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Try not to use the Chouzhou teapot. I’d say 99% of those available in the market are of questionable materials. If you want to use a teapot to prepare Phoenix oolong, use either a porcelain or a genuine Yixing. Teapots are better when longer infusion time is preferred.
Thank you alerting us on that. Will have it taken care of and update here. Really very nice of you. Thank you again.
@CHAWANG, we are working on it. The target is to create a new platform for better user-friendliness. This one we are using is pretty restrictive in how we can expand on it and each additional feature requires a lot of resources. The technology is also not catching up with the time so we have to jump boat. There are lots of forum platforms to choose from, but the challenge is to find a platform to which we can migrate all the old conversations and that can integrate well with the main website. A few users have written to us about this issue too and I am very sorry that this is not changing sooner. Please bear with the given identification icon for the time being.
I still remember the term “grandpa” method you use. It is actually a most useful daily method. I’d definitely cover whatever the infusion vessel is so it gives me the best possible result.
I also have to add that gram per gram, some teas does give more taste than others. More rounds of infusion, if you prefer. Generally black is not a top performer, but not as bad as green. However, tea category is certainly not the way to see this. It is the individual selection that makes the difference.
I am sorry I have missed out on this very interesting topic. I agree with what you said and that actually is the only standard to follow in the long term for a unified understanding of the terms that are pinyin romanised.
However, when we — me in particular — write the articles, there are other serious concerns as well. There are terms with long established usage habit before the existence of Tea Guardian and we do need to take care of how people who are used to them and intend to strike a balance. There is also the concern of how their usage affects the searchability of a term used to refer to the object.
Pu’er is a great example of that. To this day, the majority of the market still refer to it as pu-erh. Some as puer. Few as the proper presentation pu’er. To search engines, even that apostrophe makes a big difference. In the beginning I wrote “pu’er” and after 3 months of the publishing of the articles, they appeared in the 10th or 15th page in Google search. I switched it to “puer” and it came up to the 3rd page.
Yet to the majority of the readers, including Chinese who read English, puer is an ambiguous term to pronounce. So sometimes we have to present it as pu-er. Only sometimes, as a way to define the term. At this moment, you’ll probably see all the terms appearing in this site. The strategy is to expose the small percentage of the world population who chanced to be our readers to familiarise with the existence of these terms, including the proper presentation. This way, hopefully in the near future, we can regain the standard form.
In the English reading world where even some British would feel alienated with the “z” in “romanization” and some Americans would the “s” in the same word, pinyin terms are a hard sell. I still speak to tea people who say Dragon Well and shun Longjing, Peking and not Beijing. Once a trader I was negotiating a transaction with said he could not handle all the mumble jumbo of these foreign words and said he just gave up reading the pricelist.
It is a world of extreme polarity. There are open minded people and well informed of otherness like yourself, there are those who have lived in relative monolingual environment and are quite isolated from the rest of the world.
To me, it is more important to spread the understanding of tea for all its nature. With it, hopefully some lights in what is true, righteous and beautiful.
I am so happy that amongst my old readers there is one who is knowledgeable enough to point out the chaos in our pinyin presentations and care enough to write about it in the forum. However, please bear with our indulgence in attempting to make this site a bit more popular first before gradually giving order to this very diverse way of romanisation.
Much grateful for this opportunity to express on this. Please continue to let me know what you really think.
The term yu ye describes in tea production an incomplete leaf that precedes real leaves in a bud. It is somewhat harder and does not respond well to processing. They are easy to spot in the finished product: they simply look like any dry leaves from a tree and not like a processed tea leaf. Usually they are removed manually after processing and before the final bake-dry.
Since the price for lower end white peony and shou mei is not catching up with the rising labour cost in China, you can see more yu ye in the tea as the grade goes down.
Thank you for re-posting the photos.
Firstly, it is not very accurate to judge a tea by the look. However, there are visual clues as to what makes not very good tea. I can talk about that in the pictures.
Secondly, although I think it is a smart business idea to compress white teas into discus, I still think this form does not help the tea in the taste dimension at all. Either fresh or in maturing.
Let’s discuss the two photos you shared:
It says “shou mei” in the wrapping paper: shou mei in the modern Chinese ranking system for white tea is the third tier.
Though there are silvery tips on some parts of the tea discus, the majority of the surface is covered by yu ye (魚葉), i.e. un-processable leaves, a sign of low quality.So I guess this discus may not be of commendable quality?
Hello,
You will have to upload your photos to the internet and supply a link before everyone else can see them. In the near future our forum will support upload.
If you want to upload them now, you may also consider posting in the Teashop Finder in this site. You may want to first create a listing of the teashop from which you buy the Bai Mudan from and then make a review there so everyone can join in to discuss.