Editorial Conversation: 2023 Research Trip Report: Wuyi
The episode is also available on YouTube and Spotify. Our original thoughts were posted to the Cult of Quality Blog. A full transcript of this episode is below:
[00:00:00] Jason Cohen: Hello everyone, I'm Jason Cohen, the author of An Introduction to the Art and Science of Chinese Tea Ceremony. Today we're doing a bonus episode on the Tea Technique 2024 research trip to Wuyi. Here to talk about Wuyi is Patrick Penny.
[00:00:19] Pat Penny: Hey, hey.
[00:00:20] Jason Cohen: And Zongjun Li.
[00:00:21] Zongjun Li: Hello.
[00:00:23] Jason Cohen: This is our second annual Tea Technique research trip.
How did this trip differ from previous trips?
[00:00:31] Pat Penny: I'm going to let Zongjun start this one out, because I've got a lot of thoughts.
[00:00:35] Zongjun Li: This is our first time, all of us, first time in Wuyi.
Before the trip, unlike maybe a little bit Yunnan, but unlike Yixing or Chaozhou, we had pretty high expectation to the destination before we arrived. So I guess the sentiment is different from the previous trip.
[00:00:52] Pat Penny: That's a big piece of what I was going to speak to. For Chaozhou, dancong (单丛) tea is something that I think we all spoke about last year after the trip that we had not deeply studied previously. We had drank some good dancong (单丛) here and there, but it was something that was relatively less well known to us.
Wuyi teas, I think we've all been studying for quite a while now and the level of expectation, both from the teas that we've had but also from some of the hyperbole and mythology around Wuyi as a place, it's always spoken about as if it were sacred. So I think there was this level of expectation that was very different than the expectations I had going into Yixing or Chaozhou.
I think on top of that, after having a great trip last year, going into another trip, I think that also doubled the expectations. I feel like the Yixing and Chaozhou part of our trip last year went perfect.
[00:01:44] Zongjun Li: It was awesome.
[00:01:44] Pat Penny: Nothing went wrong.
We met all the people we wanted to meet. It all hit and exceeded our expectations. It amped up what I expected this year. Previously, we've all, maybe separately, but I've with Jason, you've traveled with Zongjun for tea related things. We've done tea trips before but never back to back consecutive years either.
And so I think all those different factors led to maybe an unreasonable expectation of how amazing our experience in Wuyi would go, which was just very different than I think the lower level of expectations I had for last year's trip.
[00:02:17] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I agree with all of that. Wuyi, the mythologizing and the hyperbole and the overall reputation perceives itself.
And our trip, in many ways was educational and revealing and enlightening, and it certainly was helpful for our understanding of Wuyi tea but I didn't come away from Wuyi saying, this is my new favorite place. After Chaozhou, all of my drinking habits, tea drinking habits, did a notable shift.
One, drinking a lot more dancong (单丛) tea and two, doing a lot more updosing and Chaozhou style brewing and switched some of my kettles and some of my tea setups to shadiao (砂铫). I don't really think I changed anything about what I was drinking or doing after this trip.
[00:03:06] Pat Penny: Same. I did want to ask you guys, really for the audience, what did you see in terms of brewing style, brewing technique, wares?
Was there anything? As you mentioned, Jason, there was things that we really noticed and took away in Chaozhou. Was there anything that you noticed when we were in Wuyi about brewing style?
[00:03:25] Zongjun Li: Not really. Very generic. And there's nothing noticeably very characteristic that we can point our fingers at and say, oh, wow, this is different than all the other places that we have been to. No we didn't see any of that.
[00:03:40] Jason Cohen: Too many electric kettles.
[00:03:42] Zongjun Li: Yes.
[00:03:43] Jason Cohen: I will say that the skill of brewing in Wuyi, the people that we were dealing with, the skill of brewing was fine. It wasn't consistently Chaozhou style, but it was closer to Chaozhou than to say the type of either splashy fun time that we see with people who are maybe not drinking quite the same quality of tea that, that we're drinking, that we're seeking out, or different from Yunnan brewing where it could be a lot slower paced. I do think it was still closer to Chaozhou, but the wares and the implements were generally not quite to the same caliber. A lot of electric kettles. A lot of medium to medium sized teapot, but the dosing I think was still quite high.
[00:04:23] Zongjun Li: Yeah, 7 to 8.
[00:04:24] Pat Penny: That's one of the things that I took away was there's not a single tea that we drank that came from a loose leaf pack. It was always the 8.3 gram packs, and everybody dumps the whole pack every time.
That's how we drank. Every single tea we drank was just the 8 gram pack.
[00:04:38] Jason Cohen: 7.2 or 8.3, there's two different sized packs.
[00:04:41] Zongjun Li: But they always use the whole pack. Although I would say that one thing that they do particularly care about is water. They do really care about water quality especially they praise pretty highly on water from Tongmu Village (桐木关).
[00:04:55] Pat Penny: Yeah, that was a clear takeaway for me too particularly because I got home and I had one of the teas that Jason and I had gotten on a separate night, Zongjun, when you were a little impaired, when you were not feeling well.
[00:05:07] Zongjun Li: That's a different story that we're going to talk about.
[00:05:08] Pat Penny: When you're not well cause we food did not treat you well.
We had gotten some packs of tea from a friend that we had met. Very serendipitous meeting and the tea that I had received, I think it was a rougui (肉桂), tasted so different with my water than it tasted then and there. And in a bad way. Not the tea itself, but just my water is not live up to the Tongmu Village water that we had at some places or the water that these people were sourcing locally in Wuyi certainly is matched to the tea and has a very very noticeable impact from what I tasted using my water against it.
[00:05:39] Jason Cohen: I had the same exact experience in Hong Kong. Hong Kong municipal water supply is not really all that recommended for tea and so I brewed a very light green tea adjacent baozhong (包种), and it came out kelpy and a little oceany, and everyone was like, is it supposed to taste like this?
It's a really marine note. No. I've not gotten these flavors from the tea before. I don't think it's my brewing.
[00:06:01] Pat Penny: Water is the mother of tea. So I think we all established that our expectations were high. And maybe they weren't exactly met, but was there anything in particular that did meet your expectations or were close to it, and was there anything that really stands out to you as you left Wuyi like, wow, that was bad or that, that's unfortunate, or made you sad?
Anything really linger with you?
[00:06:26] Jason Cohen: For me, the thing that stood out is just how beautiful Wuyi is. It truly is a place of majestic and serene beauty where you walk up these relatively small mountains and you see these crags and the kengs (坑) and the jians (涧) and you have rocks on both sides of you.
And it's humid and yet some of the rocks are cool, depending on which way they're facing, and these little micro climates, and water everywhere. I do think that there's a reason why Wuyi has such a reputation, and it's been preserved in a very contained park setting. Not all is well inside the park, but the fact that the park exists and it's been protected and it is truly as beautiful as the photo show, maybe even more beautiful than the photo show, I guess it depends who the photographer is because our friend's photos make it look pretty beautiful.
[00:07:17] Pat Penny: More beautiful than my photos for sure.
[00:07:19] Zongjun Li: Yeah, indeed.
[00:07:20] Jason Cohen: That's something that met my expectations or exceeded my expectations is the beauty of the place.
[00:07:26] Zongjun Li: For me, it's the food. Wuyi food is pretty amazing. Although it resides within Fujian province, it's nothing similar to any Fujian food from other regions. It's actually closer to Jiangxi food. A lot of smoky and spicy flavors that you can find, which quite interestingly, you can find great similarities with teas in the region, smoky notes similar to the smoky tong mu teas and very oily, kind of pungent notes similar to a lot of the Wuyi tea that you can have in the region.
It's quite delicious.
[00:08:02] Pat Penny: Yeah, I was going to add a comment onto your note about other Fujian food. I spent a lot of time in Jiangzhou and Xiamen area for work, and I dreaded going back to Fujian when I knew we were going to Wuyi. The food is just so plain. Very healthy and great for a few days and then you have it for a week or two and you get real bored.
The Wuyi food did not, I think we had a couple dishes maybe too many times. But aside from that it did not really get boring.
[00:08:26] Jason Cohen: I don't know, I'll eat sweet lotus seed every day. I will say that despite how good the food was, I don't think it was a great match for yancha (岩茶). The food and the tea were very incongruous.
[00:08:37] Zongjun Li: Oh, they are both very pungent. They taste similar to each other, it probably should not be tasted together.
[00:08:43] Pat Penny: Both things suit the palate of the people, but I certainly wouldn't pair the spicy smoked duck with a delicate qilan.
[00:08:50] Zongjun Li: Yeah.
[00:08:51] Jason Cohen: Even a spicy smoked duck with a spicy cinnamon rougui (肉桂)... I don't think they go together.
[00:08:57] Pat Penny: One plus one equals zero.
[00:08:59] Jason Cohen: Yeah, something about Chaozhou, all of the dancong (单丛), highly polyphenolic teas just paired with the food perfectly. And even the low to mid grade teas served in a restaurant, metal teapot in a restaurant, chugging that down while eating your chow fun and other Chaozhou food, it went perfectly.
[00:09:16] Zongjun Li: Ah, making me hungry!
[00:09:18] Pat Penny: It just turns out we're all Chaozhou bros. That's what we learned when we went to Wuyi. We're all Chaozhou bros. I do want to hear, you know, what stuck with you guys in a negative way? What was some of the impressions that you were less happy to confront your bias or reality on Wuyi.
[00:09:32] Zongjun Li: I think we have a lot of things to share. I think my major disappointment is how commercialized and over fertilized, over utilized Wuyi is in terms of garden management. It's nothing similar to the old arbor garden in Chaozhou or tea mountains, tea forest in Yunnan. It's really terraced tea, tai di cha (台地茶) everywhere, extended all the way into the inner park.
And these bushes are clearly so hyper fertilized that they are sprouting shoots in the middle of summer. And they are very heavily pesticides because all the fertilizers would attract a lot these insects. That's very disappointed, but understandable because for what we have heard these gardens are not allowed to plant even a single more bushes outside of their boundaries. There are literally people, garden supervisors or park supervisors, patrolling in the regions, literally tearing down excess bushes coming out from the garden. It's very heavily regulated.
If you cannot expand your growing region, the only way is to increase your production within the region. So that's that's very sad.
[00:10:46] Jason Cohen: I totally agree with what Zongjun said. The other thing that I found to be very off putting is the over reliance and the over focus on rougui (肉桂) and shui xian (水仙). I like rougui (肉桂) and shui xian (水仙). Some of the best yanchas (岩茶) that I've had have been rougui (肉桂) or shui xian (水仙), but neither are part of the original sida mincing (四大名丛), the original four great cultivars of Wuyi. And they have been so overplanted to the point where nearly all teas that you can find commonly from Wuyi are those two cultivars and everything else is considered small cultivar, minority cultivar. These two cultivars that aren't even originally from Wuyi, that do produce good tea, but they're selected because they're easy to grow, they're fast growing, they're earlier harvest. They can easily be blended out between regions. And you really lose a lot of the original special flavors and the variety of flavors that made Wuyi famous.
[00:11:42] Pat Penny: Yeah, I have to agree with both of you. I think for me seeing some of the heavy fertilizer use is definitely sad. Seeing just how commercial some of these gardens are was definitely a disappointment to me. Honestly, the biggest disappointment though was walking about an hour plus to get to the entrance of the trailhead for the mother bushes for Da Hong Pao (大红袍). So, Jason and I, on our last day, we were feeling very brave and we were like, we are going to go see these Da Hong Pao (大红袍) mother trees no matter what. During this trip, it basically flooded in the park almost every single day that we were there.
So the park was closed. And so we figured, you know what, if cars can't get into the park, we will walk into the park, brave the elements, because it was very wet. And we are gonna see these mother trees. And as it happens, after our sweaty hour and a half walk into and up the hill into the park, we make it to the Da Hong Pao (大红袍) mother tree trailhead and there is a guard there, and they do not let us pass. And we did not feel like getting deported, so we listened to them and turned back around.
But that was probably the saddest experience of the trip.
[00:12:45] Jason Cohen: So I don't know if I rank it quite as the saddest, but that was quite disappointing. Although we run up the other side of the mountain that looks over the Da Hong Pao Valley. And saw some more trees.
[00:12:57] Pat Penny: Yeah, we saw a lot of trees, we just didn't see those trees.
[00:13:00] Zongjun Li: Yeah, weather was definitely a letdown this time. Maybe next time we should go on a different date.
[00:13:05] Pat Penny: Part of lessons learned is certainly don't go to Wuyi in June. We will be visiting at a different time of year.
[00:13:10] Zongjun Li: Yeah.
[00:13:11] Pat Penny: Doubling down on that, is there a next time?
What do we plan to do next time we want to go to Wuyi? Because I don't think we're giving up, right?
[00:13:18] Jason Cohen: No, we're not giving up.
I don't think any of the next set of books will be on Wuyi tea. I think it'll be either on puer (普洱) or chaozhou gongfu in some some unknown order. But I would like to at some point in the future write a book on Wuyi, but I think that we just need to go back, tag on a few days in Wuyi after the ends of a few different trips and really double down on developing the relationships that we currently have and additional relationships. And spending time in the further reaches of the park where perhaps we can catch a better feeling of more natural growing areas and older trees.
[00:13:52] Pat Penny: I definitely agree because it's not like we didn't see some of these hidden and secluded growing areas with nice, natural, beautiful trees. We did have the opportunity to be guided by a teammate or friend to some of these areas. And seeing some of those more natural, harder to reach areas definitely kept the spark alive. And I think, seeing some of the areas that disappointed us after was a good thing. Because the fire and passion, I think, for Wuyi has been still ignited. Just a matter of finding the right context to help us get to that next level and next spot to make sure that we're not just Chaozhou bros for life, but we come back to being Wuyi bros.
[00:14:29] Jason Cohen: Chaozhou and Yunnan for life. One question that I have is how does this recontextualize prior experiences that you've had? Since we've had so many experiences with Wuyi tea outside of Wuyi, where it's being presented to us as the height of tea culture.
And we've had some teas that we thought were phenomenal S tier preference score, seven out of seven. And now looking back, how does this recontextualize that? One that stands out in my mind is our first time learning about and tasting niu cha (牛茶) cow tea, drink cow meat, eat cow, all of the slang sayings for Niu Lan Keng rou gui (牛栏坑肉桂). How does this experience recontextualize that?
[00:15:10] Pat Penny: So I think that must have been one year before Zongjun joined. I think it was my last year in the Institute. That was like the pinnacle of tea experience for me for a very long time. I graduated after that event that we had and I did not have a similar caliber tea experience for a very long time. This was days of us learning about yancha (岩茶). We had many experiences of high quality yancha (岩茶) leading up to having this niu rou cha (牛肉茶).
And I think we lectured about this tea. We learned from a shared teacher about this tea for probably an hour and a half before drinking it. So there was quite a lot of set up, pomp and circumstance that went into tasting this tea, but when we had the tea, at that time, it was still, as you said, mind blowing, 100 out of 100. It was the best tea that I had to date in my life at that point.
So it, it's hard then going to Niu Lan Keng (牛栏坑) and seeing the state of most of the bushes and understanding that the tea that we had is also the tea that we saw there. I think it reveals that there's probably more to Niu Lan Keng (牛栏坑) than what meets the eye when you're walking down the path, right?
I'm sure that there are some small keng (坑) or jian (涧) that are adjacent to Niu Lan Keng (牛栏坑) that form this liminal border between the two, and of course you're going to call it niu rou (牛肉) because you'll probably get more money, right? But there, there probably is still these gems within that area, that terroir that go against what we had seen while we were there and might live up to the experience that we had back in 2014 when we first tasted this tea but I don't know.
I think being there and then also having the opportunity to go to a pretty famous yancha (岩茶) studio, that also sources niu rou (牛肉) cha and things like that. It also just makes me think, the tea that we had, would I ever pay for an experience like that personally?
And the answer is probably no, because I'm assuming that that tea that we had back in 2014 must have been so expensive. Just thinking about the quality that it was and seeing some of the price points we saw last month when we were in Wuyi. I think maybe the biggest contextualizer for me after our experience, is knowing and tasting Wuyi yancha (岩茶), always seeing it as the pinnacle prior to being in Wuyi, and then being in Wuyi and seeing some of the price tags that are associated with it. It's saying that DRC is some of the best wine in the world, or Lafite Rothschild or something like that, and then also going, Oh, yeah, and it also costs this much money.
Okay, no duh, it's pretty good. It's inaccessible and super expensive. So, maybe that reaffirmed that bias or thought that I had about Wuyi. But interested in your guys' thoughts as well.
[00:17:41] Jason Cohen: You weren't there for that Zongjun so did you have a formative experience with Wuyi tea? I think you did go through the same thing where Wuyi tea was presented to you as the pinnacle.
[00:17:51] Zongjun Li: Yeah. It's a weird shift of my mentality towards viewing this category of tea.
To some extent I almost wanted to perceive, like we can probably end up drinking better Wuyi tea outside of Wuyi. Because all of these tea contacts that we have outside of Wuyi in different places act as a filter to help us get better access to teas that are just really hard to find inside Wuyi.
So for our personal experience in Wuyi, I think we are getting such a crude experience, that people probably spent decades trying to cultivate relationship and end up having access to certain tea and we end up drinking those tea with them and end up developing such expectation towards the region.
So I think there's really a disparity between reality and our expectation and the formative experience that we had that led to those expectations.
[00:18:48] Pat Penny: Just before Jason and I went to Wuyi, we had a Wuyi tasting in Taiwan with a contact of ours. And we had the best tea that I had that entire trip.
It was a Wuyi yancha (岩茶) of slightly obscure cultivar. And it was mind blowing and Jason bought some, so he still has it.
Those were the best teas, some of the best teas that we had the whole trip including being in Wuyi!
[00:19:10] Jason Cohen: I don't disagree with that. I do want to push back and say, how is that any different than puer (普洱) or really any other tea, right?
We've had excellent puer (普洱) tea in Taiwan or in our friends' tea houses in Shanghai. There's always an art of curation. There's always the ability to purchase through merchants who we trust, who have good taste, and whose taste we align with. I don't know is that unique to Wuyi in some ways, Zongjun, to your point?
Or is this just that we think that our merchant friends currently can source better tea from Wuyi than we can? Because, we just went to Yunnan and now we have firsthand contacts and amazing sources. For me, I don't know, I probably fell out in 2010, 2011 with most of my Yunnan contacts before WeChat. So is this just a function of us, or that Wuyi work differently than these other places?
[00:20:03] Zongjun Li: Yeah, it's hard to say. Maybe a little bit of both. But just by seeing the price tag that we had in Wuyi and how it compares to other teas that we drank elsewhere.
Really doesn't make sense. You don't quite see that in other regions. Like these astronomical prices, like usually the price are lower inside the region than elsewhere like Yunnan or Chaozhou but it's higher in Wuyi!
[00:20:30] Jason Cohen: I paid less for that tea, that amazing tea, the tea I gave a PQ seven, a seven outta seven in Taiwan than we paid for any of the tea that we bought in Wuyi.
[00:20:39] Zongjun Li: Yeah. Wuyi is almost a... I don't know, a showroom on its own, that have people want to purchase more expensive tea, but it's usually not the case in other places.
[00:20:52] Pat Penny: Yeah, I think Wuyi has its own jiang hu (江湖), and I think, we see it in Yunnan, we saw it in Chaozhou, it's just a little different in Wuyi. I think certainly we still do need to learn the ropes and maybe we've learned the ropes in some of the other places. But I think, Jason you wrote it very well in the blog post that you had shared, we need to just keep showing up. We need to keep building contacts.
And maybe we need to just try doing things a little differently than we've done in other areas if we want to be able to source tea in the same way that we feel like we've been able to in other areas. I don't think Wuyi is different, big difference. I think there might just be some small nuances that we need to learn.
[00:21:29] Jason Cohen: Price is a big difference. Price of entry.
[00:21:32] Pat Penny: Yes, that's true. The price tag to start. It's high.
[00:21:37] Zongjun Li: Every extra gram of fertilizers into the earth you have another Mercedes S Class popping out.
[00:21:44] Pat Penny: We saw cars very unlike what I saw in Chaozhou. Maybe you guys had a different experience in Yunnan.
But man, some of the cars that I saw while we were in Wuyi, some of the cars we got to take a ride in with the studio that we had visited, those were very nice vans.
[00:21:59] Zongjun Li: The Maybach ownership per person is definitely higher in Wuyi than others.
[00:22:04] Pat Penny: Yeah.
[00:22:04] Jason Cohen: One thing that I do think we need to discuss is drinking mao cha (毛茶).
And bing cha (冰茶) also.
[00:22:12] Pat Penny: Let's start with bing cha (冰茶) 'cause bing cha (冰茶) was cool.
Bing cha (冰茶) is basically...
[00:22:15] Zongjun Li: That was at least safe.
[00:22:17] Pat Penny: Bing cha (冰茶) was safe. Yeah. Bing cha (冰茶) was basically tea that was picked, withered, slightly rolled and shaqing (杀青) and then thrown in a freezer. So it's basically like super fresh undried mao cha (毛茶). It's pretty mao cha (毛茶), right? It hasn't dried. And they basically take it out of the freezer and brew it up.
And the flavor, what's really like eating raw tea leaves, like it, it gives you a lot of these green notes that maybe you do find in like a Yunnan mao cha (毛茶) but beyond that there's this oiliness and spiciness that you only find, I think, from fresh unprocessed tea leaves. Totally unique and it's not something that I think you can get if you're not in an immediate tea region because it's not going to stay good.
[00:22:58] Zongjun Li: Yeah.
[00:22:58] Pat Penny: It's a really cool experience. How did you guys feel about it?
[00:23:01] Zongjun Li: One of our friends mentioned that she had some bing cha (冰茶) shipped through one of the shipping service, and they didn't end up putting enough ice. The bing cha (冰茶) arrived rotting and stinky.
[00:23:12] Pat Penny: It's just hei cha (黑茶). It's fine.
[00:23:14] Zongjun Li: Hei cha (黑茶).
Different kind of hei.
[00:23:17] Jason Cohen: That's like a little anaerobic shou puer (熟普洱).
[00:23:19] Zongjun Li: It's the chou dou fu kind of hei.
[00:23:23] Pat Penny: You've heard of yellow mold?
This is black mold tea.
Okay, what about mao cha (毛茶)? Jason, I'm going to tee you up and I think we want to hear Zongjun's side of the story on mao cha (毛茶).
[00:23:33] Jason Cohen: Yeah, so Zongjun seemed to have suffered the effects worse than we did. We were invited to a tasting. Let's say we went in skeptical, and we left with all skepticism removed.
[00:23:44] Pat Penny: We left permanently damaged.
[00:23:47] Jason Cohen: We left knowing that our original skepticism was well placed. She queues up for what she calls mao cha (毛茶), which is the unroasted yancha (岩茶) but lightly processed unroasted yancha (岩茶). We're still not 100 percent sure what state this tea was in but we know it had no roast at all.
[00:24:05] Zongjun Li: But it's dry. It is dry.
[00:24:07] Jason Cohen: It was dry. It may have only been withered and shaped and then dried because it didn't go through any roast, and we're not sure what extent of rolling it went through. It was pretty green. It didn't have a lot of oxidative notes. And the leaves hadn't been very redden. It just had some chips around the edges that were red.
But she says, taste these teas and then put them into quality order. So we taste these four teas. None of them are very good. Me, Pat, and Zongjun all placed the in exactly them same order. And then she says okay, taste again.
And we're like, do we... have to?
[00:24:39] Pat Penny: Because these were not, these were not enjoyable to taste.
[00:24:41] Jason Cohen: These were not enjoyable teas.
[00:24:42] Pat Penny: Everyone who's had mao cha (毛茶) that they've bought online, that's like finished proper mao cha (毛茶). This is not the same thing. It's painful to taste.
[00:24:50] Jason Cohen: Yeah, it hurts your palate. It's coarse.
And I'll circle back on why we even agreed to do this in a moment. But she says, taste again, I'll brew again.
And we're like, do we have to? Like all three of us put it in the same order. We're pretty convinced. She's like, no, no, no, your order is wrong. And we're like, oh, okay, we'll taste again.
So we taste again.
We're all like, no our order is pretty, pretty accurate unless we don't understand what we're looking for. She's like no, you guys don't understand. You have to taste all of this other tea. Let's taste one more time and I'll show you the proper order. So we do it again. Our order in our minds doesn't change.
She puts it in the reverse order to what we did. She said, this one that you thought was worse, this is actually best. And at that point, we're all sweating buckets, both from the heat, but also from the ill effects of this tea. You get that narrowing and tunnel vision and tight jaw that you get from tea that likely has pesticides still on it.
[00:25:43] Pat Penny: Tighten throat, a knot in your stomach, you're clenching your cheeks 'cause you're not feeling good.
[00:25:48] Jason Cohen: And at this point Pat and I look at each other, we're like calling a safety halt. We're like, no, we're not drinking any more of this. And Zongjun somehow got the brunt of this.
[00:25:56] Zongjun Li: I was out, man. I was blacked out that night. Really out and fever. That was terrible. We had mao cha (毛茶) in Chaozhou, and it's nothing similar to that.
[00:26:09] Jason Cohen: Why don't you tell that part of the story, Zongjun, because that's why we agreed to do this mao cha (毛茶) tasting. Because in Chaozhou, as we were with the tea producers, we tasted mao cha (毛茶).
[00:26:16] Zongjun Li: Yes, we did, and the lesson that we learned from that experience is that, you're not really supposed to be looking for flavors that you would find or you would rate as high perceived quality when you're drinking the finished product. So you'll be looking for different stuff. So that was all fun and interesting.
When our tea friends offered to do this experience, we were like, oh yeah, let's go ahead and really learn something about Wuyi yancha (岩茶) from a different angle. And that was the reason why we agreed to do this.
But seems to be a mistake. Apparently a lot of these heat treatments from roasting would degrade pesticides or fertilizer that still remains on the surface of the leaf. That's why you are not really supposed to drink mao cha (毛茶).
[00:27:01] Pat Penny: It was the beginning of the end.
[00:27:03] Zongjun Li: We only learned that after the whole experience.
We were spitting for the most part too. Like we really were not consuming a lot of it. We were dumping most of our cup, but I think the other thing that was really subpar about that experience was we didn't really understand what we were looking for, which was evident when we were completely wrong.
[00:27:20] Pat Penny: But, Zongjun, you were at that point being destroyed by mao cha (毛茶) but you attempted to translate a little bit of what they were telling us, and it seemed like it was impossible because it was just magicky. It was not science, right?
[00:27:32] Zongjun Li: Really just jabberwocky, gobbledygook abstract theory about... still to this day, I cannot really translate what's the difference between shou and tou.
Somehow they refer to the better tea or the better mao cha (毛茶) as being a tou (透), which literally can be translated as thorough or penetrated. What exactly is that? It's still a mystery. And I don't think they even know how to articulate what tou is in Chinese to me. They just keep pointing at that tea and tell me that, okay, that's tou.
What's tou?
[00:28:06] Pat Penny: What is tou? What we had understood, we were looking at different levels of correct water purging, right? I think that's where we thought our heads were at. And so we all had picked the worst sample as being the one that was cloudy, obscured flavor, felt like you weren't getting a lot of extraction because there was probably still a lot of water in the leaf.
And that was the most thorough sample. That was the tou sample. So we were completely wrong. Great experience to show us who to not source tea from.
[00:28:31] Jason Cohen: Or what poor understanding of science processing does to you. I guess part of the problem is she was a merchant who oversees other people producing tea for her. But we did not come away impressed with her tea. And we certainly didn't come away impressed with her mao cha (毛茶).
[00:28:46] Zongjun Li: Also the case for a lot of other tea production region, but everyone in Wuyi has their own theory about shui lu (水路), about water path, about how to purge the water and what exactly is the mechanism of water purging, which in this mao cha (毛茶) tasting case, the theory was that all of the water gets out from the tea leaf around the edge of the leaf.
Because, all the holes of the leaves are centered on the edge. That was the theory. Anyone with a background of Biology 101 would disagree with it.
[00:29:19] Pat Penny: There's exclusively stomata on the edges of the leaf. That's it.
[00:29:22] Zongjun Li: Yeah.
[00:29:23] Jason Cohen: This is obviously a CAM 4 plant. Nighttime stomata only. Tea is not a CAM 4. I'm joking.
[00:29:31] Zongjun Li: Maybe it's that specific cultivar.
[00:29:33] Pat Penny: That's exactly what it was.
[00:29:35] Jason Cohen: Yes, speciation definitely changes your photorespiration type
[00:29:38] Zongjun Li: Hyper engineered by the Wuyi Tea Institute.
[00:29:42] Pat Penny: They've got the money for it. They've got the money for it.
[00:29:44] Jason Cohen: Is there anything positive that we can end on? Is there anything that for people who are purchasing teas, buying teas, for readers, listeners, is there anything that we can leave them with where they say, now I have a better understanding of Wuyi, other than that Jason, Pat, and Zongjun think it's difficult to buy yancha (岩茶) in Wuyi? Other than that it's a more complicated place than the magical reputation that precedes it. What can we give to readers and listeners to take away from?
[00:30:17] Zongjun Li: Good Wuyi tea or fantastic Wuyi tea definitely exists. We have had it and it's not something that came out of thin air or other places. I would just say that if you do enjoy your Wuyi tea, if you have been buying good Wuyi tea from your contact, keep doing so.
There's really no need of going into Wuyi and try to find better contact, unless you have been specifically recommended.
[00:30:43] Pat Penny: Unless you have plans to become a merchant. There is good Wuyi tea, there's fantastic Wuyi tea. It comes at a price point. So if you want to experience better Wuyi tea and you enjoy the vendors you're buying from, try buying their more expensive Wuyi tea and see if that's worth it for you.
Because, I think we've all had great Wuyi teas at different price levels, but it does seem that the best Wuyi teas have an entry price that's a little rich for most people. So I would try spending a little more on some small samples to see if that gives you any sense of a better quality of product or more enjoyment from your tea.
I would also say like, if you do like your vendors they're doing probably a great job for you then, because sourcing tea is definitely a skill. It's an art. I do think there's a lot of Western vendors who are doing a great job of it. It is its own beast. I think maybe we still have a lot more to learn about it, and there's a lot more that we will share in the future, but I don't know that we're there yet.
Jason, what do you want to share with our listeners and readers?
[00:31:39] Jason Cohen: I guess going back to brewing, one thing that we did not see, which I was a little surprised at, is in Wuyi, no one crushes and pack. You're using a lot of tea, but their teapots were not tiny.
[00:31:50] Pat Penny: Did we even see anyone use a teapot?
[00:31:52] Jason Cohen: Yeah, on our last night, our new friend, she used a Yixing.
[00:31:57] Pat Penny: Okay, so beyond that we had gaiwan exclusively for the five days that we were in Wuyi.
[00:32:03] Jason Cohen: I think that's right. Not a single person crushes Wuyi tea in Wuyi. That was interesting because many times we saw Wuyi done with what we were told what was claimed to be or called Chaozhou gongfu where you crush and then pack the teapot. And obviously in Chaozhou they're drinking dancong (单丛) and in Wuyi they're not crush and packing.
[00:32:22] Pat Penny: Thank you Taiwan.
[00:32:23] Jason Cohen: We're gonna need a, we're gonna need to write a book about this.
[00:32:27] Pat Penny: Thousand pages. Number three.
[00:32:28] Zongjun Li: Yeah, it's going to be a short one.
[00:32:31] Jason Cohen: This will be a short one.
[00:32:33] Pat Penny: 800 pages of data.
[00:32:37] Jason Cohen: The complete anthology of the history of crushing and packing teapots, teacher by teacher, generation by generation.
[00:32:43] Pat Penny: I look forward to editing it.
[00:32:45] Jason Cohen: This has been another edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations.
Thank you again for joining us and look forward to the next podcast in our regularly scheduled programming.
