by Puerlife » Aug 31st, '15, 08:51
I was in Kuala Lumpur last week and contacted Essence of Tea about a clay kettle they have listed online. David and Kathy graciously invited me to their home for tea. My memory is fuzzy but I think we started with the same three-month-old Yiwu that they gave me a sample of, and then I think we moved on to a brick from 2003. Great qi but we were hungry after that young one and went to eat. I thought that was it because we’d already had a good session but then they invited me back for more tea! My throat was destroyed because I’d drunk two cups of a fake 8653 in a shop in the Five Elements building in Chinatown earlier that day, so I hesitated, but fortunately I accepted the invitation. (A word to the wise—if you go the that building just go straight up to the 9th floor to Mei Ling’s shop.) After all, my taste buds were fine. This was the main event—three Liu Baos. But first, let me mention David’s setup. He had a charcoal brazier fired up on his veranda and initially heated the water there in a standard stainless steel snub-nosed kitchen kettle. At the table he had an aged zisha clay kettle heated by an alcohol flame, the same kettle that is on his website. OK, so the first was a late 80s/early 90s Wu Zhou Tea Factory product. This was a fantastic Liu Bao, so I bought some. That was the limit of what I was able to pay but never mind, they gladly treated me to another one, ten times more expensive. It was a completely different level of tea, in taste and qi, and the final one, from the 60s, was yet again better. Mind blown.
I've just edited my post, taking out an attempt to describe my chaqi experience. I've decided that's a personal, unrepeatable thing that words can't capture anyway, so suffice it to say that it was chaqi I will never forget.
We also were using Qing Dynasty cups, hundreds of years old.
In closing, I’ll just say that David and Karen are the nicest, most unassuming and genuine people you could hope to meet, and very savvy about tea and I’m glad I live just a three-hour flight away in almost the same time zone.
The next day a local friend and I were at a shop and I got tired of politely drinking some new, over-priced Dayi so I pulled out David’s Liu Bao. The master of this shop is heavily into Liu Bao. He brewed it using a stainless steel kettle despite having a tetsubin and a silver kettle side by side ready to go. I could taste the kettle. It makes the water very hard and bitter. After the experience of the night before the tea just didn’t taste right to me but my friend and the tea shop people gave serious respect to the tea.
see how green I am!
