Jim Marks

This isn’t so much a tasting note as it is a note to those of you who “follow” me here on Steepster.

I’ve grown frustrated with the technical problems with this site, and I’ve basically abandoned all other social networks (Facebook, G+, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram &c.) entirely. The fact that most of what is in my tea cupboard right now aren’t in the Steepster database and I can’t add them makes it very hard to know how to use or enjoy the site. I haven’t actually read tasting notes here in some months. I haven’t read them thoughtfully and consistently in well over a year.

So, I’m giving up the ghost.

I’ve decided to consolidate all my activities onto my two blogs. The one is cooking specific, and I co-author it with a friend, so that won’t change. I tend to focus on Lent-friendly experiments (useful for you vegans) as well as happy accidents and solutions to fixing failed dishes — we both try our best to infuse a fair bit of geek humor into the posts. But my primary blog is just where I spew out all my thoughts. Mostly about religion and politics (less and less of this) but also about disc golf, music, art, I’ll be posting photography there — and now also about tea that I’m drinking.

So if you want to know what’s in my cup, or on my mind, or in my eye, drop by my blog.

But I won’t be ’round these parts anymore.

(Yes, I am drinking some of the last of my golden fleece stash today.)

The last month or so has had me toggling between that 1992 Menghai (notes of flood damage and deep forest loam) and the 2011 Lao Tong Zhi Old Comrades (quite sweet, a second brick of which is waiting for me in a PO Box in CA, which I can hopefully recover before too much time goes by, I’m nearly done with the first brick).

Those of you who have been reading for some time know that I have developed a great love of Yunnan golden over the past few years, and the website talks of sandalwood which is one of my favorite scents, and so it is with great anticipation that I dive into this new shu offering from the great folks at Verdant.

The dry leaf smells sweet and spicy, caramel and sandalwood indeed. But get it wet and suddenly you’re in the forgotten back room of a boot repair shop. Old leather, dust, mold and old wooden tools. Despite this, the mustiness coming off of this cup is unexpected. More like a very peaty Scotch than old leather.

This is clearly a young tea. I hope Verdant has the discipline to hide away a few cakes to put back on sale in 5-10 years time. I know I sure don’t.

I had a bit of this on Saturday while running around like a crazy person and also half-dead from a severe sinus infection. I can’t claim that I actually tasted it at all. But no worries, I have more and will be able to provide notes soon.

I really want to be talking about the ‘92 Menghai that I had yesterday and the ’05 Haiwan I’m drinking right now, but the “add a tea” functionality is failing hard, so they will have to wait until the technical gremlins subside.

Meanwhile, please stand by [cue Girl from Ipanema]

So, I’d finally recovered my health in the wake of my travels to Japan when a business trip to New England during a flu epidemic (not to mention the usual winter concerns of simple head colds and sinus infections caused by forced hot air heat) took my health away again.

But, in the midst of all this chaos I did get my hands on a couple of bricks of this shu. It is true that one of them is being broken up into an unglazed ceramic canister for more aging, but the other will be consumed in the short term. Having tasted a bit of it yesterday, even if I’d intended to store them both away, I don’t think I could at this point.

As much as there isn’t nearly as much of a wide bell curve in flavor profile for shu as there is for sheng, it is always gratifying to taste a shu that reminds you they aren’t entirely the same as one another, either.

This cup was at the same time much darker, much mustier and yet over all much softer than the shu that has been my daily drinker for some years now (Upton’s “celestial tribute”). In a way that I can’t entirely put my finger on, this softer profile allows the cup to “open up” and something more than the usual wet cave stone and forest loam begin to come out.

Be aware this brick is tightly packed and you will want something better than a paring knife to pick it apart.

Well, I’m back from my long trip to Japan — where I didn’t drink nearly as much tea as you might think. Meals in Tokyo are pretty Westernized, it turns out, even when having fairly traditional foods. I had to ask for tea almost everywhere we went, and with the exception of one conveyor sushi bar and one soba shop, none of it was at all remarkable. But, I did drink a lot of matcha in Liz’s apartment trying to keep warm.

I was unable to read steepster while I was away, so if something important happened to you I should know about and missed, please get in touch.

So here I am back in Houston where we’ve been having some unusually cold weather (for Houston) and so I have tea in my hand pretty much any time I’m awake.

This experimental option from Verdant has been a lot of fun, so far. I’m on my second day of gongfu steeping sessions and enjoying the leaf very much.

Somewhere between the rich, chocolate extravagance of Laoshan black and the pleasant bite of Wuyi oolong, this tea has a complex flavor profile and a thick, full mouth feel.

Even early steepings don’t come off as dark you expect them to, given the look of the dry and wet leaf (and the enormous aroma they offer), but that is not to say what you find in your cup is either thin or subtle. The chocolate and malt definitely dominate the cup, but there is more to the picture, here. Unsalted cashews. Orange zest. Buckwheat honey.

This is a cold, rainy day tea if ever there was one.

This is a crisp, sunny Winter day tea if ever there was one.

But I also suspect it would be fabulous as an iced tea in the Summer’s heat.

I have had very little “new” tea lately, if you have been curious about my conspicuous absence. I am preparing for a long trip abroad and between wanting to avoid leaving a cabinet full of leaf that is slowly going stale while I am away and wanting to save money, I have been using up a lot of existing stock, and have been avoiding purchasing anything new.

My great joys lately has been not only my 230ml Mr. Chen yixing (http://camellia-sinensis.com/en/teapot/theiere-de-m-chen-ch-3) which I have been using for sweet shu and Yunnan golden, but also my newest, teensy, tiny 150ml black clay Mrs. Sheng yixing (http://camellia-sinensis.com/en/teapot/theiere-de-mme-sheng-sg-8) which I use to steep lapsang souchong — it seems fitting to me to put this moody, smokey tea into a black clay pot. Someday the clay will look and smell like a well loved briarwood pipe.

But, I ran short of shu pu-erh with a few weeks to go before my trip, so I decided I needed something special to see me through the last days and I grabbed a couple of ounces of this leaf from Verdant.

This is a significantly mustier tea than the shu I tend to keep around as daily drinking leaf.

The dry leaf has a sharp, leather/jerky kind of aroma to it.

The wet leaf has the smell of a rotten log, just broken open to the air, with the tang of an old steel sink an aged cabin.

The cup itself is dusty and mineral. Well water from deep in a cavern. The rich, spongey loam of the deep forest.

And yet, this cup is very gentle. For a first steep I find myself seeking out these notes, not trying to climb out from under them. I hope this doesn’t prelude to only achieving a small handful of steeps with this leaf.

Update in a few hours.

A friend ordered several ceramic storage vessels and two yixing (one of which was the one she gave to me) from Camellia Sinensis and they included a sample of this tea with her order.

I am out of practice with Chinese green teas…

The cup was pale yellow and had a gentle roasted note amongst all the fresh, green flavors. None of the deep, bass note green flavors one finds in a shaded tea or a dragon well, but gentle, sunny meadow flavors.

It is, I think, sadly, the wrong time of year, even in Houston, for this kind of cup. I could see this being a fantastic way to wake up in Spring, however, which is when this tea is first harvested.

I am working my way through this leaf much faster than I intended, but I am enjoying it so much I simply cannot help but keep drinking it.

If I have any complaint it is that it gives up far too few steeps. Despite my yixing’s young age, with each day’s use my other teas provide more and more steeps with each round, and yet this leaf still struggles to make a full ten — let alone reach for fifteen or more as great pu-erh often does.

I can’t help but wonder if such old leaf requires an old yixing to support it.

I suspect I need to content myself with younger leaf until my pot has become venerable enough to be worthy of such a tea as this.

At least it will be easier on the wallet in the meantime…

I had a full session of steepings with this tea yesterday, and I’m beginning another of them now.

The sweet, chocolate of the dry leaf is a shock and pleasant surprise every time I open the tin.

Even more surprising is how this sweet leaf instantly transforms into a musty, loamy, verdant forest floor as soon as it hydrates. My yixing right now smells like Dogtown Wood (outside Gloucester) Massachusetts in early November.

No surprise then that the cup itself mystically fuses the two. Porcini ravioli followed by cannoli with chocolate shavings. A walk through wet Autumnal leaves with a mug of cocoa. Debussy on a cloudy day.

I feel like I have finally made it “to the big time”. I’m drinking 20 year aged shu from a proper yixing.

The dry leaf smells of cocoa and applewood smoke and old leather.

The wet leaf smells of cavern water.

The liqueur is a roller coaster ride of sweetness, camphor, cave walls and bonfire. The mouthfeel is relentless and lingers for minutes after each sip.

Wow.

The dry leaf here smells of cherries and chocolate (not cacao or cocoa, but chocolate).

The wet leaf smells of roasted potato skins and corn husks.

The cup is… thick and buttery with flavors of flan and oak.

The more of these teas I drink, the less I want to drink anything else.

(Gaiwan to gaiwan technique, generous leaf, instantaneous steep times)

After many steepings, the granite and aged protein give way to… not a sweetness, but something more gentle. The dust and stones are shaken off and the full, bright, soft color of the big, red robe shines through.

Second steeping: This one’s a bit thin on flavor, probably because the leaf got cold while I was having my Mini serviced and throwing 21 links of disc golf. And yet, the mouth feel is enormous.

Third steeping: This is more like it. Deep umber color. In a funny way, this is (perhaps not unexpectedly) the exact opposite of the pre-chingming da hong pao I was getting from Upton just a few months ago. That was light and floral, this is dark and earthy. Quite literally. This tastes like wet granite and venison hard tack.

This is a cold weather tea. By which I don’t mean Winter in Houston. Perhaps I will pack this into an unlaquered bamboo canister for more aging and save it either to gift to a Northern friend or for the next time I visit my parents.

Aged da hong pao?!?!

Had to try this.

The dry leaf smells like dehydrated apples.

The wet leaf is all wuyi oolong roasted notes.

(Steeping notes: gaiwan to gaiwan instantaneous steepings, generous leaf, off the boil water.)

First steep: I just woke up, and have to rush out the door, but couldn’t wait any longer, after staring at this box all yesterday afternoon (but having already begun that session with the last of the quhao which lasted all day). I confess I can’t actually taste much of anything at the moment. But that’s my body, not this tea. So I’ll edit this note with later steepings… later. For now I can say that this is not simply da hong pao. There’s a bitterness, a dryness, a mineral quality you don’t find in this season’s leaf.

More later when my mouth and sinuses are awake.

I am still anxiously awaiting a shipment from the exotic land of French Canada (Camellia Sinensis order including some things I’ve never heard of, let alone tried) and have been pounding the new yixing with Upton’s Wang pu-erh pretty thoroughly, so I wanted to take a break, re-group, and clean house a bit.

So, I am brewing up the last of this in my pyrex and straining into the hand made glazed pot which I bought from the very nice octogenarian woman at the Japanese-American Cultural Festival of Houston two years ago.

I need to find out more about this tea so that I can investigate higher quality options, if they exist. This is a very fine tea, but because Path of Tea is serving a retail population they have to be much more careful to balance price point with quality than, say, Upton, CS, TeaG, or Verdant does. What I mean is that this tea is good enough that it makes me want to find the finest varient of it I can get my hands on.

A friend has said that the wet leaf smells like oatmeal. I get cacao, myself.

The cup has, as I think I’ve said before, the sweetness of Yunnan golden without the fruit.

BIG storm coming. Pushing Summer out, and bringing what little of Autumn we will see riding in the wake.

Time to ride the dragon.

I had a bit of this around from a few weeks ago (I’d bought it to make iced tea for a day in the park) and I need to come up for a bit of air from my endless days of yixing bliss, so I decided to polish this off with a nice big cozy pot.

This is a tea I associate with cold, New England days, so I can’t say as I ever crave it here in Houston. But, the citrus oil is fantastic iced and produces a brew which doesn’t need sweetening to be thirst quenching on a hot day. Bright and crisp and that’s all you need.

Brewed hot, this produces a dark, brooding cup. Still with that strong citrus edge, but a bit astringent and cloudy, too.

A good change of pace from cup after cup of yunnan golden and sweet shu pu-erh.

And so it begins.

A dear friend gifted me one of these http://camellia-sinensis.com/teapot/fiche/Mr.+Chen+teapot+CH-5 and it arrived on Wednesday afternoon. I used the last of my Upton Tea Celestial Tribute shou pu-erh to season the pot using the method that David Duckler enumerated here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wzsBNHO6C4

My car had a series of unexpected problems over the past two weeks, only a small fraction of which was covered by insurance, and so my plans to order lots of unusual and exotic teas is on hold until my checkbook can recover from the trauma. Meanwhile, my usual order from Upton of black dragon, yunnan gold rare grade and wang pu-erh will have to keep me sustained.

The great news, of course, is that this means I have a shou seasoned yixing and I have shou tea leaves!

I have to say, this brand new pot should be greedy, stealing most of the flavor of this first steep (after a rinse), and yet, the flavor and mouth feel of this cup are as full and lovely as they ever are.

Does anyone know if any real development actually still goes on with the Steepster code base? It seems to me they need to separate actual tasting notes from our daily drinking logs. We’ve made this into a very social space, and a kind of “tea journal” but all that information ends up cluttering up the pages for the actual teas and makes it hard to find new teas to try when you have to read through all the bits about someone’s day.

I want us to keep the social aspect, but I think the site would be a lot richer if there was a static area for tasting notes, and review which you could update or leave alone, and then a tea diary that was tied to your profile, but not the tea pages. Hmmm…

Today is a strange day. On the one hand, I’m recovering from a near miss with a migraine last night (my first in a long time, thank God), but on the other hand, a friend gave me the gift of YIXING and I have spent the morning seasoning my new jewel via David Duckler’s method which he shared on YouTube a week or so ago.

Because of the holiday weekend, my online orders of new tea have hit some delays and I was obligated to pick up a few onces of something drinkable from Path of Tea to cover the gap.

I love this qu hao, and I love it even more at home in the gaiwan than I do in their shop steeped Western style. The result is more like a Yunnan golden than it is like other Chinese black teas. That sweetness, honey and molasses is here as is that mellow roasted grain.

This is a fantastic daily drinker.

Used up the last of this leaf last night, and doing some last steepings this morning.

The past three weeks have been “Hatch season” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_chile) here in Houston and it has been a powerful reminder to me about how much our society has lost about not only living seasonally, but also in celebrating those seasons. I blogged about this earlier this week.

And so it is bitter sweet to drink the last of a pre-chingming. Sure, next year I could get more (for all I know, I could order more of this year’s right now), but next year’s leaf is not this year’s leaf. It will not be exactly the same.

But, I think there is a certain joy which can be found in embracing what is present for what it is, and letting the unknown of tomorrow not only wait its turn, but then be embraced for what it is and not as a “replacement” for what has passed on into history.

The 2012 pre-chingming da hong pao was a genuine milestone for me in terms of understanding tea. It may not even be a great tea, I have no idea. But not every great tea teaches you something. And not every tea that teaches has to be a great tea.

I will miss this tea. But if nothing else, it has taught me not to miss tea.

(loose leaf, not bag, bought from the bulk dry goods canisters, not in a retail tin)

Usually I keep this around for hot toddies, iced tea with lemon and sugar, or head colds that need lemon and honey.

But, I’ve been helping a friend shop for ceramic tea storage and when one has spent the morning drooling over hand made, artisan pottery, one needs a reality check. Also, I’m trying to empty my cupboard as much as I can in order to justify a few orders of extremely fine teas from some unusual vendors (and probably also VT which isn’t all that unusual, especially for the Steepster crowd) and I need to use this up along with everything else.

Why are all the gaiwan I see in China low and wide and all the gaiwan I see for sale in the USA (even online) tall and narrow? I have big hands. Really big hands. I want a low, wide gaiwan that will fit my hand better. Any suggestions would be welcome on this front. Plus, I just think the aesthetic works better with those proportions.

Anyway, this tea. What is there to say, really? Assam based, blended, RTC processing, industrialized brand name, it isn’t going to be a religious experience now, is it?

But let’s face it. We’re not always in the mood for the gentle caress of tiguanyin or the exotic breezes of an aged sheng. Sometimes you want a tea that’s going to use your epiglottis as a speed bag and will simply WAKE YOU UP. Those mornings you wake up and you realize you could actually sing Barry White in the correct octave.This is the tea for those occasions.

No notes yet.

I really am glad I found this tea.

Know that an “entry level” sheng exists that I can point newbies towards without scaring them with either big price tags or overwhelming flavor profiles is comforting.

And let’s face it, you can’t drink “blow my mind” tea all day every day. If nothing else, the wallet won’t allow it.

So having a sheng you can consider a “daily drinker” is pretty excellent.

With modest leaf in a small gaiwan, this tea is mellow and almost sweet. It makes me wish I had a yixing for it. I have found the yixing I want to invest in, but this will take time. And money.

I did long steepings with this for the first time, yesterday.

I freely admit that at this point I am extremely spoiled by my semi-gongfu double gaiwan style of steeping most tea most of the time. Working from home, and so having access to the kettle, all the hardware, towels, etc. means I can make great cups of tea all day every day.

So, on those occasions I make larger batches and do longer steepings, I have to remind myself that of course the results aren’t going to be as dramatic.

The balance in this tea just amazes me. Whether steeped long or short, the roasted notes one expects in da hong pao are always playing this complex game of tag with the more lady orchid type notes.

I was pleased to discover that while a Western steep doesn’t sparkle the way a gongfu steep does, the result is still a well balanced, excellent cup of extremely refreshing oolong tea.