You've probably figured this out already, but I've migrated postings to the dedicated website www.flockofteacosy.com.

That site is mostly about the modern wool felt teaware that I make -- tea cosies, coffee cozies and mug cozies as well as trivets (hot pads) and table runners.  But I also still write the occasional post about some of the wonderful teas I find or tea places I've visited.

Those can be found by choosing "Flock tastes tea" in the drop-down menu of the "Post Category" on the blog page.

Myself, I still use this site for reference and reminders of what I've tasted so am leaving it here as-is.

Fresh 2012 Bi Lo Chun from China

Just before she left for China two weeks ago my sister-in-law asked if there was anything I'd like. "Fresh tea.  Really fresh tea," I said.  And she delivered it yesterday.  What a gal.

Xi Shan Bi Lo Chun - a green tea which, according to its label, was made April 8, 2012.  That's fresh.
Tie Guan Yin - an oolong, undated but packed in individual serving-sized foil wraps
A black tea - lots of gold furry buds, without an english label but dated September 16, 2011.  Fresher than most tea you can buy in Toronto.













Xi Shan Bi Lo Chun or Green Spring Snail 
Okay, first up is the Green Spring Snail which is a baked (rather than steamed) green tea from the Jiangsu province in China.  ( I did a previous posting on another example of this type of tea last year.)

The dried tea has a distinctive gray-green colour. Click the
image to have a close look at these beautiful furred leaf buds.

According to The Tea Drinkers Handbook this tea's original name translated as "astounding fragrance" or "fragrance to cause fear and trembling" and when I snipped open the foil inner packet yesterday the aroma did indeed knock me over.  So big and fresh and sweet and green!  It was made only three weeks ago -- no wonder.

It's current name -- apparently changed by an Emperor during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), is Bi Lo Chun, sometimes translated as Pi Luo Chun, which means Green (bi) Spring (chun) Snail (lo), and is named for its coiled snail-like shape and the fact it's only manufactured in the spring from the year's earliest plucks.

Separating out the bud-sets you can see the
coiled, snail-like shape which gave it its name.

The always informative SevenCups website further explains the "Xi Shan" part of its name: Within and around the Tai Lake in Jiangsu Province is Dong Ting Mountain where Bi Luo Chun originates. Dong Ting actually refers to two mountains known as Dong Shan (East) seated on the eastern edge of the lake and Xi Shan (West) which sits on an island within Tai Hu. The taste and aroma varies between Bi Luo Chun harvested from these two mountains. Dong Shan Bi Luo Chun has darker and bigger leaves with a rich taste. Xi Shan Bi Luo Chun has small, tender leaves with a gentle taste. 

FYI the Bi Lo Chun I posted about last year was from the mountain on the other side of the lake.








The Tea
Water at 80C for 2 minutes.
I wanted to emphasise the flavours a bit so I did a longer steep than needed.  I will try this at 1 1/2 and 1 minute tomorrow for regular drinking.

The dry leaves give off a big, heady perfume which is sweetly floral with a hint of light lemon, along with a sweet vegetal aroma like steamed spinach and a faint marine (fishy) note -- along with so much else that I'm at a loss for words.  Everything about the aroma is amped.

Bright green of the tiny, tiny leaf buds.

The liquor is a pale, golden green, getting more golden as it oxidises in the glass pot next to me, and is slightly cloudy.  This is due to the teeny leaf bud hairs floating about which seem to add a firmness to the tea's mouth-feel as well.  (Cloudiness can also be due to a high L-Theanine content -- the amino acid which is credited with contributing the calming effect of tea despite its caffeine content.)

The tea has fresh light body with good briskness -- snappy I'd say.  There's a toasty nuttiness, followed by a sweet green vegetal (spinach) flavour and a light marine-ness (seaweed) which is then balanced out by a nice tartness.  Its briskness dries the sides at the back of my tongue, watering my mouth and leaving me thirst-quenched.  What a great tea!

Pale golden green liquor of
the 3-week new Bi Lo Chun.

After drinking it all day I can certainly attest to this tea's caffeine content:  I'm buzz buzz buzzing. Nothing like fresh, spring leaf buds for big fresh flavour and big caffeine.

The refreshing briskness of this Bi Lo Chun reminds me of the wonderful Ceylon tea a friend brought back from Sri Lanka for me. It also had a wonderful lemony snap to it, and became my favorite morning tea, until it was gone.  It also was a very fresh tea -- coincidence?

The thing I've found about freshly made tea is, not surprisingly, its flavour has huge breadth.  Beyond the tea type's distinctive flavour characteristics freshness delivers flavour nuances big time.  As a fresh rose blossom's aroma is so much more than just "rose" (think peppery, peach, almond), so fresh tea is more than just toasty, vegetal and/or malty.  In fresh tea those flavour notes sing with so much.  I've been drinking (mostly black) tea for decades and enjoying the way it perks me up and calms me down and has a wonderful bitter-sweet brew.  But in recent years I've had the occasional really freshly made tea and discovered a whole new world of flavour in tea.  Yahoo.  More, I say!

The shop in Shanghai where it came from...

A Ceylon from Parliament St.

It arrived in a ziplock so I've absolutely no information about this tea except that it comes from Sri Lanka, and was bought at a Sri Lankan grocery store on Parliament Street.  Which I'm going to have to visit because this is one of the nicer Ceylon tea I've had in awhile.

A medium-sized leaf and an even coppery colour.

After the wet leaves fill your nose with their damp, lightly toasty, tangy raiseny aroma there's a fresh, light perfumey note of spices in the cinnamon and clove range.  How lovely!

The liquor is rich red-brown and light to medium bodied -- a clean feel on my tongue with just the lightest furring, and a bit of briskness.  The spice notes have become a faint honeyed floral note in the mouth.

Caffeine in Tea -- more info

Hey -- even more great  info about how much caffeine is in tea.

Camellia Sinensis -- tea store and importer extraordinaire in Montreal -- did a test of their own and you can find the results here.  They're also included in their book, recently translated in to english.

Available for sale at their site

What I can't discern from the info on-line is how old the tea was that the tests were done on.  I've always assumed that as teas age and flavour fades everything else does too so that older (stale) tea has less caffeine.  I'm also curious about what the results mean for oolong which one usually steeps for a series of short infusions -- 1 minute, then 30 secs, then 45 secs, etc.  But perhaps it's cumulative time vis a vis the oolongs...?  And the Gyokuro they tested is way down the list while the Hujicha was quite high!  Questions, questions.

UPDATE April 2012: I'm going to Kevin Gascoyne's presentation on this subject at the Tea Expo in June and look forward to the opportunity to get more background information.  (He's one of the partners at Camellia Sinensis.)  More later.

TAI PING HOU KUI (TAI PING BEST MONKEY)

Tai Ping Hou Kui green tea dry leaves.

This is an extraordinary looking green tea from China -- big, long leaves pressed flat and having the imprint of either paper or cotton on its leaves.  The dried leaves are whole and 2" and 3" in length -- unusally large for tea.  Another unusual aspect of this tea is that it's both pan fired and basket-fired.  Besides its toasty flavour, the leaves' crispy flatness hints that it's pan-fired -- pressed into a wok-like hot pan. But The Story of Tea explains further that after the pan-firing, the leaves are scattered on a sheet of rice paper, then another sheet is laid on top and the leaves are blotted to remove moisture without removing their aromatics.  This is what's responsible for the distinctive cross-hatched pattern on the dried leaves and, of course, ultimately why the tea is flat.  After this the tea is finished by basket firing.

Tai Ping Hou Kui.  You can still see the distinctive rice-
paper  imprint on the wet leaves.  (Click to enlarge.)

This tea is from Tao's tea house, and the package says its origin is Hou Keng Village in AnHui province (China).  It's considered by some to be one of the "Ten Famous Teas" -- although there is no definitive list of which ten they are*.

"Tai Ping" is a region in the south of the Huang Shan mountains in Anhui province, and "hou kui", according to Babelcarp, means "monkey king."  Some legends say that, due to the area's steep slopes, the locals trained monkeys to pick the tea, but I find that abit of stretch.  According to other googled sites the word "Hou refers to Hou Keng Village where the highest grade of this tea is made and the word Kui refers to a tea-grower Wang Kui-cheng who made this tea by improving the processing of a local green tea Jian Cha around 1900."   The Tea Drinker's Handbook notes that "according to another legend, it is the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, a tragic epidsode in Chinese history that ends in a bloody repression, which is linked with its name," and further notes that a "special feature of Tai Ping Hou Kui is revealed during the infusion when the veins of the leaves turn bright red -- some claim in tribute to the blood spilled by the rebels during the revolt."

I like to imagine that both might be true.  For usually there are many 'true' histories of a thing.  We come to blend and bend certain stories and events to reflect various people's emotional memory of the time as much as the 'facts' of a time.

I did two steepings.  Both in about 5 ozs of 75C to 80C water for two minutes but the first one had 6 or 7 leaves, which is what I thought I remembered Tao suggesting, and the second had the standard 2.5 grams of leaves.

Tai Ping Hou Kui wet leaves from the 2nd steep  -- large,
 mid-green leaves, showing, particularly on the left sample,
a pluck of a tiny bud, a new young  leaf and two other leaves.

The dry leaves have a surprisingly strong sweet and fresh aroma.  Almost floral.

On the first brew the wet leaves give light aroma of beans and a sweet vegetal scent, along with a light toasty scent of buttery popcorn.  The latter is the smell of the firing and identifies it as a fired not steamed green tea.  I don't see a red leaf vein though.

The liquor is a very pale, elegant blue-green with a light round buttery mouth feel. 

Overall I find this too watery and delicate for my taste-buds -- basically under-brewed, so decide to do a second one with the standard 2.5 grams of tea leaves to 5 oz of water.

This brings forward the toasty buttery aromas of the leaves and flavour to the tongue, along with the usual green-tea vegetal notes and a rich hint of toasted pecans.  This heavier, standard brew also brings a nice light briskness and a bit of sharp bitterness which is actually a nice balance to the quite full round, satiny (oily) mouth feel.  I could perhaps do with one notch lower on the bitterness but it brings a refreshing quality too, and the rest of the cup goes down with no problem.

This tea is so nice I'm trying it again the next morning -- 2.5 grams in 5 oz water at 80C.  This time I don't let it slip over the two-minute steep at all, which takes the slight bitterness down a note.  (It's amazing how little it takes to tip a tea over to bitterness.) The cup is wonderfully round and buttery with light toasty notes followed by the vegetal and the nutty pecan.  A second brew (at two minutes) is less round on the mouth, with abit less of the pecan and almost a mint-tea feel on the tongue as the last sip goes down.  A third brew (in cooler water since the water in my thermos has cooled to 65C) done at 3 minutes gives me another lovely cup of tea -- it doesn't seem to have diminished on the mouth feel by much, a little lighter on the flavour profiles and, surprisingly, the sweet floral note is more dominant. 

As I sit here sewing cosies this afternoon this tea just keeps on giving.  It deserves its moniker as one of the Ten Famous Teas -- rich-tasting and distinctive.

* Before the fall of the Imperial Court in China the Famous Teas were called Imperial Tribute Teas and were apparently for the exclusive pleasure of the emperor.

ORGANIC GOLDEN YUNNAN VS GOLDEN MONKEY

Golden Monkey on left, Organic Golden Yunnan on right
with fewer golden leaf buds and a chunkier leaf -- click for a
closer look at the lovely furry golden peko on the buds.



















I'm taking another run at the organic Golden Yunnan from Tao's Tea House, and comparing/contrasting to the Golden Monkey, also from Tao's.  I should admit off the top that Tao's Golden Monkey is currently my favourite tea ever.  Has been for the past 4 or 5 months.  Mmmm-mmmm good.  Yes, it's on the pricey side.  And, um, yes, I don't tend to offer it to visitors unless I think they'll appreciate its richness.

Both have lovely golden tips in them.  Both are from China albeit different provinces.  I got the Golden Yunnan thinking it might be in the same taste corner and seduce me as well.  It didn't, although it's not a bad tea.

TEA NAME: Organic Golden Yunnan
The Yunnan province is down in the south-west of China, and is considered one of the birthplaces of tea.   Its cultivation there started some 2000 years ago, but apparently it was only in the 1940s that black tea production began.   Yunnan black tea is generally called Dian Hong in China, which translates literally as 'Yunnan Red.'  Dian being another name for Yunnan Province, named after the Bronze Age Dian Kingdom, and red referring to the colour of the tea liquor.  We remember, bien sur, that in China what we call black tea is called red tea.  According to the Heiss's comprehensive book, The Story of Tea, historically Yunnan black tea has been grown from an indigenous variety of large, broad-leaf tea bush known locally as dayeh and classified by botanists as a subvariety of Camellia sinensis var. assamica.  I've no idea if that is the case with this tea but I did wonder, given its taste profile.  The Heiss's also note that Yunnan Buds of Gold and Yunnan Golden Needles are both among the highest grades of Yunnan black tea and "yield an exquisite creamy and malty, sweet-liquoring tea with almost no bite."  That certainly wasn't my experience with this Golden Yunnan and sounds much more like the Golden Monkey.  Hmmmm.

WATER TEMPERATURE:  Just off the boil
STEEPING TIME:  2 minutes, 10 seconds

DRY LEAF:
Per the photo above, the Golden Yunnan on the right is chunkier-looking, and is a dark charcoal grey with bright silvery-gold threads and small broken bits mixed in.  Under the magnifying loup, the threads are revealed as gorgeous furry pekoe on unopened leaf buds with the darker (though still showing pekoe) slightly twisted young leaves.

Organic Golden Yunnan wet leaves.

WET LEAF:

Small broken leaves of a very deep, coppery-brown (dark penny colour) with occasional dark green evident.

Organic Golden Yunnan brewed tea.

LIQUOR:
Very deep red-brown with a green ring around the rim.
 
Hmmm.  Bit of a bitter after taste -- I think this is a tad overbrewed.  But still a sweet, caramel flavour coming through, and behind that the slightly steely bitterness.  Nice round mouth feel -- bit of fur on the tongue.  Medium to soft briskness -- ie: refreshing in the mouth, and can feel water being formed in the lower jaw bone area indicating lack of astringency.  When I add a bit of milk the bitterness is mostly overwhelmed -- and it is now a nice balance to the sweeter front notes.
 
Curious about the bitterness I did a second brew with 2 grams of leaves instead of 2.5 grams.  It's still got a bite and the big mouth feel.  Could this be due to it being c.s. v. assamica...?

TEA NAME: Golden Monkey (Zheng He (or Zhenghe) Hong Gong Fu) from Fujian Province
In trying to track down what the heck the tea's Chinese name means I stumbled on the Babelcarp site which is fab.  All I previously knew was that "hong" means red.  But Babelcarp tells me that zheng he is the name of the place that is the centre of bai cha (literally white tea) production in Fujian province, or the variety of red tea produced from a cultivar usually made into white tea.  It also tells me that Gong fu literally means work or effort, and can signify either the gong fu tea service or red tea --  I find this confusing.  Does this mean there are other Fujian red teas with this descriptive or what?  From this translation device it appears that zhenghe hong gong fu literally translates as "the variety of red tea produced from a cultivar usually made into white tea + red + well made red tea"....?  Elsewhere on a tea purveyor's site it was explained that the english name, Golden Monkey, comes from its unique appearance: the leaves resemble monkey claws.  Not sure I see that but then I've not come across many monkeys.

WATER TEMPERATURE: Just off the boil
STEEPING TIME:  2 minutes 10 seconds

DRY LEAF:
Per the photo above, I identify this tea by its long (3/4"), slightly grey-black long wiry pieces with loads of golden threads and light crinkly-ness -- it looks and feels very airy.  Under the magnifying loup this is revealed to be all furry pekoed long thin leaf buds.  It's such a special, funny sight you must try it some time.  Or click on the photo above.

Golden Monkey wet leaves.

WET LEAF: 
Beautiful long buds and bud + leaf in a slightly grayed coppery brown.  (This photo is under halogen light and is redder and yellower than to my eye.) They kind of look like slippery little eels, don't they? Or little wet seals. (Okay, the latter might be stretching it.)

Toffee. Peppery.  Faint sweet apricot note. Lower down there's a light musky-musty note.

Golden Monkey brewed liquor --  much more orangey
than the Golden Yunnan.

LIQUOR:
The colour is a medium, bright orangey-brown.  I've noticed the brew also tends to have a bubbly, slight scum which on closer examination seems to be a result of the leaf bud's hairy pekoe.

Mmmmm. Sweet toffee, with some apricot, light soft bitterness to balance out the flavour.  Nice lush medium body in the mouth -- a light velvety furring, and not at all brisk.  When I add milk -- which is the way I tend to drink black tea -- it smoothes out the furring abit, and is still a wonderful, addictive brew.

KEEMUN from Tealish

This is from my local tea store, Tealish, and therefore may be from the ubiquitous Canadian tea distributor, Metropolitan.

TEA NAME:  Keemun (aka Qimen, etc)
Keemun is a well kown Chinese black tea made in the small town of Qimen in the Anhui province.  It's often cited as the original basis for English Breakfast tea.  Its taste is big and faintly smokey (as most Chinese teas are) with a medium briskness and full body -- considered perfect for a get-you-going-in-the-morning tea for westerners.  Which it is.

WATER TEMPERATURE: Just off the boil
STEEPING TIME:  2 minutes

Keemun dry leaves.

DRY LEAF:

Dark charcoal grey colour, whole and broken small leaves (along with a few leaf twigs) which, in close-up, have an oily sheen and are lightly twisted.  Under the film loup all is slightly dusted with light grey.  Age?  Process?

Keemun wet leaves.

WET LEAF:

Warm, classic "black tea" aroma with hints of dark chocolate, and sweet apricot.

The wet leaves are coppery with some dark green, almost exclusively small broken leaves and you can still see a few little leaf twigs.

Keemun liquor.

LIQUOR:

I overbrewed this slightly as it has a slight bitterness in the fore, and aibt strong on the metallic.  Lost any subtlety.  However, I'm still drinking it up.

The colour is a lovely rich, amber-red and is fairly bright and clear here on first pouring.