Visiting Bangkok Chinatown tea storage; reviewing Thai black tea

Kittichai!  He and his wife are so nice!

I've visited my favorite Bangkok Chinatown tea shop, Jip Eu, twice in the past few weeks.  I mean that I've been to their storage location, since their main shop is closed for repairs to the building.  A part of the roof cover out front broke and fell down, and it has required a lot of design change and extensive re-work to fix that, so who knows when it will be complete.  

Part of posting is about mentioning the location link, here.  It's about a block from their normal shop, but it would be hard to find without that map location.

The first visit there was during the vegetarian festival, a couple of weeks ago now (I've been busy with other posts).  Keoni, my son, and I had went to Yaowarat the week before to see that, then the next weekend to that shop for a visit.  I visited the next time to meet with a long-time tea contact who was in town, but I didn't get around to asking for permission to mention him, so I won't, but his name would be familiar to many.  It's nice meeting people you only knew online before; it's very rare when that doesn't go well.

Touring that location was interesting.  A lot of what you see is just cardboard boxes, since the tea is kept within those, but it's interesting hearing Kittichai, the owner, describe what broad and deep rows of boxes were.  It's more tea volume than I expected, literal tons of it.  Some was long term storage of sheng and shou pu'er, but apparently they keep moving enough oolong and other teas that it makes sense for them to have an awful lot of it around at any given time.

they had used this in place of cardboard boxes in the past, a bamboo frame

Tulin sheng pu'er tuochas; they carry Xiaguan of different ages as well

I don't think I've ever tried Liu Bao there, but they have some

Between those two visits I ended up trying a good bit of interesting tea.  On the first visit I had asked about Thai teas, since they usually mostly sell Chinese teas of different types, and Kittichai shared some black tea he said that he doesn't sell.  I review that in a separate section of this post.  It's good; I think he doesn't like it because it's a bit tart, which is a flavor aspect that I also don't care for.  But it's such a good quality version that it still works, even with that included.

We tried a Xin Ban Zhang, from the newer village near the older one, Lao Ban Zhang, which I reviewed here.  It's been a week or two, so I don't remember much of the rest.  For most visitors maybe it wouldn't seem as good a place to visit as the shop, since there is much less space for hanging out and tasting, and they typically only taste teas they have some of open anyway, but for people who know what they want you can still visit there and buy teas.

those Xin Ban Zhang leaves (left), and a Viet Sun version, reviewed here

Review:

To be clear they don't sell this tea (a Thai version of black tea), or at least that's what Kittichai said.  It makes for an interesting consideration, what Thai black tea might be like, and why some versions might not be preferrable to some people.  Of course this doesn't represent other styles; I mentioned trying a favorite Wawee Tea origin black tea in a meetup this past week, and that's nothing like this.

First infusion:  it's good tea, but the character includes significant tartness.  For me that's not a favorite flavor inclusion for black tea.  That could be why the shop owner, Kittichai, doesn't like this tea enough to pursue selling it.  Or it could be something else.  But the general character is quite positive.

Berry or cherry is a main flavor component beyond that, or complex range, if it's really both.  Some cacao is there.  Feel is fine, nice and full, sweetness is good, and it extends to an aftertaste experience.  Tartness is more or less the make or break, as I see it; if you like that included then this tea is quite good, and if not maybe not so much.  Because so much of the rest is so positive I still like it.  I doubt the tartness will drop out, but the proportion of different flavors expressed can shift.

Second infusion:  tartness stays just as strong, but other intensity ramps way up.  One flavor is like roselle, a tart version of a tisane that's popular in Thai.  It's a little like cranberry, but it's a flower, not fruit.  Cacao is still included, but it also doesn't increase, so it drops back in what you notice.  The rest of the fruit is hard to separate out, but it does seem to include berry, maybe blackberry.  This tea is pretty good.  It seems a little unorthodox, maybe even heretical, but it might work to mix this with the kind of tea that includes lots of warmth and depth but not so much forward / brighter flavor like this.  This already tastes a bit like a flavored tea or tea and tisane blend.

Drifting further off topic in that direction, it would also work as one basis for a Christmas blend.  Those tend to be black teas with a bit of citrus, cherry, and cacao, or something along that line.  This covers half of all of that without adding anything.  I experimented with making Christmas blends much earlier on in tea exploration, but it's the kind of thing people tend to move away from.  

And living in the tropics de-emphasizes Christmas, from not experiencing cold weather, and not being somewhere that it's a more central theme.  Thais put up a tree here or there, and decorate malls, and that's about it, and in Hawaii people celebrate it on their own, instead of decorating public spaces and holding related events.  It's a part of mainland culture, to them, and the ties to local culture, Polynesian themes, and to Asia are stronger there.

Third infusion:  I brewed this round much faster, to see what changes, and flavor intensity is still good, but a bit thinner.  It might need a couple of more rounds to shift to a different character, since these infusions are pretty fast, since I used the more or less standard 8 grams or so for this.

Fourth infusion:  this is improving; depth keeps picking up, and tartness fades.  This is a pretty solid tea version.  I could see how it wouldn't match everyone's preference, but it's still good.  Aftertaste expression is strong, and feel includes decent fullness.  There isn't harsh astringency structure; that part is fine, just a moderate level that supports the rest.  This tea may be even better brewed Western style, using just 2 or 3 grams and letting it brew out for 5 minutes or so in 250 ml or more.  But it was a nice effect in later rounds that the tartness faded, and it would probably be strong in an infusion made that way.

Of course this tea would brew a lot more rounds; I tried it again yesterday and brewed about 10.  It's better in the last half of the rounds than the first, to me, because the tartness drops out.

Another tangent:

There's not much to add about that tea or that shop in conclusion; that already covered it.  But a strange thing has come up related to this blog's viewership stats:

They will hit 700,000 this month (this is from the 30th).  Of course that's mostly AI bots; in the history of this blog daily viewer stats were more like 10,000 per day, or less.  They were higher before Facebook changed their algorithm to show more ads and promoted content, however many years ago that was, but they were consistently 6000 to 8000 even without posting that much.

So what does that mean?  Apparently I'm training AI systems on tea background, and probably also on writing form.  In a way that still is communication with a broad audience, it's just indirect, and almost entirely uncredited.  

It is what it is; I set out to communicate about tea, and it was never about me getting credit, or profiting.  I've made next to nothing from tea blogging, or actually exactly nothing, since any limited income came from editing content for others, and such.  A few vendors have mentioned setting up an affiliate link marketing scheme, where I would get revenue for tea sold through links here, but I've declined to be a part of that.  It wouldn't add up anyway, and then I would be creating paid marketing content, which is no good, not really the idea for here.  

Vendors do send tea for review sometimes; that's much appreciated, and it represents real value.  Thanks much, if this applies to any given reader!

I always mention when that's the case, when a tea was provided free for review, and whether that was in the form of extra samples sent with an order, or a set of samples sent for review, or actual conventional size amounts sent for review.  I try to review teas in the same way here, I guess "objectively," as much as that makes sense, but it's for the best to be clear on context anyway.  

I also try to make it clear when I'm writing about a vendor I consider a personal contact.  The Jip Eu owners feel like family to me, and it's as well let people know that their experiences would be different than mine, because they wouldn't be based on that personal connection.  They won't give you 50 grams of free tea that they don't sell.  It's still a good place to shop, once you work around Bangkok Chinatown shops being a little inconsistent, in general.  Some teas are great, and a great value, and others that are not as favorable can come up.