Miaoli, Day 2: Tea with Eric, The Brother's Shop
Aaron woke me early because he had an early appointment to drink tea with his friend and employee, Eric. He and Eric were reviewing some 1990s teas, and I was to join them. We tried two samples labeled only with letters, and they were both quite gross. They had an unpleasant bitterness much like stale green tea, but they tasted otherwise like lightly aged pu’er. The leaves were small, papery, and appeared very dry. I was not impressed, but these were “dry storage” teas that required a lot more time, not the wetter stored 1990s teas I was used to. I kept my own notes on these teas, even though my thoughts would not be included in the magazine article, to compare with their results when they publish them. I thought perhaps my tongue was off until we rewarded our tasting with a dessert of 1970s aged Baozhong oolong, quite tasty and sweet.
Eric left, and Aaron and I spent more time talking about the online world. I finally succeeded (I think!) in helping him understand us, why we demand so much information, and why we drink younger teas. I also told him the reasons I started the Puerh LJ: I wanted a place just for pu’er tea, I wanted a visual blog format to keep things fresh with new featured posts and pictures, and I wanted heavy moderation and user tracking to create higher quality posts and a closer network of (hopefully) friends while preventing the main cause of bickering online: lack of moderation. He asked me to consider writing an article about it all for the magazine, but I told him it was probably uninteresting to non-Internet people, but I agreed to consider.
Aaron had business at the school to attend to, so he decided to take me to his tea teacher’s shop just outside of Miaoli. His teacher, affectionately known as “The Brother,” has run the shop and sold pu’er for nearly 25 years, and, according to Aaron, is one of the first people to introduce pu’er to Taiwan in the 1980s. The Brother spent 15 years without leaving the shop or its immediate area, sitting in the shop and meditating. The most spectacular thing about The Brother and his business is that he serves good aged teas to anyone and everyone, even hosting a group of 15-25 people once a month where he serves them really good, often famous vintage, teas and serves them dinner-all for free.
The Brother has stuffed his store full of old tea; I didn’t see more than a handful of pu’er younger than the 1990s. The tea at the store ranges anywhere from very wet stored to very dry stored, from 1920s to 1990s, from new and aged oolong to pu’er to Hunan heicha to liu an…ad infinitum. An impressive and curious place to hang out, I couldn’t help but wander and gawk and pick through things. I’d never seen so much old tea concentrated in one place. The smell was amazing.
Once my jaw tired of its dropped position, we sat down and drank tea, again in silence. The Brother served us a 1970s tuocha mostly broken up in a jar he’d left under one of the benches in the shop and forgotten about. The tea was superb in every way-only a little wet stored-thick flavor, great yun, lasting through many double-infusions. The flavor is very traditional, I guess, not uninteresting but no unexpected flavors, just the usual earth, wood, sweet. This tea experience made me feel cha qi deeply for the first time. Previously, I’d felt cha qi as heat/sweating, dizziness, or even hyperactivity, but I never felt my body relax, my skin tingle, and my center pulse (waves of…heat?...kinda like when I’m ill, actually) like this before. The physical sensations were very strong. Of course, my mind wandered quite a bit in the relaxation, but I enjoyed what I realized was some form of meditation. At one point, with the wind whipping the bamboo to rustle and dance its shadows on the wall, I felt positively blissful. It sounds corny, but it’s what happened, and I hold that experience dear to me, and this was repeated many times throughout the next three weeks. It centered me, and I did a lot of personal healing when in my head during those meditations.
Aaron left for the school, and I ate vegan dinner at the shop with three clients who walked in: a middle-aged woman, her husband, and her husband’s father. The woman was an obvious capital-w Wife, and the husband was a man with an odd, weak, creepy cadence and a bad dye-job. At dinner, my chopstick skills impressed them all. The husband even used his silverware perhaps to show me that he could play my game as well as I could play his. The father was the most impressed, and he kept saying over and over again that I ate beautifully. Ah, flattery! Swelled with it, we approached the tea table and began to taste teas. We began with a warm-up tea, a Taiwanese “high mountain” oolong of some sort, very tasty, I think served to please the woman and the father. The husband came for pu’er, and the next two we drank were quite old. One was a 1920s tea and the other a 1930s, both loose-leaf. They tasted older than any pu’er I had tasted before, even before I knew how old they were my impressions were that these were the smoothest pu’ers I’d ever had, something oily and sweet about them was incomparable to any tea I’d had previously. What’s more, one of them was really broken up, almost into confetti, but it yielded brew after brew without weakening. Obviously, being loose-leaf, there’s no ascertaining the age of these teas. But, they were old, very old, and rebrewed enough to not be aged cooked pu'er masquerading as aged raw pu'er.
The odd triple left after the last tea, and I just lounged around the shop sipping the remains of the pu’ers I’d tasted all simmered together in a glass kettle until Aaron arrived to take us home.
Eric left, and Aaron and I spent more time talking about the online world. I finally succeeded (I think!) in helping him understand us, why we demand so much information, and why we drink younger teas. I also told him the reasons I started the Puerh LJ: I wanted a place just for pu’er tea, I wanted a visual blog format to keep things fresh with new featured posts and pictures, and I wanted heavy moderation and user tracking to create higher quality posts and a closer network of (hopefully) friends while preventing the main cause of bickering online: lack of moderation. He asked me to consider writing an article about it all for the magazine, but I told him it was probably uninteresting to non-Internet people, but I agreed to consider.
Aaron had business at the school to attend to, so he decided to take me to his tea teacher’s shop just outside of Miaoli. His teacher, affectionately known as “The Brother,” has run the shop and sold pu’er for nearly 25 years, and, according to Aaron, is one of the first people to introduce pu’er to Taiwan in the 1980s. The Brother spent 15 years without leaving the shop or its immediate area, sitting in the shop and meditating. The most spectacular thing about The Brother and his business is that he serves good aged teas to anyone and everyone, even hosting a group of 15-25 people once a month where he serves them really good, often famous vintage, teas and serves them dinner-all for free.
The Brother has stuffed his store full of old tea; I didn’t see more than a handful of pu’er younger than the 1990s. The tea at the store ranges anywhere from very wet stored to very dry stored, from 1920s to 1990s, from new and aged oolong to pu’er to Hunan heicha to liu an…ad infinitum. An impressive and curious place to hang out, I couldn’t help but wander and gawk and pick through things. I’d never seen so much old tea concentrated in one place. The smell was amazing.
Once my jaw tired of its dropped position, we sat down and drank tea, again in silence. The Brother served us a 1970s tuocha mostly broken up in a jar he’d left under one of the benches in the shop and forgotten about. The tea was superb in every way-only a little wet stored-thick flavor, great yun, lasting through many double-infusions. The flavor is very traditional, I guess, not uninteresting but no unexpected flavors, just the usual earth, wood, sweet. This tea experience made me feel cha qi deeply for the first time. Previously, I’d felt cha qi as heat/sweating, dizziness, or even hyperactivity, but I never felt my body relax, my skin tingle, and my center pulse (waves of…heat?...kinda like when I’m ill, actually) like this before. The physical sensations were very strong. Of course, my mind wandered quite a bit in the relaxation, but I enjoyed what I realized was some form of meditation. At one point, with the wind whipping the bamboo to rustle and dance its shadows on the wall, I felt positively blissful. It sounds corny, but it’s what happened, and I hold that experience dear to me, and this was repeated many times throughout the next three weeks. It centered me, and I did a lot of personal healing when in my head during those meditations.
Aaron left for the school, and I ate vegan dinner at the shop with three clients who walked in: a middle-aged woman, her husband, and her husband’s father. The woman was an obvious capital-w Wife, and the husband was a man with an odd, weak, creepy cadence and a bad dye-job. At dinner, my chopstick skills impressed them all. The husband even used his silverware perhaps to show me that he could play my game as well as I could play his. The father was the most impressed, and he kept saying over and over again that I ate beautifully. Ah, flattery! Swelled with it, we approached the tea table and began to taste teas. We began with a warm-up tea, a Taiwanese “high mountain” oolong of some sort, very tasty, I think served to please the woman and the father. The husband came for pu’er, and the next two we drank were quite old. One was a 1920s tea and the other a 1930s, both loose-leaf. They tasted older than any pu’er I had tasted before, even before I knew how old they were my impressions were that these were the smoothest pu’ers I’d ever had, something oily and sweet about them was incomparable to any tea I’d had previously. What’s more, one of them was really broken up, almost into confetti, but it yielded brew after brew without weakening. Obviously, being loose-leaf, there’s no ascertaining the age of these teas. But, they were old, very old, and rebrewed enough to not be aged cooked pu'er masquerading as aged raw pu'er.
The odd triple left after the last tea, and I just lounged around the shop sipping the remains of the pu’ers I’d tasted all simmered together in a glass kettle until Aaron arrived to take us home.