Background Today I drank a sheng pu’er tea that was produced in 2013 by the Nan Qiao tea factory. Nan Qiao is a small / medium sized tea factory based in the Menghai region of Yunnan province’s Xishuangbanna prefecture. They usually specialize in wet piling (wo dui 渥堆 in Chinese) tea, and producing ripe pu’er. … [Read more…]
Background Today I realized that I have not yet written a blog post about Wulong Tea (烏龍茶, or wulong cha in Chinese). For this reason I felt inspired to drink a spring harvest wulong tea from Taiwan, and write this blog post. Green teas are as close to no oxidation as one can get while … [Read more…]
Overview Today’s blog post is a followup to an earlier post of mine in which I brewed a tea 30 times in order to see whether or not I believed if a tea company’s claims about a 5 gram sample of Wild Tong Mu Jin Jun Mei that could be brewed 30 times had any truth. I … [Read more…]
Background Today I woke up to very cold temperatures and a substantial amount of rain. This is quite a change from the hot 85 degree days of the past week or two. For this reason my plans to exercise outside with friends were cut short, and instead I stayed in and brewed some tasty tea … [Read more…]
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…]