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@M, my major income comes from exporting to wholesalers and larger retailers in various countries. Tea Hong is something that I hope will grow to be more profitable than that in the future. I do a bit of something to exercise at home. Just that I get lazy when without the peer pressure inside the gym. Very tired after the long hours too.
@Manila, will keep you updated. I have high hope for a few remaining selections. Hope you’ll like them too.ps: and we came out winning a lot of great quality teas, some even better than before! That’s for our commercial operation, though. Just want you to be happy for us.
Great to see tea happening for people around here. @ M, one thing about cold infusing puer: it is a microbe-fermented tea, things are likely to be still alive there. It is advisable, even for your experiments, to at least double blanch the leaves before submerging them with cold water. Other than the microbes, puers, whether sheng or shu, are teas that are relatively more laden with humid-evils when drunk cold. I do not advise it unless your area “the land between two rivers” is very dry in summer. Teas that are humid are suitable for people who sweat a lot because of the kind of work they involve in, or for those who live in very dry climate. Green style Tieguanyins and cold puers may well be the two most humid teas.
Here is a page about the land between the two rivers, for your enjoyment:I wish I had checked in earlier. @ sofie1212, I hope your headache is gone now. If this kind of condition gets you next time (hope there is no such thing next time), slice up 30+ grams (one traditional Chinese tael, the same that you have in the wet market in HK) — that’s a lot of ginger — into thin slices, say 1~2 mm thick. Boil them in 300 ml of water (that’s a very big cup, your ordinary rice bowl is about 250 ml ) for about 5 to 10 minutes (10 is better, at least 5 when you are in a hurry, or if you can’t take the hotness of the ginger) — use medium low heat after the water is brought to a boil. If you have real raw sugar (search that in Tea Guardian), use that, if not, use your traditional dark slab sugar (片糖) to sweeten the drink as much as you like it, but the sweeter the better. Drink this ‘ginger tea’ when it is still hot.
What Alexargon said is correct for prevention of tea drunk, but when you have got it. You need to dissipate the ‘toxic wind’ energy that comes with the overdose of TCM coldness of green style tieguanyin. Remember, the greener the TGY, the colder it is in TCM term, the more wind you’ll get, esp when you are quite tired already.I just learned that I have not written about the cure for tea drunk in the TG site. I am sorry I have not been better help soon enough. Hope you have a good Sunday at least.@ M, I think this is a good experience for you to sense the kind of pressure I have having an opinion and a more reasonable markup system different from the majority of the trade. While puer discus is still a rare item in the tea trade in US, it is a major commodity here in HK and southern China. Peer criticism is really intense. To hold fast to my believes and principles is not an easy job when I have all the resources to make big bugs out of this item that I don’t believe in. I even have access to those extremely exclusive ones made for national leaders. In China where the Party elitists enjoy even more special privileges than ancient imperial families, there are special F&B production facilities for every single item in their households.
The only thing that this MarshalN said that really is to the point is that we do not have advertisements from other operators other than Tea Hong. I cannot yet afford an advertising sales for that space. Perhaps you can tell this MarshaIN to advertise his puer cake shop there. The advertising info page is at: https://www.teaguardian.com/advertisers/advertising-tea-guardian.html#.UZHgHOBmn5gor perhaps I can get someone to post it there:))
@ Hokusai, I think your proposal is a great idea. However, it is not always possible to get two similar ones at the same time. I’ll try. I have no intention of opening a physical shop for retail any time soon. I will have to take care of what’s on the plate first. I hope you can feel the pots with the photos and buy from there 😉
@ Tea Soul, that is a very fine zhu-ni pot. I have had it in the storage for a number of years and I believe I cannot buy the thing again at the original price, but marked it up accordingly anyway. My overall markup scheme is much lower than shops in HK (I believe that’s where you are?) or cities in China but competitive with the internet shops in China. Last time I saw similar things in HK in one of those Chinese emporiums, it was a few times the price. Their markup scheme is suicidal in the long run. As the Cantonese saying goes, killing the chicken for the eggs.
@ Lamppost, that really depends on the infusion time you set for your top drop.
I’ll use my own practice to explain it here. When I choose to top drop for an infusion, I normally have decided that I would give it a full infusion duration, i.e. 5m for smaller vessels, 7 to 10 for large ones. To sustain a good temperature throughout such length, the vessel has to hold heat quite well. (other readers pls note: heating with a candle under the pot won’t work unless it is a very basic quality tea) In your case, the Yixing pot would have to be very thoroughly preheated. I would also use a slightly higher temperature in because I know it will get cooler. In bigger vessels, this is a lesser worry.To me, a balanced amount of astringency in the tea is important. So is aroma. Both have to be brought about with heat. The trick is knowing how much over that mean of 85°C. It varies with the heat retainment properties of that pot you are using and the immediate environment, and your personal preference, of course.If your Yixing teapot is giving you the same infusion quality as a gaiwan, there are things that you may want to ask:Is the pot a genuine Yixing clay or an imitation? Certain clays continues to absorb the substances in tea.Is the pot too thin or too small? Heat retention is a key factor in good infusion. Thinness of material and smallness in size are not good in heat retention. One way round it is by introducing a hot water bath for the teapot during infusion. The original meaning of chahai, before the intermediate teapot was popular, refers to that container for the hot bath. And the original intent of the Shuiping teapot style was exactly for submerging into the hot bath. However, that’s a lot of work for a small cup of tea.Another way is to use a shorter infusion time for smaller pots, say 2-3 minutes. To make sure you have a full enough body, you may have to break some of the leaves before dropping. That way you have more surface areas for infusion, but that also means easier release of bitterness and astringency. Milan Xiang is certainly not the easiest tea in the world for this technique.One good way to experiment with your own setup is to use less tealeaves in the beginning and very gradually increase the amount the other time you make tea. Do the same with temperature and duration. Do them all separately though, ie, change only one variable in one series of experiment., otherwise, you never know which is the contributive factor to the taste effect.Have fun.@ Tea Soul, in those days they were still trying to maintain a difference. Nowadays it is pretty much homogenized. However, I agree with you that the tea from Shaoxing are not as good. In pure gastronomical terms, the better ones are not produced in the West Lake areas now, although farmers move them there to put on the origin labels and sold to wholesalers as genuine ones.
In terms of pouring speed, these pots are above average. The larger one, the zhu-ni one by Xu Yan Ping, with a 200 ml capacity, pours at 12.5 ml/s, is actually even faster than the smaller one which is at 11.8 ml/s. The classic and most popular shuiping design, for example, seldom goes above 10 ml/s. Most Yixing pots are in the range of 8 ~ 10 ml/s.
However, some people are concerned with how long it takes to empty the pot because they think that the pot cools down while pouring and the remaining of the pour, since it is still infusing the leaves, but now at a lower temperature, will not be infusing in an optimum condition, and thereby lowers the quality of the overall infusion.That is a valid concern under these conditions:- The infusion time is short, e.g. 30 sec etc, so the 10~20 seconds become relatively significant.
- The pot is not thick enough or not of genuine Yixing clay, so it is not holding enough heat to stablize the temperature during pouring. The Chaozhou hand-thrown clay teapot, for example, is not good for this reason.
Since you are using the pot for Longjing or Puer, which I think better quality is brought out only through enough infusion time, so I think the pots are good for you.Here is one reason why Yixing teapots were not intended for ultra fast pouring:In Chaozhou, where they used to put out 3 cups, no more, no less, regardless of the number of people to be served, every time tea is infused in a small pot, the tea was poured around the 3 cups in a circle. The pouring time had to allow the tea maker enough time to even out the concentration in each cup by going around the cups with enough repetitions. This was where the term “General Guan going round the city wall” (關公巡城) came from.I think I should do a demo later when this busy tea season is over.
