Lao Ban Zhang Tea at New Record Price

Lao Ban Zhang is an area around three small villages on a southwesterly line. It is composed of perhaps twenty to thirty mountains that have become famous for their tea. This year the prices for tea in this area hit a new high after an army convoy rolled in and bought out the entire spring harvest one week ago. Now the later, lower grade tea has been priced higher than even at its peak in 2007, before the collapse of 2008. While we do not make large purchases of tea, we get a few samples, and even trade a woman for some of her LaoBanZhang, which she picks wild.

The tea from this sandy sometimes orange/ochre soil has a natural smokey complex not imparted by the cooking. Many refined tea drinking of the north will recoil at the strong green tastes in this Puer, and indeed many of the northen Chinese puer enthusiasts will say a puer is not a puer until it has sat for ten years. The thicker, heaver leaves, and larger tree and root systems of the Yunnan old tea trees mean there is much to naturally age inside the Yunnan tea leaf. Menghai, situated as it is deep down with Laos to the South and Myanmar to the West, has an ecology that is among the most pristine in southeast asia. This microbiology also creates chemical reactions which slowly sweeten and deepen the taste of the tea. Of course when one must wait ten years for a tea to ripen, one must also buy the tea ten years before, when it is a raw puer.

So what are the tastes we look for in the raw puer? What flavors now are necessary for a tea after ten years to be not thin but full, not bitter but sweet, not old but ripe?

New Year in the Golden Triangle: menghai water wars

Menghai today celebrated their new year with one of the best community rituals I've seen: the water festival. We weren't entirely sure what to expect and now wear borrowed clothes (and shoes) from a friend. Even though I took off my boots after the first attack, they will take days to dry. Being a foreign guest a hotel was no security from an ambush that left me soaked but with a bucket which I then put to use! Later I was invited into the very pickup that drenched me, and we spent the afternoon driving through the town between water fillups, slashing water down and across at victims and enemies (on this journey husband and wife left their camera in the hotel room). So no video except a short clip of what happened to me when I tried to get revenge on the marauders from across the street. I realized then water hitting my face could actually hurt like a punch.

At one point a small army of adolescents in yellow shirts came through with pickups and water guns, and later, in our own pickup, we faced off with an actual army transports with tarps and troops standing in knee high water hurling buckets down on everyone they came across. Only the elderly are spared in these intense encounter. Next year we will bring a waterproof diving camera to capture the full intensity!

An enjoyable but tiring day. Needless to say we slept well that night.

Briefly, there is a story behind this ritual (which spreads across much of south-east asia), but it varies region to region. Here there is the tale that a period of drought in ancient times was caused by a powerful wizard who had so much fire in his head it drove the clouds away. His compassionate daughters cut his head off, which burned at such a high temperate that they had to continually pour water on it...

The video below is of me getting my head cooled...

White Tea Bought along the Road

This year we found some white teas with sparkling notes of flavor. Many roads have been made in the last few years, slicing through the hills of the hinterlands of the largely undeveloped north-east Fujian.

Weaving along the roads recently sheared through the mountains we pass dirt that is grey, brown, red, purple, and of course the quintessential orange. When there are tea bushes and farmers picking tea atop the brighter colored soil we stop to buy samples.

Northern Fujian's back roads more often than not end at Buddhist retreats, slipping through time. Nuns here also pick tea which they often cook into red teas.

Sometimes there is just tea out drying by the side of the road, and if the air is clear we stop here too to talk and perhaps visit the trees this tea was picked from.

Tai Mu Shan

Historic Tai Mu Mountain mentioned in the Classic of Tea by Lu Yu as a famed tea growing area for white tea preferred by the Song emperor over one thousand years ago. On the northern Fujian coast, this rocky high point is the legendary birth-place of white tea. Here there are towers of bare rock face, sometimes guazed in cool mist. Much of the time covered in clouds, opaque at night, and during the day blinding white, it is a national park.

As one approaches, Tai Mu Shan looks on the outside like any of many less than fascinating tourist destinations in China, but once through gauntlet of stores selling items beneath the dignity of people, including even green tea dissembling as white, a wonderful park opens out.

Rising above are wide gray swaths of soft, undulating granite. Shocks of the hardest stone left by whatever geologic firestorm squeezed the light colored molten rock to the surface. There are bubbles and holes with rich orange earth beneath we we gently ascend through a green wooded canyon, gradually closing in.

Holes are cut in the board-walk for the spindly trees, and various walks snake off. A detailed map could rate them by their difficulty. One is a new, almost entirely flat grade suspended on the sheer southern face, a stunning and peaceful way to descend from the top to the famous cave that gives this park its fame. Other paths ascend on roughly hewn stairs, and one approach even snakes under the cool and damp, massive tumbles of granite, foliage and moss, crossing an underground reservoir on stepping stones, where I had to take off my backpack to pass.

When we finally reach the cave entrance, there is only a single long and narrow tea tree growing behind a fence. There are shrines, and some monks tell us the tea trees have been cut down. He waves to a far hillside perhaps a kilometer distant where tea is terraced, and says, on a good day we can see the sea from here. I ask if he has some place he can go where the tourists don’t come. He says he does. Inside the Buddhist temple there is a vegetarian restaurant, and after two volunteers there ask to take a photo with us, we decide to eat with them. In minutes two bowls of two different soups, which should be called stews for all the various vegetables and shoots and mushrooms in them. The soup was so good we wrote a note praising it and encouraged them to begin placing such notes on their wall.

(video: walking up, cave, tea plant, inside cave - mar talking, monk, into temple, eating, pull back from monestary)

Two categories of Puer: Sheng vs Shou

Shou Puer is a relatively new processing technique. Possibly the oldest known method for creating a puer, and the first step toward creating any modern puer, is the Shai Qing Mao Cha method shown here in a video. This makes a loose leaf sheng or raw puer that originally made Yunnan famous for its tea. Traditionally a couple is given this tea at marriage which they then store as a retirement present to drink in old age, to impart health and help them relax. Of course the idea of waiting twenty or more years for a tea to properly cure requires more patience than many people have. It relegates the tea artisan to a niche market, because traditional collectors were only old wealthy families in Tibet, Guangdong, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Some larger farms have storehouses of sheng puer dating back fifty years, but these teas are then sold at auction for a high price. So the market was kept small, with new tea seldom bought at retail because of its bitter tannins and old tea priced out of the market. In the 1970's Yunnan puer makers began to experiment with an artificial aging process in order to make their tea marketable quicker. The idea was to place the Shai Qing Mao Cha in "saunas" - hot and damp rooms - which accelerated the natural process of anaerobic fermentation by which sheng puers naturally age. In six months of "sauna" a green grassy and astringent raw puer leaf could be transformed into a sweet or earthy, mellow infusion.

This rapid aging changes the puer taste characteristics and is not without dangers. The shou puer chambers must be sterile, as high heat, humidity, and darkness are environments in which many human pathogens thrive. Dangerous fungi and mold can grow in these "saunas" and the shou puer spoiled. After such an investment of tea and time, so-called inferior products are rarely discarded but rather sold at a cheaper price to be offloaded on unsuspecting and ignorant customers. Even when the shou puer aging process is carried out by a master the resulting tea develops unique flavor characteristics and no longer has the complexity in taste of a naturally aged puer. High heat deactivates some bio-activity in the Shai Qing Mao Cha, and by forcing the reaction in cooked puer many secondary and even tertiary flavor inducing reactions do not occur. As a result cooked or shou puer will tend toward a sour, sweet or loamy taste whereas old raw develops a range of astringent to mulched hay overtones, as the tanins and fats naturally form simple and complex sugars. Raw puer can age unevenly and vary more year to year than a cooked puer, and some raw puer's only taste wonderful after twenty to thirty years. Sheng or raw puer also develops distinctive psychoactive properties after about fifteen years of aging. Shou puer also can benefit from aging, and often a mixture of various tea buds and leaves are mixed to increase the flavor range in higher quality shou puers. Both types of tea can yield wonderful and inspiring tastes, maybe something like comparing impressionistic and renaissance paintings, the latter's crisp lines a metaphor for sheng puer properly aged.

Also, it should be noted, age alone cannot guarantee a young tea grown in worn-out soil will become a good tea. Recently a number of old teas from 1990 central Yunnan grown around Dali have come to market with a bitterness that no amount of age will remove.

Tea and Time: a comparison of two Menghai teas ten years apart.

Probably the oldest known method for creating a puer is the Shai Qing Mao Cha method which we describe in the post and video blog previous. In the past this tea was pressed into blocks to make it easier to transport, but now it is possible to buy these leaves loose, exactly as they were fixed by the farm that grew them. We have come to prefer this style of tea because it is often cleaner and closer to the source of its creation. So we go from farm to farm looking for batches of tea packed away. This year we came across two pure Menghai teas that have captivated us. One is from 2007 and the other is from 1996. Both are Shai Qing Mao Cha, but as you can see the colors of these two infusions are very different!



The chemical pathways taken by tea over time are incredibly complex and are perhaps the most rewarding aspect of tea. Chinese describe teas as sleeping once they have been fixed. This metaphor extends to the first infusions and washing of tea leaves in which the tea is said to awaken. Tea undergoes primary, secondary, tertiary and more reactions over a period of thirty and more years. The aromas become flavors, and the flavors become textures. Eventually the best old puers lose all aroma and take on a dense texture upon which drops, or pearls of the tea liquor, will even bounce upon the surface-tension of the resulting infusion. But there is a more profound transformation by which tea becomes more psychoactive over time. As tastes within the first five and then ten years stimulate different areas of the tongue, mouth, throat and nose, the initial wake-fulness sensations in a tea begin to stimulate different locals in the head and brain. For teas a decade and older the well known stimulant effect of caffeine becomes a subtle and nuanced sensation. For some puers there are psychotropic elements created by the yeasts and other microbes living on the tea, but for other teas the biochemistry and psychoactive qualities are less straightforward proceeding from reactions within the tea leaf itself.