Background Today I drank an interesting kind of red tea called purple red tea. Standard red tea is made from tea leaves that are picked, fully oxidized, shaped, dried, then packaged. Purple red tea is processed in the same way, but the source material is composed of purple tea leaves rather than regular tea leaves. … [Read more…]
Background Today was a sunny, hot, and humid day. For this reason I chose to drink a tea called Huang Shan Mao Feng green tea (Huang Shan Mao Feng Lu Cha 黄山毛峰绿茶 in Chinese). Huang Shan is the mountain range near where the tea is grown in Anhui Province (An Hui Sheng 安徽省 in Chinese). … [Read more…]
Background In the world of Pu’er tea, it is very common for vendors and consumers to discuss the age of the trees used to produce any given tea. Although different people will have different things to say about tree age, it is generally believed that older trees produce better tea up to a certain point. … [Read more…]
Background Today I drank a raw pu’er tea from 2014 called Impressions. This tea is interesting because it includes blended material from various locations and harvests, rather than being a production from a single origin and time period. The vendor of this tea claims that the tea is produced from rough tea (mao cha 毛茶 … [Read more…]
Background Today I brewed some pu’er tea that I have been aging in my home for around a year. The tea is called Qi Sheng Gu. According to the vendor, Qi Sheng Gu is a fictional name for the town where this tea was produced. The only information given about this town is that it … [Read more…]
Overview After a brief hiatus due to a delayed tea shipment, I was able to write my third blog post today! This post was inspired by a marketing email sent my way by a certain tea vendor that was selling 5 grams of red tea (hong cha 红茶) for $38.00. The tea in question was … [Read more…]
Background Although June has arrived, the weather where I live has been fairly cloudy, dark, and cold. For this reason I wound up drinking a ripe pu’er tea, or shu pu’er cha (熟普洱茶) called Yang Luo Han. In the last blog post I briefly discussed sheng pu’er, or raw tea. Raw tea naturally ferments and … [Read more…]
Background Today I wound up drinking a sheng pu’er tea (生普洱茶）from 2015. For anybody who is not familiar with sheng tea, it is a kind of tea produced in China’s southern Yunnan province. The production of this kind of tea involves a light pan firing and sun drying, which allow for microbes to survive on … [Read more…]