North Korean Tea to Make the Dear Leader Proud

Circa 2004, my friend Sof returned from Seoul with this azalea tea harvested from BaekDu Mountain - the birth place of none other than the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Yes the very same Dear Leader who is the revered inventor of "double bread with meat" and who is also continuing on in our collective virtual memories as the man who looked at things. (My personal favorite is DL looking at squid but I digress.)

In reading the stories on the web, it all started with an obsessive dream of a South Korean tea drinker named Nam Bong Oo(남봉우).  He illegally snuck into North Korea through the Chinese border risking his life evading North Korean soldiers even encountering a bear in search of the existence of this tea which he believed held the "fragrance of the nation".  True or not as related to a women's magazine, such efforts are many notches above vendors visiting tea farms.  However after the start of thawing relations between the two Koreas, Mr. Nam was able to commercialize tea production in 2000. And now you can be party to this tea through (teastory.co.kr) which processes and packages this tea(백산차) or through other Korean resellers which sell pu-erh as well. (This is an aside but you can see chaye.kr's Menghai cake prices are not that good.)

I had this azalea tea languishing in my tea closet for nine years and I brought it out for a brew. Could this be the very type of tea that the Dear Leader himself could have imbibed on occasion?   He is reputed to be more of a Hennessy XO man. Tea probably was not the drink of choice for his Pleasure Palace with the Joy Brigade.  Purported to help bronchitis, colds, skin diseases,  gastric ulcers,  and infertility, this azalea tea has fortitude that would make any comrade swell with pride. Don't let the light color of the brew fool you.  Extremely spicy with turpentine notes,  I feared for my liver and kidneys. This tea had not mellowed out one iota in 9 years and it took about 6 cups to tire out the leaves somewhat.

A little more research reveals the scientific name for the tea plant is Ledum palustre which is also known as Marsh Labrador Tea - a homeopathic remedy in the West. It also contains toxic terpenes that are not friendly to the central nervous system when taken in large doses. I have to admit I am feeling not well. I think I have to eat a big bowl of ice cream to neutralize the toxins.

Discourse on Honey and Puerh

Some nights when my tea selection turns out to be particularly boring (I'm looking at you Haiwan Peacock Quest...), I'll open up my honey drawer to cheer things up a bit.  Actually the photo below is a bit misleading as I also have 5 alternative locations where various honeys are stashed including two different desks at work.  Honeys last for an eternity so you can take tiny spoonfuls periodically for a decade and still not finish it off even when you hold official honey tasting parties and impromptu tastings when friends drop by.  Half of these honeys are older than a decade and the flavors are still quite lively. Some have developed more complex flavors as they liquify and ferment on top.

I've been bending my noodle wondering if honey or pu-erh provide a wider range of flavors. I'm settling on honey because it's directly effected by the tremendous botanic availability of a particular area which can be a single varietal such as chestnut trees in bloom or an incalculable mix of florals. Even a single mountain can produce vastly different honeys within its micro-regions dependent on the season.  

You can see how extremely dark the Miel de Rangiroa is compared to the creamy multi-floral honey from Waimea on the left.  The Rangiroa honey is made by French bees taken to French Polynesia by a French beekeeper Meri Tuam and has a lovely dusky and uniquely sour flavor that is uniquely not french.  One day I will return to this atoll, swim over the Tiputa Pass, and then fill my suitcase with this dark wonder and my life will be complete.  This dark honey tastes very different from another dark varietal - Black Forest pine honey hiding in the back which has a dominant mineral profile. Can you imagine what comes out of the body of  bees who collect honeydew secreted by insects who live on the pine sap. A German friend brought back his uncle's pine honey which is now long gone and replaced by a supermarket jar which is also surprisingly good.  

The first left two honeys both exhibit an effervescent quality that I prize- it's the proverbial champagne on your tongue.  The Ratcliff's honey is an excellent summer multi-floral that I picked up for ~$3 in a chain grocery store in the Isle of Man after hiking around Cregneash. The Manx are so lucky to have such top notch honey and I wonder if they even know it. For the most part, you can expect excellent honey from islands and from the edges of the world.   It's a shame that blandly sweet clover honey dominates the world market.  

The last honey in the row(Lusern) I brought back from South Africa after a particularly grueling stint for work years ago but I love South Africa and the warm South Africans. This Lusern Heuning has a medicinal and unfamiliar herbal flavor which is one of the most sheng-like honey in my collection along with the arbutus honey.

When I think of my jars of hard-earned honey that were lugged home from the various corners of the earth or brought by friends, most jars have an abundance of memory attached to them.  I am a bit sad that I have purchased most of my puerh collection quite anonymously online. Even when a tea comes into your life without any more effort than a paypal payment, it does not diminish a power of a good tea.   Despite their pedestrian internet provenance, a tea can be loved and shared amongst friends. 

Brick from Middle Earth - What would Frodo Drink?

I set myself to fold 4 loads of laundry tonight before my husband comes back from levitation class.  But you know who would rather be steeped in tea doings.  After MarshalN revealed that my 25yo mystery brick had been roasted multiple times,  the DIY in me wants to give it a go.  I realize the problem with experimenting with my current collection is that the price of failure is too high since I bought most of my stuff 6-7 years ago. Even the cheapest 2004 sheng brick which I bought for $2.50 is now mysteriously selling for $40.

No matter, I just need cheap raw material. I'm willing to spend 10 bucks on a science project.  I need some disposable shu bricks and to learn the secret to a good roast. I went to Oakland Chinatown and got a 3 dollar barnyard shu that I'm going to wetstore for a year and then roast.  Should roasting should be done in an oven, fry pan, or a popcorn popper which is the preferred home roaster for coffee hounds?  I'm going to try over the weekend pan roasting a little loose pu-erh and flaked brick samples to start.

In the meanwhile, I opened this brick up for a tasting. You could see from the neifei that this was the shu of choice for dwarves of Moria- what else would they drink after a hard day's work mining mithril?  When I take 4 brews of it, it's a muddy earthy pondy unpleasant shu - definitely meant for the orcs of Mordor- they probably put a lump of it in their leather water bag.

Let me entertain my hobbit loving friends and others on what teas Middle Earthlings would drink:

• Smaug - no drinking, just hoarding all the vintage puerh of Middle Earth (Song Pin Hao, Tongchang Hao, Puqing Hao) which was simply in decrepit condition due to the dampness and awful dragon aroma
• Gandalf - aged sheng from Smaug's lair after using his wizardry to remove mold and said offensive dragon aroma.
• Bilbo Baggins -plain black tea before his "adventure".   After his return, keemun, yancha, and aged sheng which he split with Gandalf .  
• Frodo - Golden Yunnan. Really prefers uncomplicated mellow brews after the whole ring incident. He really never could get into pu-erh so he gave Bilbo's stash of aged sheng away to Sam before leaving Middle Earth with the Elves. 
• Hobbits - just plain black tea, don't go in for that foreigner brew.
• Dwarves - Elder dwarves go for wet stored sheng, particularly pure Lao Banzhang which make beards grow woolier.  Younger elves go for the punchy new born sheng- all wild tree of course!
• Aragorn - aged sheng only after reclaiming throne of Gondor. Just new Wild De Hong sheng during his days as a ranger.
• Faramir- Aged sheng for special occasions after Gandalf introduces him to pu-erh. He's working off that tong of stone-pressed Yiwu young sheng that's a bit too fragrant for aging.
• Elves of Rivendell - Oolong (floral Dong Dings of course!)
• Elves of Lothlorien - Silver Needles
• Saruman -  First generation De Hong Pao after he turned to the dark side. No need to ask. 
• Riders of Rohan - Wet stored shu!  Barnyard earth flavors are prized by the Horse Lords of the Mark.
• Ents - don't drink tea, kind of gross if you think about it...
• Sauron - tough one...

(For those who are not Tolkien fans, this Middle Earth has nothing to do with the Middle Kingdom- 中国.)

Mystery Brick From The Past

The joy of being a packrat is that sometimes you refind a treasure you had completely forgotten about.  Once I found two crisp hundred dollar bills in my copy of the Wind in the Willows. I was happy for a few seconds, but then soon felt quite defeated knowing how many books I trade and donate. But this week, I was richly rewarded by my forgetful ways.

So let's continue on with this mystery from circa 2000. Even before I started drinking pu-erh, I used to order oolong from Taiwan.  In one shipment they had mysteriously included this brick for free.  It smelled so funky back then that I immediately wrapped it up in a brown paper bag but I couldn't force myself to throw it away.  I vaguely thought it was Tibetan tea and maybe I would be lucky enough to find yak butter someday to brew it up proper.  I wondered how the vendor thought this gnarly brick would fit into the delicate sensibilities of an oolong drinker but I am happy they did.  I stashed this brick away in various kitchen cabinets forgotten over a decade until this week. 

You can see the leaves are rough and twiggy and  that I had made serious inroads in drinking it last week.  There is a sticker on the wrapper which lists http://verytea.com.tw/ but I got this tea via a different vendor which I can no longer remember despite a diligent search. The wrapper definitely is new since it has verytea's phone number on it. I also tried taking the way back machine and looking through their website to even figure out if verytea ever sold this brick on their on-line catalog. No luck.  (This is an aside, but it's pretty fun to do time travel with the way back machine to check out pu-erh selections and prices from the past. I should do a post next week. But have a look at these sites that use static html-  tuochatea in 2005,  Holy Mountain in 2005.  Dang... I really missed some gems... )

Only in the very first brew I detected a subtle mold flavor which I recognize as wet storage, but it was not unpleasant.  Even with my summer allergies, I can tell there was something special going on. This twiggy brick had more layers of complexity, medicinal bark overtones, camphor than any other shu I've tasted which are from a narrow range of  Menghai, CNNP, Feng Qing, Haiwan, et al.  Unlike most of the shu's I tolerate, there really was a there there.  And it left a lovely sweetness on my tongue for an hour afterwards. I was so taken aback that this brick was so much better than I expected, I drank this tea four times during the weekend with different brew parameters to make sure.  You can brew it dark which brings out a roast coffee flavor.  Unfortunately this brick lasts only two steeps.

This tea must have been wet-stored even if briefly.  There were carbonized black hard leaves which Jason points out in his blog as evidence of wet-storage.  I did see a few white dots of mold just in one section.  What's making this tea so above my ho-hum shus?   The question begs to be asked, is it complexity from the wet storage or the decade in dry storage or both? I think the decade of dry storage definitely aired out that barnyard smell but the extra something special is definitely from the early wet storage because my 2001 FengQing does not have this special depth (for a shu).

But then I finally spend $15 to get the handwriting character plugin for Pleco on my ipad so I can figure out what the wrapper says. I spend a painful amount of time wiggling my fingers to draw the label text just get "Taipei City Rd."  But then the back wrapper says-  年份:十五年 (niánfèn- a particular year: 15 years). OMG, it was 15 years when it came to me (or maybe less if the vendor is not to be trusted.). It's now a 25 yr. old. OMG. It's not the most mind blowing tea but it was free and it sure beats all my other shu's hands down.

Wet storage on a shu seems kinda dangerous,  just a step away from compost.  I procured mostly high end Menghai shus and gong-ting tribute beengs but maybe I should have been slumming it with the cheap rough bricks with a Guangzhou past.   Now this gem has given a new path for my shu drinking.

2006 Star of Bulang $156 on Verdant Tea is $17 on Taobao

In my previous post, I essentially claimed Verdant Tea was massively overcharging customers for a low end product- an eye-popping $156 for the Yong Ming 2006 "Star of Bulang".   To be clear, I support Western pu-erh vendors that provide interesting selections or even charge more for premiums  products. I'm mostly against Western vendors that charge arm and a leg for low-end stuff glorified with a story.

 I had confirmed with MarshalN my suspicions on Verdant Tea  but I wanted to also provide my readers with concrete proof and also a simple way you can do a sanity check on prices.  David Duckler wrote me and claimed "Our markup is extremely low."  You can now make up your own mind against the 900% markup compared to the Chinese price as shown below.

I don't know Chinese. Sometimes babelcarp has the desired terms in their glossary such as factory names, but I had to hunt for desired chinese characters provided by puerhshop.com and the puerh wiki entry and used a translator to double check some things. I then went on TaoBao.com  (ebay of China) and typed in 永明茶厂  布朗之星 :

布朗之星 = "Star of Bulang"   永明茶厂 = "Yong Ming Tea Factory"

We see that the supposed "ultra premium" Yong Ming Star of Bulang sheng is going for a mere 108 yuan which is about $17 taobao.

Update: 10-03-2012 Verdant Tea claimed that the "Star of Bulang" that they are selling is not the Star of Bulang but the Bulang Qing Bing.  However a taobao search for their Bulang (永明茶厂布朗山乔木青饼), we can see 2007 versions for less than $10 with the cheapest at $6.30:

As mentioned, selling a "Star of Bulang" which is not a Star of Bulang is misleading but this is still moot when the price of a 2007 version is going for as cheap as 40 yuan($6.30). Beengs from low-end factories like Yong Ming do not have a 2600%+ increase for the same cake released only a year apart ($6 to $156). Even cakes from high end factories don't have a 100% increase between years. Given the 2007 version goes for as low as $6.30, the 2006 Bulang Qing Bing should not be over $17 regardless.

Whether or not Verdant Tea was selling the Star of Bulang and switched to the Qing Bing, their markup is eyepopping. I would not consider this an "extremely low markup".

If Verdant Tea is in fact being scammed and mistakenly paying a really high price for this low-end tea and passing the blunder onto the customer, then I guess it's definitely one more argument against buying pu-erh from clueless Western vendors.  You will be essentially paying at least $100 more for his opinion and marketing stories around the tea than rather than actual value.   It's 3:30 am Sunday morning so you can see I really wanted to take great care in not putting negative feedback about a vendor unless I had reasonable cause.

One of the things I am trying to achieve in this blog is to make sure novice pu-erh drinkers benefit from whatever little I did learn the hard way.   I personally wasted not an insignificant sum of money on Western vendors who knew little about pu-erh but charged me outrageous prices for what ended up being less than mediocre sheng I could have gotten for tenth of the cost.  So by the time I figured out what was good, I had already blown my tea budget and was stuck with overpriced duds. If you do spend $150 on a 2006 beeng, you should make sure you found a premium beeng worthy of your hard earned money that really does hold aging potential.  Verdant Tea probably is not alone in the ridiculous up-charge but I am giving them specifically a hard time because their prices are above board outrageous and due to David Duckler's insistence on his supposed "expertise" in pu-erh and superior curation. Here are some other aspects of their business I find misleading to the consumer

• David renames Yong Ming Factory to "Yong Ming Workshop" since Verdant Teas makes a big do about not dealing with big factories. He states of his source"Wang Yanxin has amassed the most unique and outstanding collection of pu’er we know of through dedicated work with small growers in stead of the large workshops. " on Why Verdant Tea is Different. But YongMing is a nothing special factory selling low end stuff.  Menghai Tiandiren Tea Factory is also a pretty big low-end factory that used to make cakes for CNNP.  
• Verdant Tea also makes it hard to see what pu-erh you are really buying- i.e. the description seems be deliberately hiding the real factory names so you cannot do comparison shopping. "2004 Willow Grove Workshop?" MarshalN has kindly translated the factory 勐海楊記天緣茶廠 which literally means "Menghai Yang's Sky Serendipity Tea Factory" which he found for less than $10 for the 2005 version. Where does "Willow Grove Workshop" come from? Or where does "Peacock Village" from their Tiandiren shu come from?

David also wrote me how he carefully "curates" his selections and that he has been "training under a pu'er master, tasting 5-10 pu'ers a day for months". So when I read his recommended "Intro to Pu'er, An Investor Guide to Sheng", I am surprised he states:

"A brand-new sheng should exhibit three main characteristics if it is to become a great tea. It should be sweet, smooth, and have a flavor or interest that you could see developing into something amazing."

I need not stress that that is the kind of sheng he is selling. I highly recommend MarshalN's post on the futility of chasing taste.   There has been a trend in the last few years for factories to produce sweeter fragrant cakes with more buds and young leaves manipulated to be consumed now. There is enough empirical evidence that sweet smooth cakes have shown NOT to age well.  Just flip through the half-dipper.  No one really knows definitively what ages well but strength (cha qi) and presence of huigan and kuwei is often mentioned, as well as complexity from wild tree.   For a Western vendor trying to sell sheng to new pu-erh drinkers, they have to carry sheng that can be drunk now to beginners which is not necessarily the tea that will age best.

I want to spend time writing posts about the appreciation of tea and not being ripped off or being scammed.  It's unfortunate that the pu-erh market is filled with so many gaps in knowledge that the consumer can be taken for quite a ride. Good night!