2009 Xi-Zhi Hao Jing Gu minibeeng

A good sheng beeng, at last!

Or, according to the small size - a good sheng sample, at last! (© by Hobbes)

This is one of the two xiao (mini) beengs from the Xi Zhi Hao gift set sold by Hou De. According to the description, this is from Jing Gu area, same, as the 2007 Pu Zheng beeng. Unlike MarshalNs experience with Jing Gu teas, the Pu Zheng is one of my favorites. Expensive, yet very solid pu-erh.



I really like this pygmy beeng. The mao cha it's made from is said to be from 2100m high ancient plantations near the Daoist temple "Da Shi Si". I believe this claim - the leaves are whole, big and strong. This is the fourth year tea trees are harvested in this area and they still possess some kick and character.

As I see it, Mr. Chen made this tea as a "gift tea", designed with less orthodox tea drinkers in mind, so we can expect a pleasant experience, not an overpowering one. No smokiness, slight bitterness, good acidity, thick soup with peach notes. On the other hand, the tea isn't powerless or bland and has nice and clean aftertaste.

I believe this is one of the better teas Xi Zhi Hao made after the first productions in 2005. And here is a proof of my appeal for this tiny and young sheng - I'm used not to drink the same tea more than once a week, and yet there's the same beeng after ten days.



To be continued... with the shu xiao beeng from the same set. And then, my thoughts on the whole gift set.

Beta - "You Le Zhi Chun"

This is the second sample of tasting of pu-erh teas made by Yunnan Sourcing. First was one of the most expensive teas made from high altitude Yi Wu mao cha, this tea is made from spring 2009 mao cha harvested in Long Pa village of You Le Mountain. The beeng is on a looser side with nice whole leaves. The fresh scent is less powerful, than the smell of the Yi Wu sample.



I liked this tea less then the Alpha. The overall craftsmanship is good, the tea produces clear yellow soup with just a little smokiness, lasts quite long and has some kick. Yet, it’s more crude then the first sample, with much less sweetness, fruitiness or vegetal tones.

The leaves are mostly small, though some large can be found in the mix. The black dots tell us, that pesticides were probably not used this year, and that’s good. Some of them are much darker and shows signs of bad processing with too late kill-green step. Fortunately, these dark leaves are only a few.



This is an OK tea compared to the whole selection of pu-erh offered by Yunnan Sourcing, yet from these five samples this is definitely not the tea of my choice.

The samples so far, from best to not so best:
1. Alpha - Yi Wu
2. Beta - You Le

Other reviews can be found on Half-Dipper.

2008 Spring Chun Cha

A lot is happening today. Slovakia, the country I’m from will loose its national currency Slovak Crown by January 1st 2009 – we will switch to Euro. And because I work in a company producing and distributing enterprise-wide information systems, we have now a lot of work ahead to help all our clients to convert their systems to euro. That’s why I haven’t had too much time to blog. Yet I still drink a lot of tea and have a lot of samples. My current plan is to post a blog here at least twice a week.

Let’s drink today’s tea. I got this free sample with my last order from Nada.



What says the note: 2008 spring tea (Chun Cha) from ‘Bang Wai’ the village near Jing Mai Mountain. All the leaves from one tree ‘Gu Shu Cha’ Old Tree Tea.

Jing Mai is located in southern corner of Yunnan near Burma and Vietnam. Bu Land is near Jing Mai, so I expected the mao cha to produce strong and powerful soup. The leaves were whole and large, covered with long silver hair. I decided to stuff my pear-shaped teapot to get a heavier tea than usual.

But I’m quite disappointed. The tea isn’t what it should be. I found the very similar taste in 2006 Long Yuan Yi Wu Aromatic Beeng sold by Yunnan Sourcing – same sweet and empty tea. Overbrewing makes the tea too bitter; the way I prepare tea normal makes it uninteresting and a bit miserable. I will try this tea in next few days again; hopefully I will have more luck finding its heart.



Coming soon: I purchased several tea-flavored chocolates. Now I will try them and report to you how they taste like. Hope they will not be too nasty. The Gyokuro one looks a bit suspicious.

2007 Xi Zhi Hao Pu Zheng Yuan Cha

This is second of the two limited production autumnal pu-erhs of Xi Zhi Hao tea factory, sold by Hou De. I liked the first one, the Da Xue Shan, although the character of that tea was very unusual. Very green and floral with sweet flowery taste.



The Pu Zheng beeng is similar to Da Xue Shan – beautiful, compact but not over molded, nice piece of craftsmanship. The leaves are easy to loose; I used ones from the jar filled a week ago. The leaves are big, bold and whole.

The tea brews yellow, thick and fragrant liquor. First few cups taste a bit smoky, but the smokiness disappears in later infusions. The tea is strong but not untamed, the crystal clear liquor calmed my head and slowed the time running by. An enjoyable pu-erh, though a bit pricey.



The leaves are huge – I found lots of them long nearly 10 centimeters. I took the picture with biggest Slovak coin (slightly more than 2 cm in diameter).

This tea was also drunk by Hobbes.

2007 Xi-Zhi Hao "Xue Shan Chuen Lu"

Last week I traveled across whole Slovakia, from west to east. Since I rode a car, I had enough time to sightseeing. I took a picture of Castle of Spish, the largest medieval castle in Central Europe. Few weeks ago Australian sculptor Andrew Rogers finished a huge stone sculpture, a geoglyph depicting a “celtic horse”. Though the geoglyph is best seen from balloon or height – do you think this is how a horse looks like? (click the picture to enlarge)



Being out of home I lacked good tea. So as soon as I returned back, I brewed the third of the 2007 minibeengs produced by San Ho Tang Tea Factory under the Xi Zhi Hao brand. You can find my notes on the Yi Wu minibeeng and the Din Jin minibeeng here.

The last two teas had certain flaws. While I disliked the poor leaf quality of the Yi Wu minibeeng – problem probably found only on few last made beengs – the Din Jin was processed in very unusual way, it tasted like the leaves were overfermented before the kill green step was done. Is at least the Xue Shan worth the money? Lets see.



As Guang wrote, the tea trees the mao cha comes from are located close to Wu Liang Shan of Si Mao, east of Ling Cang from mostly around 300 years old plantations.
The beeng is heavily compressed, on the leaves is clearly seen the pattern of sack the tea was compressed in. If I compare it to relatively loose 2007 Da Xue Shan from the same factory - Chang Tai - this one looks hydraulic pressed. Separating whole leaves is possible, but it requires lot of precise effort. The leaves are very colorful – silver, yellow, all shades of green.

The liquor is light yellow, thick and clear. This tea is definitely sweet, very sweet without any acidity. The brew leaves slight hint of smokiness and a bit more bitterness in mouth. The floralness I found in the Da Xue Shan beeng does not occur here. Aftertaste is long, sweet, lingering. Tea lasts long enough and even in later brewings it's strong enough to kick me in the head. The spent leaves are ok, but more than few of them are black-dotted, like they were taken from sick trees.



Will I buy this tea? No – I don’t like enough how it tastes to spend the rather large sum on these minicakes. Instead I decided to purchase few of the Yi Wu minibeengs to store, age and consume them later on. Hopefully that batch will be made from higher quality mao cha.

2003 Wu Liang Wild Arbor Xiao Beeng

According to legend, Wu Liang was a man, who invented oolong teas by accident by neglecting to dry tea leaves promptly. But Wu Liang is also a mountain in Simao region where mao cha is harvested for producing pu-erh.

This 100 gram only xiao (small) beeng is of private production using pure sun dried mao cha and traditional processing. I got a sample of this tea from owner of www.longfeng.cz – the 2003 Wu Liang pu-erh is one of his exclusive selected teas.



As it’s clearly visible from the leaves, the compression of this minibeeng is very loose; it’s probably stone-molded. Also, the tea is nearly five years old, but from the color of leaves and their smell I can deduce, that it was stored in dry environment all the time. There are mostly green leaves with few tips.

When I prepared this tea for the first time, I used boiling water. The brew was yellow with some chemical smell; the taste was heavy and sharp. I definitely disliked the tea – it’s certainly a good candidate for aging because of the strong taste, but I like somewhat more gentle teas to drink right now.



Since I got a sample only, I couldn’t let this tea age. So next time I prepared it with only 90 Celsius (194 F) water. First two infusions were somewhat smoky, but smokiness dismissed in third infusions and citrus aroma showed up. This tea actually tastes like tea should – the taste is very pleasant, full and round, filling the whole mouth leaving very long fruity sweet and slightly acidic aftertaste.

Using the cooler water this is a very good drink-me-now tea, but thanks for the power of mao cha it is made from it’s also a good candidate for aging. From 5 grams I made 10 very good infusions and I have to admit, that I gave up earlier than the tea.

2007 Xi Zhi Hao "Din Jin Nu Er" Minibeeng Part I.

Yesterday I tried the Yi Wu Cha Wang minibeeng produced by San Ho Tang Tea Factory. The tea was good, but the beeng was of poor quality. So I decided today to try a beeng, that looks much better than the last one.

The Din Ji Nu Er minibeeng is said to be produced from spring raw leaves from the vicinity of ancient tea trees in Chien Jian Zhai. The beeng should be made from sun-dried mao cha by stone molding. Well, the beeng is very solid; it’s hard to believe that such compression can be obtained by stone molding. But from the slightly irregular shape and thickness I can assume, that this can be true.

The beeng is nice, small and much thicker than an average cake is. It emits soft and young floral aroma. It looks much, much better than the Yi Wu one. On the other side, the Yi Wu minibeeng tasted very good, while this beeng performs much worse.

First of all, the liquor – it’s just too orange. On wrapper is date of production – 2007 november 18th. Such young pu-erh should be on some side of yellow, either bright or darker, but orange – that means problems.



The second problem I found in this tea is the taste and smell. It wasn’t pu-erhish enough; it reminded me of Dian Hong teas. I was expecting many different tastes and aromas, but not this one. This aroma prevailed in the cup for all the eight infusions I made.

Today I prepared the Din Ji in zhu-ni teapot, so I decided to try it next time in gaiwan. Maybe it will show me other flavors and more depth.

I speculated that the strange red tea taste could be caused by over fermenting of mao cha. So I searched the wet leaves for reddish over fermented leaves. And yes, I found some of them. Not too much. What puzzled me more were small yellowish leaves. Check the picture – such different leaves cannot be from tea tree!! And the long yellow leaf wasn’t the only one I found. The real tea leaves (those with serrated edges) were thin like from over harvested trees.



This beeng is said to be produced as birthday cake for Mr. Chen’s daughter. So I believe, they are intended to be for long term storage. Also, this fact implies me to believe, that they should be of better quality – hey, they are for his daughter!

That’s why I’m so puzzled with the strange taste of the tea and the outlandish leaves. I will revisit this tea soon and post my thoughts here.

Note: Tasting sets of all three of these minibeengs are available at HouDe. Hobbes will provide his reviews of these Xi Zhi Hao minibeengs in (hopefully) next few days, so check out his Half-dipper.

2007 Xi Zhi Hao Da Xue Shan

After trying the mao cha, today I drunk pu-erh made of that mao cha. Leaves collected from Big Snow Mountain (Da Xue Shan) at Gu Hua (fall harvest) last year are stone molded into big 1 pound beengs. As I wrote in this post, the cake itself is nearly a piece of art, big beautiful leaves gently compacted in the form of rather big disc. Yes, the beeng is clearly bigger than an average 357g pu-erh cake.

This tea is still very, very young. Most dominant is the vegetal, flowery, grassy smell and taste, but I’m sure this taste will diminish as time pass by. No smokiness at all. I can feel how delicate was the processing of beengs, leaving most of bioactivity intact. So there is a good chance that this tea will age pretty fast.

This tea lasts pretty long, I pushed 9 infusions from it and even then I stopped just because I was too tired to continue. In later infusions the grassy taste back up, but it was still the most dominant. Touch of fruits and mushrooms stepped forward in last infusions. Actually, I dislike mushrooms very, very much, but fortunately they weren’t dominant.



Orange liquor is clear as a piece of crystal, no muddiness at all. Sign of a good kill-green process. Leaves are strong with veins popping with health. Some are quite hairy.

Since the taste of the cake is quite specific and the price is quite steep, it’s advisable to purchase a sample and try before buying the whole cake.