Today's Agenda

Today's agenda: got the shengpu up in the Sentra.

Go to room 1-12, 

tell 'em Miss Lin sent ya.

Please make your brewings clean, rinse up in between.

Rule #1 about me: I am pathologically contrary. If you tell me that I have to like something, or, even worse, that it is cool to like something, then I will almost certainly dislike it, on principle.  This is not something over which I have conscious control.

So, when the (super-cute, "Mister Scruff") wrapper of "Poundcake" tells me that it says a lot about you if you not feeling us, then I am almost preternaturally indisposed to find the cake undrinkable.  Without intervention of any decision-making process, that's just how it is.

On the bright side, this cake ($50/200g) was green and fruity; Miss Lin described it as being "outlier Yiwu", which is accurate.  There is a hint of sourness at the back, which terrifies me, because it has a leafy green-brown flavour that tastes a lot like everything I try to avoid in shengpu.  The opening infusions were much better than the tannic later infusions.

"This is quite ordinary", notes my dear wife, as she offers an opinion in passing.  I silently rejoice, wondering if I might not be mad, after all.

Calm as possible, make the deal go through

$38/200g is, on the grand scale of modern tea, reasonably affordable.  I love the way that the wrapper says "Will this do?", as if Miss Lin ran out of time or ideas.  You couldn't say that about some of the 2016 cakes with their plush wrappers!

The leaves are rich, and dark, and spicy.  The pale yellow soup is thick, and comforting, and very sweet.  I appreciate the beefy, almost meaty, aftertaste.  The dry opening is so dry that I am half-expecting to find grapeskins mixed in there with the leaves.  It chugs on nicely, with the buttery scent of a clean wok'ing.

It is a solid little drinker, but the background has a hint of sourness that terrifies me; those of us in cooler climes ware the sourness like a werewolf fears silver.  "Nice, but not for me", I hurriedly conclude.

I got a hundred bricks, 14.5 a piece

Now this one - this one is a bad boy.  You know I saved the best until last, and it's absolutely true in this case.  I totally dig 200% the cheesy old wrapper that looks like a leftover from the 1950s.  This is real Communist space-race tea.  Admittedly it's from 2005, but the ambience is very "planned economy".

This is another White Whale, and old Captain Ahab knows total embargaination when he sees it.

Like the Whale, this is clean orange in its brew.  Like my purple-wrapper Dingxing (inexplicably prized from the hands of the dodgiest Taobao seller imaginable), it is sweet in its rustic Yiwu stylings.  Unlike either of those two, it has a complexity in its scent, with floral summer-flowers.  Hell, it even leaves an explicit cooling sensation in the nose.  The nose!

So good is this tea, that it even managed to see off the cold that I had incurred recently, after hitting some deadlines.  It cured the common cold, you read it here first.

The first half-dozen infusions are the best for this tea; while remaining clean, sweet and robust, it fades a little after that.  For $88/400g, I think it has earned to right to do so.  Complaining about this later infusions of this tea would be like complaining about the colour of the leather interior of a classic Jag that someone sold you for 10% market value.

The tongs, they are a-purchasin'.

2015 Green Shroom (w2t)

Nothing helps a situation like a serious cup of tea.

Looming deadlines? Cup of tea.

Student trying to convince you to let them submit an unready doctoral thesis, while their primary supervisor has disappeared to South America? Cup of tea.

Electricity and water not working while the builders try their hardest to destroy what little remains of your sanity? Cup of tea.

No, you're right: functioning electricity was an aspiration, not a requirement.

Much of this last year, I've enjoyed tea in one of two places: (i) feet up back at Chez Moi, huddled over my teatable, while children bounce off the walls; (ii) sitting in my lab, huddled over my computer keyboard, while researchers bounce off the walls.  Both of these seem to work well to a surprising degree.

I've noticed that I've developed an unexpected ability to enjoy tea at the unlikeliest of times - by setting up my secondary teatable in my office, it's genuinely surprising how much enjoyment I can get out of even the most mediocre tea when it's brewed right.  And by "right", I mean "strong".

Mediocre tea is no short supply: much of the intake has been "gift tea", provided by generous colleagues as they come back from China and India.  Gift tea looks nice, and is characterised by being, let's say, "accessible".  It needs to be inoffensive, by definition.  Good tea is rarely inoffensive, however.

Wimpy wulong?  Just double the amount and perform a "flash brew".  Humdrum hongcha?  Crank up the amount of leaf in the pot, and enjoy the tippy first infusions.  Dodgy Darjeeling?  There's little that maximum amounts can't overcome.

"If in doubt, just overwhelm them with violence."  It's a family motto that I like to like by.

Rarely, I get to drink outside, but that's another great way to improve even the laziest leaf (pictured above, in that "sweet spot" between the students leaving at the end of the academic year, and before the tourists arrive in their bazillions).

Thankfully, w2t has made a tea that (i) I love so much that it seems too big to fail, no matter how it's brewed; and (ii) is unavailable, naturally.  Perhaps the latter is part of its appeal - the one that got away.

When you're making tea that looks like something from Super Mario, then "you had me at hello".  If this were available, my entire life would be filled with such cuties.  Perhaps it is good, then, that (as ever) I got to the party too late, and this had sold out before I got around to drinking the sample from "MISS LIN" (chortle).

As the kettle fires up, I find myself humming the theme-tune to Super Mario Bros.  At one point, I'm sure that I even said, "OBEY WARIO - DESTROY MARIO" to my youngest son.

Dubs (i.e., w2t) has morphed from being super-cheap-and-cheerful into a more premium outfit, and that's entirely fair.  Miss Lin (chortle) makes great tea, and if she wants to charge a living wage on top of it, then I'm not going to whine.

I realise that this makes me a massive hypocrite: the Hobbes from nearly ten years ago, back when the ol' Half Dipper started off, would have been vociferous in condemning a vendor for charging for their tea.  Now, I'm more laissez-faire.  If the tea's right (and w2t's tea is right), then I'm fine with Miss Lin making her margin.

As a thought experiment, I asked myself if I would be equally content with another vendor doubling their prices.  I concluded that I would not be content.  Why, then, am I content for w2t to charge thus?  Perhaps it's personality: personality goes a long way.  The cakes are great, and they have personality.  Additionally, and I think this is the crux for me, there is always a bargain available for sale.  You can grab a huge stack of Elephant Cakes, or Rocket Yiwu, or whatever it might be, for a good and fair price.  That helps a great deal, and discriminates between "ripping off customers wholesale" and "offering something for everyone".

This is, by far, the best tea that I've had for some time.  It is Menghai to the max, but it has a hint of complex darkness.  It  has the heavy scent that matches its dark leaves.  It is green, and especially violent, because I used the whole sample.

This is my kind of town: strong, dark, and unexpectedly fragrant.  The fragrance won't last as it ages, I suspect, but it is a consequence of the complexity of the leaves.  If I wrote "it tastes like a bizarrely-delicious broccoli" you'd be forgiven for thinking it was dreadful, but, really, it is a complex mixture of fruits and vegetal tones that thrills me.

On checking my notes, I was amused to see that this was the last tea that I drank before the builders pulled one side of our house off, in a process that has only just completed, some 11 months later.  The memory of this tea stays with me, and I sorely wish that I'd bought at least one tuocha while it was still available.

Drink 'em while you've got 'em!

Trips

William of Bannacha has lain tea thricely upon us.  When a man married to JINGMAI LADIES (probably in the singular) sends you Jingmai tea, you take it seriously.

These are, it would seem, the first 2015 teas that I have written about on this humble web-site; I have to create a "2015" tag for the occasion.  Let's drink some twenty-fifteen!

You know the drill by now: in tea, as in life, I start at the bottom and work up.  The least assuming of these three teas is the "Jingmai Natural", which is an amusing name in the sense that the other teas, by implication, are unnatural.  The price for this cake is not (yet?) listed at William's web-site, but I imagine it will be lowlowlow, based on previous pricing.

He be selling it low.  Low.

It has the smallest leaves of the three samples, and is all sugary sweetness.  It is rounded, especially saccharine, and perhaps none too fragrant.  It is not by any means complex, but is straightforward and enjoyable.  Combined with an assumedly rock-bottom price (the 2014 price was a shocking 7 Euro/200g), this might we worth considering.  Nice, probably cheap, I can get behind.

However, for now, we have larger aquatic lifeforms to saute.

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...starting with the "Jingmai Single Tree".

This fad for single-trees is all very well, but it doesn't necessarily make for the most complex tea.  However, we get ahead of ourselves.  The maocha, pictured above, is delightful.  The locals have done a good job of removing huangpian [yellow flakes] but the odd stem remains - I am happy to brew the odd stem, by the way.

The soup is the purest, purest yellow.  That yellow really is considerably in its purity.  It has the buttery, spring-time aroma of good processing and we conclude that all is well in Jingmai residents ability to cook their leaves.

It is vibrant and bitter, but very well-defined in its own way.  It has obvious "gushu" flavours, but perhaps reminds me a little of kudingcha: it is 1-dimensional, but that single dimension is most pleasant.  And exceptionally pure.  Does it leave you wanting more, for all that purity?

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The final act is by far the best: the "Jingmai Ancient Gardens".

I'm sure that this will be priced more cheaply than the "Single Tree", but I much prefer it: this "Ancient Garden" tea has a broader base.  In tea, as in life, one simply must appreciate a broad, well-defined base.

As with all three teas in this triptych, the leaves are well-preserved and very nicely wok'd through their shaqing [kill-green] process.

Most importantly, this "Ancient Garden" cake is just delicious to drink.

It has the vibrant spring-time freshness of good, young tea.  To those HUMBLE MORTALS who maintain that shengpu has to be old before it can be tolerated, I offer a respectful raspberry.  This tea has Jingmaishan flavour, but which is entirely complementary to the grassy power of the tea.  While grassy cakes might be questionable for aging, this big cake is ready right now: powerful, cooling, and enduring.  It is yummy and, in a very real sense, in my tummy.

If this cake sells for a price similar to the 23 Euro of the 2014, it would be foolish of me to miss buying some for immediate consumption.  The long hold on my faculties keeps the attention, and the more attention one gives this tea, the better it becomes.

Oh, the wallets, they are a-purchasin'.

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my handkerchief jumps

into the lavatory

with a loud flush