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@mpham787, to mature shengcha pu’er until it is round and still clean is a very skilled process. Most can mellow out the sharpness but make the tea muddled. Some make it dirty tasting. Others keep it clean, but lose the taste. To do it as you say, many people, even those in the trade, are finding the way.
I’d advise for 1kg of respectable quality shengcha to mature till it is not so “fierce” and darker, is to pack it quite tightly in a clean earthware. By clean, I mean free of chemicals and other alien matters. Avoid a big Yixing pot this size. 99.9% of such wares are made from dyed clays. At least half of that are with questionable additives.
An alternative is to wrap the tea in a few layers of “clean” paper.
In any case, avoid touching the leaves with the barehand; avoid also putting them close to the mouth or nose, lest moisture and grease from you become agents of unpleasant changes. Store the tea away from any smell, in the dark, and in average humidity. Noticeable taste changes happen from the third year onward, in normal, room temperature conditions.
I have wanted to write about Liu Bo for sometime but have not been able to find worthy quality of it to make it interesting for me to do the task. A lot of the producers have switched to making other teas and old brands are not performing as they should. I am not giving up the search though.
Basically it is a dark tea from Guangxi. Most available in the market is full of pesticides and other flaws. The worst is the compressed ones. There is a picture of it in page two of the below article. The one with sand and soil in place of tea in the inside of the basket:
There are many things that affects how a tea can taste, and quality most certainly is one. As I said repeatedly in different articles, the quick wash infusion style popular in China is NOT a way to judge a tea. While you are a tourist, tired and thirsty, perhaps even a drop f water tastes much nicer in a shop where u could sit down and rest your feet and your bag.
While there are honest tea merchants in China, there are indeed quite a high proportion of dealers trying to cheat whenever they can.
There are also shops setup just to con tourists. They should be avoided altogether. These shops are easy to recognize. They usually have huge billboards or signs somewhere your tour bus stops, but they have to be accessed through not so obvious passages or stairs or gates etc. However, the most critical evidence is that you are taken there. No matter if it’s a personal escort or a tour group guide, it is the same. Most ridiculously, such shops almost always exist in places at or near famous tea origins, and definitely in all major tourist hotspots. Those in Hangzhou also feature an old man or a young woman doing the famous Longjing wok roasting at the entrance.
Next time you are in China, never buy tea at shops in the airports, train station etc, never buy in places where the guide takes you, and shop only where the locals shop. The easiest way is to shop in the few famous brand name chain store teashops. It will not be easy to get really great value or really great quality this way, but you will not have big ‘surprises’ either.
Another way to do it is to really spend time exploring the origins, taste tea at the farmers, and at the shops. Not one or two, but as many as you can spend time in. Buy tiny portions here and there. Compare quality and prices. This was how I began to really know my teas.
Darkening of the colour of the teeth can be the result of many other things. Drugs, smoking, food colourings, environmental contaminants, bad hygiene, diseases and health conditions etc can all be the reason. Unless you are using really low quality products such as RTD or teabag green tea, and in unusually large dosage, prolonged usage of green tea does not result in darkening of the teeth.
If what you mean is tea stain, green and white teas are actually the least possible of all the tea categories to be associated with such problems. Normal oral hygiene habits take care of it much easier than if it is coffee, soft drinks, or any other sugared beverages.
This is a much more complex question to answer than a simple yes and no.
Traditionally there are two kinds of Phoenix, namely Qing Xiang and Shu Xiang, ie fresh fragrance and ripe fragrance. Fresh fragrance refers to those varieties with distinct floral ( in the Chinese sense of the word, meaning blooming flower types of fragrance ) and fresher kinds of taste profiles. Traditionally varieties such as baxian ( eight immortals ), zilan, yulan, etc belong to this category.
Ripe fragrance refers to those varieties that are baked more deeply to render the characteristically classic Phoenix oolong type of ripen fruit, honey or baked sweet potato types of aroma and a sweeter liquor. Traditionally milan, qunti, mi xiang etc belong to this category.
The grand Phoenix oolong specialist Huang Bozi further differentiates by creating the the nut taste category ( eg xingren xiang ) and pure category ( eg zhuye dancong ).
Developments in recent decades have further given rise to more varieties, but they are basically classifiable under these categories.
The most confusing part in this concept lies not in the conceptual arena but in how certain producers and wholesalers have manipulated the idea to conveniently market their products.
I was just talking to an old producer yesterday about how some sellers deceptively put grand names on ordinary products. A big name is always a big push for anything. Buyers from all over the country lined the single lane winding road in the Phoenix region trying to get the best batches. Manipulation of concepts and facts begins there. Half finished tealeaves from all round the region come through the back doors of the farmers/producers to make up for the greater demand than volume. This is only the beginning…
The resultant condition is a market with confusing understanding of what quality a certain label represents. Certainly there is also the universal condition of a huge range of quality grade under the same variety.
As a result, there can be countless kinds of quality for one single label, e.g. Milan Xiang, in the market, all tasting differently. Which category it belongs to is but one of the many puzzles. Even some wholesalers ( or claimed farmers ) have not tasted a genuine one themselves and believe, or want to believe, what they are selling is the real one.
Such is the condition for Phoenix oolong. Similar things applies to most other teas. Manipulation of the concept and muddling of the truth works for those who control the larger share of the market and have the resources to propagate myths to their commercial advantage.
BTW, for all the time I have been working with people in the Fenghuang area, I have not heard of a Hudi Laocong. A laocong basically means an old bush. How it is best processed has nothing to do with whether it is old or not, but the cultivar.
Hello Katrin,
Thank you for your question. A brick tea made from a white tea is a compressed white tea. When this tea is turned dark through exposure to the environment or through an induced process, it becomes a dark tea.
This is the same in Pu’er teas. A fresh shengcha (aka raw tea) is a white tea. When it turns dark, it GRADUALLY becomes a dark tea. It can be years or decades a white tea is turned dark.
I first saw a compressed Fuding white tea in 2008. It had been compressed the year before, I was told. They still use Fujian white tea varieties to produce such products. This happens not only in Fuding, but also in other sub-regions, such as Zhenghe and Chongan.
I’d also like to add that compressing tea has been a practice outside of dark tea regions since antiquity. For example, there are oolongs and black teas. Compressed green teas had been the imperial court standard in China until the 15th century.
I can recommend a few English books, but most of them are more about history than about the nature of tea. Please visit the bibliography page in the All About section:
Information in the English language, or perhaps in most other Western languages as well, in relationship with the nature of tea is depressingly insufficient. A lot in popular circulation are more like propagation of myths. Sadly, many who have written them have not seriously studied the topic, some may have not even compare different tea plants.
The taxonomy of tea producing tea plants still needs much work, but you are right in saying that the two major varieties are v. sinensis and v. assamica. The origin of the latter is still in much debate, but most evidences point to the area in the northern part of Indochina and the southwest of Yunnan. The oldest surviving tea tree of the assamica variety is in Yunnan.Beyond that, hundreds, if not thousands, of cultivars are in production. They can be different in appearance, growth pattern, resilience, resultant tea taste, etc. They can be the result of the hybrid between two other cultivars within the same variety, or cross. Some ancestry can be traced back, some still need work. A lot are carefully breed.Da Hong Pao is one cultivar of the shuixian family of cultivars, officially speaking. I personally think that the shuixian family is likely to be a sub-variety, rather than simply a cultivar group.I have many times mentioned the topic in the Tea Guardian. Just type in cultivar, or tea plant and you get many articles to read.
