Jim Marks

This pi lo chun, like many I have had, seems more like a white tea than a green. A fuzzy, fluffy dry life, not entirely unlike the silver needles, but curled in on itself rather than straight.

The scent on both the dry leaf and the brewed cup is also much like the silver needles. Sunny hay on the dry and sweet roundness coming off the cup — but the flavor on the tongue is more astringent and not nearly as sweet.

As much as I love big, strong, bold, dark teas, my favorite dry leaf is white needles. Big, fuzzy, white buds that look cool, and always smell like freshly rolled hay drying in the sun.

The steeped aroma is quieter, almost shy. There’s a kind of sweet grain essence to it, like opening a fresh box of corn flakes, but not nearly that strong. Like someone opening a fresh box of corn flakes in the other room. Down the hall.

The cup is round, and wet and sweet almost like fresh snow peas or papaya. But again, from very far away. Like you’re tasting what your identical twin is eating downstairs while you sleep in under a huge, downy duvet.

The dry leaf of this tea has a powerful aroma. Stronger than anything I’ve had on hand in a good long while. Oddly, the smell is all Yunnan golden. Deeply sweet, like roasted figs.

The cup isn’t nearly as bold on a short steep but there’s a very pleasant round, full presence of the tea from start to finish.

I don’t have nearly as much astringency as I did from this tea the other day. Maybe I did over-cook it a bit, then?

No notes yet.

No notes yet.

This is an incredibly light cup. The liqueur is almost completely clear. Just a faint hint of a pale, sea foam green.

The flavor is similarly delicate, bright, fresh and clean. No bitterness or vegetal notes, and yet also no sweetness. It does have a surprising astringency to it, however.

A very pleasing tea, but I have a mind that I ought to be serving it and sipping it from very fine, very thin, very fragile, delicate, white, bone china.

I could see this making a truly excellent iced tea.

Today is going to be all about the fact that our lawns have spent the past 18 months being abused by landscapers, contractors and the worst drought Texas has on record. I basically have to get an entire year’s worth of dead grass out of the thatch in the hopes that the St. Augustine will run one more time before going dormant until March. With any luck, the spot treatment for the weeds (an eco-friendly variety of weed killer) will arrive tomorrow and I can follow-up the weed whacking and raking with weed treatment.

Oh, and I’ll be drinking this tea while I do all that work because we aren’t supposed to break 60 degrees until afternoon.

Maybe I’ll back the car into the driveway and listen to the Arabic version of the liturgy as inspiration…

As homage to the great tradition of martial arts films which at a tender age first planted the seeds of my obsession with all things East Asian, I call this “Gongfu Madness”.

We got a second pouch of this pu-erh in our second round of samples. I suspect we were supposed to get the other pu-erh which TeaVivre offers, the rose scented one, and we got this one in error. But that is not a problem because I don’t know as either Liz or I would have cared for that one very much and we liked this one a lot.

To expand the tasting boundaries the second time around, I came up with another heretical steeping idea which is so crazy it just might be genius.

I got a my smallest tea pot (close to 2 cups) as well as my largest (close to ten cups).

I set the electric kettle to boiling, and dropped the toucha into the warmed small pot. For this process I did “rinse” the tea, because the steepings would be so short I needed the leaves to losen up.

Then, in quick succession I made five steepings and transferred them to the larger tea pot. That is to say, I combined them. The timing for the steeps was 5 seconds, 3 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds and then 5 seconds.

My thinking? If the idea behind this long series of short steeps is to expose various profiles of the tea, if you combine them, you should get a deeply complex, multi-dimensional flavor matrix that is distinct both from any one steeping or from a single, long steeping of the combined 20 seconds.

And it seems to have worked!

This cup is all at once soft and loamy, bright and sweet, and yet still dry and dusty. The liqueur has a thick, almost broth like mouth feel and coats not only the tongue, but the whole mouth.

Fun!

I wish I had a 20 cup pot (or a teensy 1 cup pot) so I could try what 10 steepings tastes like.

OK, I have to give this tea a bump. I’m on steep number six and still getting excellent, full flavored, rich cups.

The flavor profile is still “basic Chinese green”, but with this level of resteepability, that’s a big bump on the value for money front.

No notes yet.

This is where Chinese green teas start to lose me, I think, and all begin to taste basically the same. But the problem, of course, is me, not the tea.

I’m into my second steep of this, now, and after my enjoyment of the dragon well in recent weeks I had high hopes.

There is a steady transition here as you sip, savor and swallow. Up front you get a strong roasted note and a tiny bite of vegetal bitterness, but then the cup opens up into bright, fresh green sweetness. But, that’s what happens with all the good, green, Chinese teas I’ve had. I just don’t have the palate development yet (for these teas) to discuss the subtle distinctions between a Chun Mei, a Xin Yang Mao Jian, a Taimu Maojin and a Bi Luo Chun.

Hopefully this week’s series of samplings will school me.

Fair truth: tasting this kind of terrified me. If you’ve followed my notes regularly, you will know that I simply cannot abide anything floral in my tea. So, a fully flowering tea? This can’t be good, can it?

We don’t have, no shock I suspect, the proper pot for brewing this, but I took the center column out of a clear, round Bodum and we used that. Unfortunately, no matter how slowly I poured, the pod did get battered around a fair bit, and some of the outer leaves came loose. And, it floated for a good while, which complicated things a bit.

But it did fully expand in due time, and was very pretty.

And oddly enough, the tea itself is not particularly floral ! Just a lightly roasted white tea, very subtle. Maybe a whiff of sweetness near the finish. If this was just a loose white tea, I wouldn’t be all that impressed, I don’t think. But then, who’s going to use their finest leaves to make these things?

I forgot to say that this is one of the teas from our second sample set, which finally arrived (it got delayed in Beijing for quite a while) yesterday.

I definitely should have done the first steeping much shorter. My second cup is already a bit thin. Oops.

I’m always fascinated by other people’s tasting notes.

I did notice a bit of a hint of smoke on the dry leaf, but beyond that point I haven’t found it to be present again.

In fact, the wet leaf and fresh cup were, for me, redolent with all the tell tale notes of a Yunnan golden tea. I actually went and double checked the bag to be sure I wasn’t half asleep and brewing the wrong tea.

In the cup I get a teensy bit of that Yunnan sweetness but it is more than managed by a big whallop of assam like astringency. Not that “oh no I over steeped it” bite that puckers your sucker, just that lingering dry mouth that has you reaching for another sip over and over again.

There is an earthiness here that is completely distinct from a pu-erh. Not old, musty loam, more of a fresh, black top soil during a gentle rain.

I find myself wishing I’d done an even shorter steep in the hopes that it would have allowed for quite a few rounds on these leaves.

My second round of samples from TeaVivre seem to be held up in Shanghai, so while I wait for those to arrive, I’m sticking to old favorites rather than ordering anything new. Actually, we’re stone broke and I can’t justify buying tea, but I’m telling myself that I like turning to favorites right now.

The more tea I drink, the more I realize that the only teas I don’t need to be in a “mood” to want to drink are Yunnan golds, Wuyi Oolongs and pu-erhs. Everything else, as much as I like them, I need to be “in the mood” to drink.

I just wish I had a better Yunnan than this RoTea, right now.

Lisbet picked up this tea for me while she was in Tokyo and I’ve been saving it for a rainy day because it isn’t cheap.

Well, it is raining both literally and metaphorically today, so here we go.

Unfortunately…

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this tea, but truth be told, I’ve had better gyokuro sold stateside (so much for the myth that all the best tea is never exported) and there really isn’t anything deeply exceptional or exciting going on, here.

Certainly not enough to make up for financial woes, failing plumbing, deaths in the family, conflicting obligations, office politics or looming holiday travels and hassles.

A good way to make this seem much better than it is (to me) is to make it my first cup of real tea in a full week.

I still don’t like drinking flowers, though.

This does not hold up well to the “en-K-cupping” process.

I am in the office for the week.

I may need to go buy loose tea and a basket.

Third short steep and this is a weak, flat cup.

I wonder if the water was too hot?

A lot of ideas got exchanged yesterday, and so in the spirit of an open mind, today I am steeping this in the shortest possible intervals. I have to confess, I was highly skeptical this would produce anything other than weak tea.

The first steep (about 5 seconds) had a bit more of a green, vegetal flavor than I’ve gotten from peony in the past. Less of the dry hay.

The second steep (also about 5 seconds) is much darker in color, since the leaves are more hydrated. The green has passed now, and this cup is all warm sun and dry hay. Always amazing to me how a tea can taste like something “dry” while having no astringency to it whatsoever.

So I’m on my third steep of this particular pile of leaves, at 1 minute per steep each. Amusingly, this delicate green holds up better to a third steep (at 1 minute each) than the bai lin gong fu robust black tea does, but there you go.

Still buttery and soft, this third steeping has lost all resemblance of a Japanese shaded and now has those sunny hay notes common to Chinese pan fired green teas.

This tea is really impressing me — as have all the TeaVivre teas, I have to confess.

Again, one could say that this is “what bag tea should be” in a sense. A very no-nonsense cuppa. But rather than elevating this tea to the level it belongs, such a comment would imply it was common, dull, or something of that nature, which isn’t at all what I mean.

Once upon a time, all tea was “good tea”. Then The West discovered tea and the tea growing regions of the world suddenly had to deal with economies of scale they simply weren’t prepared for. And so, traditions like putting fannings or dust into mesh bags were developed to help cover the margins. But the leaves those fannings and dust came from were, probably, at least initially, good leaves that would have made good tea.

But meanwhile black tea has gotten a bad name.

Which is a shame.

At any rate, I’m going to have to learn more about Bai Lin teas.

And there we go. The second steep completely opened up the leaves and a much better cup results. Why do tuocha get packed so tightly? Are they “superior” in some way to fermented pu-erh which isn’t pressed?

See, this is why I don’t like tuocha.

These are so perfectly made that they may actually be too perfect. The one I just steeped, despite some attention with a chopstick, didn’t actually open up on the first steep.

The resultant cup is still just fine, but I simply find loose pu-erh to be much easier to work with for short steep times.