not suggesting at all to design separate wrappers for each tea, but if an online merchant is selling worldwide, it helps if the wrapper is friendly to people all over the world. In my tea storage I've been struggling with small pieces of paper to try and distinguish one Chawangpu cake from another and I'm sitting here again this year feeling like I can't throw away the plastic baggie or I have to cut out the sticker. Do I tape it to the cake? I could buy my own separate rubber stamps, I suppose, to try and differentiate the cakes, but then I worry about choosing ink, and ink bleeding into my teas. I could try and keep track of pieces of paper yet again. But other vendors create different wrappers for each cake which is the easiest way for me to differentiate my teas. Often vendors also label teas with the year in Arabic numerals someplace on the wrapper front or on the back flap. Why not just make it easy for the customer to enjoy the product year after year, and use a different color of stamp for each tea when the wrapper must be the same for each cake.

Otherwise, all I can say right now is that I can't see any reason to invest any of my money into regular factory label teas. I've put thousands of my dollars into house teas from excellent curators, taking full advantage of the palates of the people at Chawangshop, Yunnan Sourcing, white2tea, Crimson Lotus Tea and yes even Misty Peaks, and there are several others I could certainly choose to try in Europe if my dollar held up better against the currencies than it does. But my conclusion is that the house teas from the companies I've mentioned above are superior, by far, to anything I can buy from any regular factory. And if I really must buy aged factory teas, those chosen by the above companies are superior to those I can choose for myself.

While I might be a tea blogger with a little experience in puerh, I have no trouble proudly acknowledging that the palates of good tea vendors are so much better than mine. I can't see the need to waste my money, and what's left of my time, trying to figure out which teas to buy on my own. Chawangshop's 2015 collection demonstrates yet again that budget is no excuse to order factory teas anymore. I'm not trying to criticize my friends who choose to do so, and I enjoy the fun of blind tea shopping as much as anyone. But look at the photos, see the leaf quality and processing. Make up your own mind. I'm fairly certain that once you try even the most low budget of cakes from one of the curators above, they will surpass anything you can find on your own.

Tong People

I'm moving my puerh collection out to the three season porch for the summer humidity season, and testing many of my teas to see how they are coming along. It's tiring moving tea around to preserve a beeng of one tea and half a brick of another merely to keep them tasting their best. Dear Son says my tea habit is out of control, but of course he is just wrong. Today I looked at him and realize I have no idea where he came from. He can't possibly be related to me in any way. And now, I'm fairly certain those humans in all my family photos are not really my parents. That's right. I think I'm one of the Tong People.

Tea vendors keep talking about the Tong People so I know they exist. They are a tribe who buys tea in Tongs only. Tong People are supposedly from someplace in Eastern Europe or maybe Russia. As a matter of fact, I do look rather Eastern European with my olive type skin, and my silver hair used to be dark brown. And I already have a Polish name which no one can possibly be expected to spell. My mother muttered something about Jewish and Hungary once, so I know the people who raised me were covering up something Unacceptable with a story that no one can possibly check out. Other clues: my sister maintains a house in Milwaukee that she doesn't live in, and my brother left on a fishing boat to Bermuda two years ago and never came back. So they clearly must've felt it too. On the Trucker's Radio Network people are calling in to report alien sightings, which leads me to conclude it won't be long now before the Tong People come to get me. On that day, a Brave New World of possibilities will open up.

For one thing, I can finally be relieved of keeping up appearances amongst the local population by pretending that I drink coffee. I will be rid of all those sensible discretions like buying single tea cakes and ridiculous samples. Tong People never buy anything less than a Whole tong, preferably three or more and nobody calls it hoarding. Obviously, storage is simply not an issue. The Land of the Tong People must be a blessedly warm and humid place where people don't have to bother with tea fridges and pumidors, or make do with vintage stoneware crocks and underwear dresser drawers. They just pile tongs up in the living room right out in the open. So a Tong lifestyle gives new meaning to household furniture. I won't need to feel embarrassed anymore when sleeping with my tea, nor hide it from my psychiatrist. I can just place a wood slab right over tong legs and call it a table. Gone too are days living in fear that the Humane Society will take away my cat when he chews on the bamboo and licks the fishy mini shou tuos we all know are really just pet treats for Tong cats.

One reason Tong People buy so much tea is because they drink it all day long as a family. I can finally send out real paper invitations openly to the neighbors to come over for a bowl without worrying about the cops. Or about the landlord calling the fire department. Tongs have deeper reasons that only the Tong People understand. As proof, Honza recently commented on TeaDB that tea heads really need to drink into a tong to understand a tea. Thus the Tong People have a deeper understanding of tea cakes than anyone else. While I can believe that a good tea is still excellent three cakes in, I don't think a crap tea gets any better the more of it I drink. But in the world of Tong People, money for tea is simply never a budgetary issue. In fact, I will get a tax write-off for my Bad Tea when I donate it to the Salvation Army for shut-ins. And then once a year they will invite me to a really big Chair-a-Tea fundraising event, where I can wear my best dress and show off to everyone how much money I spent on tea, and just how much I gave away this year. People will clap instead of calling my ex-husband.

So whether the tea is bad or good, online tea ordering is a community event with social caché. Nobody ever needs to leave work early in shame, hoping to catch the postman before the spouse sees yet another oversized box from China. Yes sir, that box can arrive openly in all its glory and the neighborhood will rejoice, for at some point everyone will be partaking in that tea order.

mrmopar's dream house.

Naturally this means one will go through tea at a lightning speed, necessitating some work-arounds like phoning instead of email ordering, and calling Tea Vendors in the middle of the night to check for new stock before it gets posted.  Fortunately, most of them appear at the local farmer's market where I can take my pick of sheng vegetables.

Allan's weekend errands.

Old people have a special place amongst Tong People. I will be sure to receive immediate appreciation for the tea stains on my fingers tips I can't seem to wash off. Not to mention all the in-home services available to elderly sheng addicts. Good looking young men in bamboo briefs will visit me at home every day to pour my tea and make sure my gaiwan is polished. And on the day when my end arrives, I will rest at peace receiving all the gods-given rites due a Pu Head, and look forward to frightening small children and would-be grave robbers who try and raid my stash.

Now that the days are here when the Tong People are coming to get me, I am making sure my tea ware is packed and all preparations in order. This didn't take too long since I stopped paying utilities awhile back. But I took the time to visit with my psychiatrist. I told her why I no longer need to take these medications. Sadly, she is jealous of my good fortune or she is just too greedy because she took all my puerh knives. Don't be too surprised, I saw her game all along. Right up to the end all that bitch wanted is to steal my Last Thoughts.



Requiescat in Pace.

2015 (2005) Chawangpu Bulang Shan Old Tree Xiao Bing

oops, unwrapped it before the photo

This Pu head Badger stuck her head out to look when she saw this new Bulang Chawangpu cake, pressed just a month ago now from "forgotten" warehoused 2005 maocha in Menghai. 200g of such stuff for the crazy low price of $32, sounds too good to be true, and lucky me the tea arrives in the mail within a week so I can check it out.

Brown leaves, very sexy.

The photos show a promising mix of buds and huang pian, I like a blend of leaf especially in Bulang-area tea which tends to pack a punch. Also, the brown color of the cake along with the rather olive-toned steeped leaf in the photos suggests more humid storage. All this seems to pan out when I sniff the cake. If this tea was forgotten in a warehouse, it certainly smells like it. I smell damp cement, damp wood and earthy soil. Not overpoweringly so, I've had far more stuffy smelling cakes than this before and I know from my crocked teas  that I can turn humid storage into a lovely mineral taste.

Looks like noodles

Even better, this is one of the first opportunities I have had to get a cake straight out of its initial humid storage. This gives me a baseline sample tea which got its start in a more humid setting in China, and then will finish in the west without any other unknown storage variables in between. This won't be the case a few months down the road, because I would then have Honza's storage to consider. His storage might be a good thing, but surely the tea would lose the odor and some of the characteristics it has right now.

Second Steep

This tea should be over the hump into teen years for sure, and I see promising signs of this stage in the brown and slightly cloudy brew on the first steep, with a ring of red around the cup. Top note of slightly musty hay, straight up bitter coating on the tongue. Cooling effect. The storage doesn't really seem terribly musty at all, I was expecting more. Bit of char in the strainer but the smoke is gone from the storage. Third and fourth steeps some peppercorn, hay is almost gone except in the nose, the bitterness overtaking the hay.

A real mix of leaf size and age.

Leaf seems rather variable in storage effects, as if it was piled or boxed and just left without any turning. Some leaves are blackened and dark brown, others olive toned, and still others a very light green. Of course, it's $32. Aside from the thicker buds I see in the cup, the leaf is on the thin side, this seems to be more of a farm craft cake of a day's unsorted picking: buds, large leaves, small leaves, huang pian. This is likely the justification for the lower price, the thin and rough leaf in places. Remember, it's $32. The tea isn't very thick, I started out with 9 g/100 ml and found myself lowering the water amount, this tea would be more like 12-14g/100 ml for my ideal ratio. That's cuz it's...$32.

Fourth steep.

Tea is lightening up and fading at steep 8, I wouldn't take it past 10. But I already own mega-steepers which are 10x this price. Sometimes I want something I can actually finish in a session instead of four days later. Tea that qualifies as a nice daily drinker for me will be, you guessed it, $32.

Seventh steep with 30 seconds steep time.

As for storing, because of the thinner leaf I think the tea is gonna be good til 15 years tops and fade after that. So with a tong situation, under ideal storage conditions, I'd keep it in bamboo for a couple  years, then take the bamboo off for one or two and have me a daily drinker after that. Not that it can't be drunk up now, but a year of airing and relaxing would help get rid of that warehouse smell and bring out some possible hidden flavors. At the start of the warm and muggy summer here in Wisconsin, I've got the best time of year just ahead for working out old flavors and continuing to age pressed tea.

So, I think this is a tong for old people, tea for warm feet and just bitter enough to give you something in a couple years. Did I say it's $32? Thumbs up for the storage, thumbs up for the price, and one thumb up for flavor. My grandkids will never see this cake.

Requiescat in Pace

2015 Chawangpu Hekai Gushu Xiao Bing

Spring puerh cakes are coming in, and the prices favor the tea drunk this year, thank the gods. Chawangshop's entire spring line of 200g cakes can be sampled, in full cake form, for just under $200. I've been thirsty for some gushu, given I didn't order any other spring teas like longjing, saving my 2015 tea virginity for pu. With aged oolong years rapidly approaching for me, I realize have little time in life to actually drink really fresh tea. I plan to make the most of it while I can, so let's get right to it.

200g cake

This gushu puerh is described as hailing from Man Nan Lao Zhai, Hekai Mountain, Menghai County and is a ridiculously low $36.00 a cake, 5 cakes per tong. Stone compression comes apart easily giving me more leaf on my plate than I can brew in one session. I'm going with 9 grams and my usual 110 ml Celadon gaiwan. I hit this hard with boiling water and started digging in the leaf before even trying the tea.

Soup pours out light green, so the photos on Chawangshop are very accurate. Mine appears a little yellow because of the lighting. First two steeps are very sweet with that champagne grape profile of fresh gushu, no apricot here. The processing is very fine in my cake, almost no char my strainer and definitely no smokey flavor whatsoever.

Stone compression means a looser press

The tea coats my tongue in steeps 3 and 4 with a bittersweet flavor which lasts quite a long time. I'm not noticing a whole lot of astringency, and I'm on medications that tend to give me more dry mouth than normal. I tend not to rate astringency for this reason, but the fact that it has less than I normally get from tea means that most other people might not experience much, if any.

Second Steeping following two quick rinses

I'm getting an easy relaxation and some pressure around my ears but not a huge tea drunk. The relaxation helps when the mailman arrives and drops off a newsletter from my former convent of nuns. I know all four of these nuns in the Memoriam section. The photo farther below is the newsletter.

The sister in the upper right cameo photo was a cousin of mine, and the dearest friend I ever had. Sister Alice's brother married one of my paternal grandmother's nieces. We became close friends in the years before I left the community, and before the time when she served as what was once called the Mother General. Alice was a loving, happy person. Her gift to me was a lot of love and gentle attention to my sensitive shy side with cups of herbal tea. Without all this, instead of the tea drunk I am today, I would have become an alcoholic, or worse. Sister Alice had a stroke suddenly around age 62, which left her almost unable to talk. I visited her a few times and heard her frustration with losing speech and other functions that left her in a wheelchair and living in the convent nursing home much too early.

The photo below my cousin is a nun who was my first director in formation, a position once called the Director of Postulants.  Sister Leclare was also a nurse, and had been a missionary nun. When I lived with her, she had just started a clinic for Laotian and Thai refugees who were moving into our city at the time. A no-nonsense and energetic person with a large open heart, her gift to me was guts and some backbone. I lived with her at the time when I found myself in a school shooting situation. She listened with some sympathy in the days that followed, and eventually told me to stop moping and get on with it. I doubt I could have gone on to work in dangerous forensic mental health settings without the courage I got from Sister Leclare.

Sister Alice, upper right; Sister Leclare lower right. I knew the other two on this page, but not well.

These sisters passed away last fall, and I had asked to be informed when Sister Alice passed, but no one did and I missed her funeral. The tea I'm drinking helps me in a pensive moment like this, making me glad to be a tea drinker and not someone needing to drown my sorrows in booze. Because this would be one of those moments to do so. However, I've known of these deaths for some months now and today is more of a moment to think of the sisters fondly. I also notice in the newsletter that the community dropped the age to join the convent down to age 45 for the top end. They must have done that to make sure Old Cwyn doesn't come back. hehe Tea drunks probably shouldn't apply.

A few darker buds and one with a thick stem.

This interruption to my session leaves me with a bit of mental confusion so it takes awhile to get back on track and steeping the tea. The tea is still going strong at 8 steeps, and I'm getting more bitterness coating the tongue. This might be a good sign for some people who look for bitter teas to age, but I'm not going to recommend this for aging because I think it is a shame to let gushu like this dry out too much. In my opinion, I will treat it like a long jing, to enjoy gushu fresh. For aging I want something with a bit of big leaf, maybe a blend of summer and fall tea thrown in there for balance.

A happy pile of leaves.

This gushu doesn't develop the thick body in the soup, that engine oil type liquid I find in higher tier teas. Those folks willing to pay for the high end experience should look out for something more like white2tea's 2014 Last Thoughts. But if you have never tried gushu, at all, this is a chance to do so as a learning experience to get the flavor of that grape-y bud tea firmly ensconced in your memory bank. And it is almost inexcusable to pass up the chance at the price of $36, because buying a small sample of this, even if Honza offers it, is really not cost effective when a cake is this reasonable in price. This tea is going to be gone quickly, I think, because of the price.

In my realm of puerh, for me this is tea I will want to drink up before the drying air of winter returns. For me it is a cake that would be a shame to dry out and store. It is good to drink fresh and give as a gift to friends to drink right now. Sister Alice and I drank a lot of tea back when she lived in Woodruff, and I think I'll have some more of this gushu for them all, in memory of her.

Requiescat in Pace, my sisters. And thank you, because I would not be here right now, as I am, without you.

The Real Cost of Tea

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Requiescat in Pace

The Jet Set

Finally my tea buying vacation is here, and I'm just arriving in China. This is the ideal vacation for me, because quite honestly I'm fed up with buying dirty tongs on EBay and you know my problems lately with vendors. Since nobody is happy anymore the only solution is I must go pick the tea myself. Naturally I've planned my entire trip in advance, starting with the selection of the tea farm where I plan to get my very own personal 2015 tongs.

An ideal tea farm needs to be tended by a single family or preferably a monastery where the monks never think about sex and especially not with each other. They should have sweet, gentle and deferential voices. Monks should eat nothing at all or tsampa if they simply must eat. And of course they take visitors all day long and pose for photos when asked. The tea farm must be at a 2000 foot elevation and preferably higher. I'd like to ask that my private room have an attached en suite with double sinks, and please inspect the drainage before I get there.

Hopefully you'll have a nice tray ready for me when I arrive, this trip is exhausting to say the least. And I hadn't planned that stopover at the World Tea Expo in Long Beach, but I simply had to put in an appearance because I'm a Tea Writer and naturally everyone expects to see me there. Also I had a hair appointment with Wen in LA too but that just made skipping the World Tea Expo inexcusable. So I'm far more tired than I anticipated and the tea was horrible on the flight. You'd think an Asian airline would have decent tea, and unfortunately I had to ship all my gift bags from the Expo back home. Actually my husband's secretary is arranging it, and he is usually dependable, but this is the reason my flight has literally worn me out.

The trees must be at least 100 years old, 500 okay and if I get my way at least 1000 years old. The monks and families tell me the leaves are fine if they are bug bit, but you know what? I want mine perfect, sorry. I'm traveling a long way to get this tea and I expect a lot for my trouble. My tea needs to be gushu, nothing else, and I want to know if it rained before the tea was picked. All my tea must perfect for aging, which means it must be bitter and full-bodied without any off tastes. The leaves need to be thickly veined and as long as my hand. I will be checking to make sure. Tea producers screw up the wok process all the time and you can be certain not a single charred twig will make into any of my beengcha.

All tea must be gluten-free. This is a really important criteria. I never let any gluten whatsoever within 20 feet of my children and at least 500 feet of my house because of what it does to the bowels. And I know for a fact that gluten can produce spores that fly around in the air and affect my son's lungs. Same thing with peanuts. Now I'm aware that most tea farms don't grow peanuts but I should tell you that one can find traces of peanuts in nearly everything these days. I just went through this on the plane trip over here and I'm not in the mood to go through it all again. Are we good so far?

So my goal is to make 20 tongs of the best gushu you have. Actually we could save some time if you have most or all of the tea picked before I get there. I've taken the time to get my rubber stamps made with my own design and to choose the ink that best represents who I am as a person. I'm really looking forward to just sitting down and stamping my tea wrappers while I watch the monks making my tea cakes. Also, I normally drink Imperial Bud hongcha in the morning so I'd be happy to sip on that while I do my rubber stamping. Eventually I'll be in the mood to sip some of your vault tea, the older stuff, twenty years old at the very minimum. I won't be paying for any of that so don't worry. Trying this older tea will give me a chance to see how it all ages before I buy any of the newer tea.

Another thing. It really gets on my tits when I buy a tong and the bamboo is all brown and knotty and gnarly-looking with split pieces. I have returned many a tong for this reason alone. My idea is you should sun-bleach the bamboo so it is a nice creamy ivory color, this would look awesome in my living room curio cabinet where I plan to display all this new tea. When my daughter has her first grade graduation party in June I'm hoping everyone will get a chance to see the display, since I've been talking it up for months now. I am very particular about brown spots which are bad Feng Shui according to my decorator. I paid her a fortune to arrange my house and pick the paint color last year and I'm told she is booked solid now through next year which is really inconvenient when I'm extremely busy trying to plan a party. So if you can inspect all the bamboo in advance this will help compensate for the misfortune my daughter has experienced so far this year.

You asked my husband's opinion and he wants me to let you know that he isn't fussy about the tea. That's because he's leaving all this to me. However, he is very particular about the cost. As I wrote to you previously, we will be paying $10 per cake.

If anything in this text message is unclear, you can fax the Delta Club at the airport.

Sent from my iWatch.

Bag Fun on the Bi-yo

Spring blossoms in Wisconsin

I'm muddling along with my oolong situation. Call me Cwyn the Old Tea Bag. I just found a box of oolong tea bags in the cupboard I didn't know I had. This is a box of Bags from EnjoyingTea, a purveyor of super cheap in tea and teaware. I didn't actually buy these Bags, the website automatically gives out a free box of Bags if you buy a piece of tea ware. You can't put a note in saying "don't send Tea Bags please," I tried that and it doesn't work. A few years back they gave me a box of shou tea bags that ranked among the worst teas I've ever had, fishy old things. I emailed to complain and got a reply "Rinse 'em in cold water." Helped a little, should've thrown them out but you know me.

Cupboard find

Here we have Oolong tea bags this time, hopefully an improvement. The weather is mighty fine today, a warm and sunny day with the crab apple trees in full bloom. These are trees that bloom for maybe a whole week and then the rest of the year they dump leaves and mushy berries on your car. Waste of time and I don't know why people grow them. They also push up creepers relentlessly and dig in so deep you can't really remove the trees unless you want to pay a tree removal service at least $1000. I plant real trees in my yard that grow fruits and nuts you can actually eat. Or I plant things that annoy my neighbors, again a tree with a purpose. Anyway, with the trees in bloom, I decide to use my American tea ware which consists of a Mason Ball jar, channeling Hank Williams.

A light roasted oolong.

I western steep my Bags at 95 C in 200 ml for 5 minutes or so while thinking of Hank Williams' Jambalaya song which is one of the most annoying songs played at every wedding by every boy country band on the planet. The song really isn't about Jambalaya or crawfish pie or being gay-o. It's about a wapatoolie, which is a party drink of fruit, vodka and maybe some sugar syrup. When I was in high school, a wapatoolie was a party where everyone bought a bottle of some alcoholic beverage and all of it got dumped together into a big tub. And then you drink wapatoolie with a fruit jar like my Mason Jar right here.

My EnjoyingTea teabag gets a bit of color in five minutes, the bag contains maybe 2 grams of dark roasted oolong chips. It's not unpleasant, I get a little tongue action, but the tea is not very strong. Still, I can see myself drinking up this box of Bags. But now I can move on to another tea Bag, this time I have one from blogger Wilson of travellingteapot. Five minutes in the old fruit jar, I smell some humid storage and the session is suddenly looking up.

A Liu Bao bag from Singapore

Anyway, a wapatoolie is a nasty way to drink, and probably tea in a Mason Jar is no better, and certainly not a deserving homage to the centuries of care and cultivation China has put into tea. This here tea Bag is more cultivated and cultured on its own, my fruit jar is like Frederick's of Hollywood on silicone honkers, a violation against what nature required centuries to perfect. But then I wonder, is my fruit jar really a violation?

The humid storage tea Bag brews up a bit red and I must have forgot something because this isn't oolong. Checking the email from Wilson I see this is Liu Bao Bag. Imagine that. This tea Bag is rather good. I feel bad now I steeped it so long, I could have got two good steeps out of it had I gone for two minutes instead of five. I'm feeling a little buzzed and just like with alcohol I start wanting another glass. My second steep is very light, so this tea Bag will need to cold brew for a few hours. I only have one of these Liu Bao Bags so I'm gonna steep it and find another glass.

Black tea and shou flavored brew

My last tea Bag is from the former Origin Tea, by way of the guys at TeaDB.org. This is a really Old Bag but not as old as Cwyn. It's an oolong from around 1976. The first thing to worry about is whether the actual bag will hold up in hot water or it might be fragile enough to fall apart.

A really Old Bag from Origin Tea.

I'm fairly certain that wapatoolie is a southern word. I'm not sure that Wisconsin or the north will be the region to wield the words that describe our experience with aged tea because we're not a particularly colorful bunch in our speech. But I had a revelation last spring after attending a tea tasting hosted by Twodog. Now I've been drinking puerh since 2009 but I think most of the other people at the tasting were new to the beverage, and it showed on their faces. Twodog tried to help people relate to the qualities of more humid storage and he said, "It's like turning over the leaves in April when the ice and snow are still on the ground, melting." This statement hit the very core of my sensual memory, younger than I can even remember within myself, this smell of earth in the melting snow, dripping wet with a crust of ice on top, it has the mineral scent of humid stored puerh tea.

Treat me nicely, I'm old.

After connecting something so natural to me to a tea that is not my native beverage, I no longer tried to relate to the "official" terms of tea tasting, nor anything else we can consider traditional about aged tea aside from my own experience. I'm not discounting the importance of the cultural aspects of tea, and I'm about to risk falling into a stereotype of stupid Americans. I'm just saying I'm not going to use words that don't naturally roll off my tongue. Maybe if I'm 20 and plan to spend a semester abroad or go work overseas, I might find reason. But I'm old and at my age I'm not just acquiring experience but I'm trying to articulate what the experience is that I've already attained. However, this isn't really about me. My point here is that people are taking these teas today, brewing and tasting them in their own way, in their own language. And while I could certainly spend time working on all those great tasting terms, instead I can work on articulating my experience because overall my own culture is just beginning to do this with teas. I'm after what's authentic and visceral in my tea experience, not merely the intellectual. And we don't need to take on Zen or even buy all kinds of special equipment. I happen to have a fruit jar already.

Red is the color of aged oolong.

The Origin Tea bag brews up red. Nothing of the original roast left in the aroma. Few of us have the patience to wait out the full resting of a dark oolong to the point where the roast has integrated and faded. This is the point when the real flavor of the tea emerges. The flavor of this tea bag is like Wisconsin's cold weather variety of cherries. Cherries and stone fruits. Stunning. I don't think a tea bag nor an oolong gets much better than this delicate fruit flavor. I'll be cold brewing this also, right here in my fruit jar.

I've found plenty of folks on Instagram likewise brewing up Chinese tea in their own way, and finding local connections. Sometimes we are all steeping the same teas! Through a mutual admiration of photos, I discovered a blogger ysaurella_thevangeliste and hence meandered onto "her" blog. Here I find a tea head writing in French and brewing up every single tea, regardless of type, western-style either in a large Bonjour glass teapot or western-style in a sieved tetsubin. Other tea nerds elsewhere brew the same exact teas using a tiny gaiwan, or a Yixing teapot. Another person uses a stoneware tea pot from a thrift shop and decorates the tea table with little painted statues or pieces of patterned cloth. Very often my friends seem to brew up the same tea on the same day, without anyone consulting anybody else ahead of time. And no one person uses the same equipment and nobody brews the same as anyone else.

Wapatoolie is one of those American words, and you might have noticed I eschew terms like huigan and umami and terroir. I'm not a Tea Sommelier and nobody is gonna pay me for my tea knowledge, such as it is. I stick tea in my Midwest farm crocks, and use unplugged fridges that don't work. We sneak tea in through the porch window to hide it from the kids. We brew up the Naka in Starbucks travel mugs and store shou under the bed. Puerh samples go into Tupperware and Ziploc. Oolong finds its way into family reunions for the first time in the family history. The purists can try and keep the Objectivist Puerh universe intact, and the vendors complain how we westerners talk about tea more than we buy.

But they are missing the real picture that I'm seeing. We need to talk to find the words to describe puerh and oolong tea in American English. People are trying things, connecting to tea in ways that are meaningful to them, Relative to where they live. The vendor that will win out in the end is the one who has it in stock when the craze hits because the teen kids are drinking puerh now, and the real big day of tea is coming. You know what is going to happen eventually anyway in America once the Champagne gets dumped into the Wapatoolie. That's right. It goes into a Fruit Jar. Then a Hank Williams writes a song and soon enough everybody sings it at a wedding. Nowadays it's people like the hip hoppers who are giving us new words. And we like it. Amerika hasn't done its thang to the shang just yet, but it will.

Give us time, we're just getting started.