Vietnamese tea status, according to two experts

 

Steve of Viet Sun!

Seth and Huyen, visiting Bangkok

The tea industry in different countries in South East Asia can be dynamic, and Vietnam has a broader range of good tea to offer than any of its neighbors, except for China, and styles and higher quality levels seem to be developing there.

I asked two friends to share input on this.  Steve of Viet Sun is a main Western facing vendor, focusing on pu'er, or the local equivalent type.  Seth is a tea researcher, working on very developed writing on tea, along with Huyen, one of my favorite tea friends.  Seth is too; they're both great, and knowledgeable to a degree that's hard to relate to.

How does the perspective and demand on tea seem to be changing in Vietnam (by consumers)?

  

Steve:  I work mostly with old tree assamica teas (what many people in Vietnam call trà shan tuyết or shan, snow shan tea in English) as well as wild varietal non-sinensis teas so I’ll only speak on that segment of the industry. I see a lot of people getting into these types of tea, many just over the past few years. There are more and more tea shops opening and offering many styles of higher quality teas in bigger cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The demand is still quite low compared to green tea from Phú Thọ and Thái Nguyên provinces though. 

Many tea makers are experimenting with different styles. For example, you can go to villages in Cao Bồ, Hà Giang and find multiple teamakers who make halfway decent- good versions of many different tea styles, while 5 or so years ago it was difficult. Many producers see other producers making new styles of tea (raw puerh, black, white) and they start producing it themselves with varying degrees of success. 

An example of this is some time in the past couple years, a couple tea makers started making tea stuffed wild tangerine tea. Now many tea makers all over Hà Giang are making them. Many however, apply that higher volume “export tea” mindset into making these other styles and often fail to sell these teas due to competition from higher quality similarly priced options. 

Yt Y local area tea trees; photo credit to Steve

that tea, prepared as a tea cake, or bing

the right spelling (accent / diacritic)

Seth:  Matcha has exploded in popularity among the general public. Matcha products are now widely available in cafes all around Vietnam, and many tea factories have started producing matcha. This fits easily into the milk tea trend that started more than ten years ago. 

In terms of tea shops offering specialty teas or a general trend of specialty tea consumption in Vietnam, that is still only a small part of the overall market. Most locals middle aged or older drink green tea produced in Thai Nguyen, but there’s a rising demand for teas that use less industrial production techniques, which has created an opening for teas from Vietnamese heritage varietals like the various Assamica varietals locals call “Shan.” 

On the higher end, there are a lot more players in the market than there were ten years ago. These are mostly business people from Hanoi who see opportunities to invest in tea as a luxury product for higher income brackets in Vietnam. Some of the tea makers who focused on the Chinese market in the past have started expanding into the Vietnamese market since COVID forced them to look for new markets due to border closures. The shift to local markets seems to be enduring. There is also a rise in Chinese teas being sold in Vietnam, and some Vietnamese are making major investments in bringing Chinese tea to Vietnam, teas like Wuyishan wulong, Liubao, and Yunnanese teas. This is a small trend but seems to be prominent.

Editing input:  just a random tangent, but it's interesting that "oolong" always should have been "wulong," that the original transliteration was pretty far off (per my understanding, at least).  Now the right term depends on how you see language use conventions and transitions, and it really doesn't matter.

How is the industry changing in response to that, or do industry changes lead that other consumer perspective change?  Are producers exploring new styles, or is awareness of traditional tea styles broadening?

Steve:  The general attitude of many tea makers I know seems to be to focus more on higher quality tea or at least higher quality compared to the high volume “export grade” tea they were making for China. The Chinese tea industry seems to be quite unstable at the moment so many people are focusing their efforts locally as well as internationally in countries besides China. 

Seth:  Traditional tea styles in Vietnam are mostly dead or dying out. Most are extremely localized, within a few towns or districts, and they are not something that most Vietnamese people are even aware of, or would have an opportunity to try. In the specialty tea community in northern Vietnam, there is some interest in reviving tea production methods for Vietnamese yellow tea, which is made using an older technique for making Puer tea. Some are using this as material for making lotus tea, which is closet to the techniques that were used to make lotus tea about 100 years ago. 

The most popular traditional Vietnamese tea is still boiled fresh tea leaf. Locals will buy it at morning markets and drink it throughout the day. But this is mostly the older generation. The younger generation doesn’t tend to drink fresh tea leaves because there are lots of other beverages to choose from now. 

Editing input:  without some context it may seem like this input contradicts his last comments about people tending to drink Thai Nguyen green tea (sometimes branded as "fishhook" style).  Seth is surely aware of a range of very local tea styles that most of us will never hear about, even though I don't intend to add too much here to clarify what he really meant.  Western marketing tends to make it seem like there is really a much narrower subset of types out there than we see in online markets, even related to Chinese teas, which get the most exposure.

-are Facebook pages or online platform shops changing how tea is sold in Vietnam?

Steve:  Yes, many tea producers are on Facebook and many customers buy tea directly from them. Many tea shops have websites but they are often not updated. You usually have to contact them directly to see what their current offerings are.

Seth:  More rural tea makers are able to sell their teas directly to customers via Facebook. This offers the possibility of much higher income that they would make selling tea harvests to factories. However, the quality is not always consistent, and some of the tea can be quite rough, so Facebook marketplace doesn’t always translate to long term economic benefits for rural tea makers. In some cases, they wind up with bags of tea that they struggle to sell because of quality issues. Customers also have a higher risk of getting a product that isn’t satisfactory.

Editing input:  I've had very mixed experiences trying to buy tea locally, more in Thailand, but also from Vietnam.  Sometimes it works well, especially with others' help related to awareness of types and options, but you never see clear product listings, and issues like communication (language issues), money transfer, and shipping are all typically quite problematic.

-has foreign Western tea demand changed (consumer purchasing from outside of Vietnam)?

Steve:  I see interest in Vietnamese teas in the West growing year after year. Many people both tea business related and consumers travel to Vietnam to visit tea producing areas and tea shops in the cities. I don’t know exactly how other tea businesses are doing here but our sales have been growing gradually year after year.

Seth:  Changes in Chinese demand are pushing Vietnamese tea makers to look for new opportunities in the local market. The exact numbers are unclear.

The market for specialty Vietnamese tea is still miniscule outside of Vietnam, but awareness of Vietnamese tea is continuing to grow as tea enthusiasts introduce it more regularly to markets in the US, Europe, and Japan. Overall, this is still pretty small scale.

-can you add a little more about what is of interest to you related to Vietnamese tea experience or tea culture development?

Steve:  I really enjoy spending time in the tea mountains. The scenery is beautiful, there are many regional food and drink specialties and the culture of the different groups of people living in these areas is very interesting. Some tea areas have tea trees but there is little or no tea making happening there. Some areas just sell raw leaves to factories in other areas. I work with the local people and share what I know about tea processing and the tea industry in Vietnam. The state of protection of the tea trees is quite depressing in many tea areas here so It’s important to demonstrate the value and potential of what tea can provide with the people living there. 

I am currently focused on exploring new tea areas, learning more about tea production and the history of tea culture in Vietnam especially in the different tea producing areas. My favorite style of tea is raw puerh so I really enjoy getting to appreciate teas from many different terroirs in northern Vietnam. It’s also always fun to meet people interested in Vietnamese tea and share with them what I think are good examples of teas that represent the current state of tea in Vietnam. 

Seth:  There are more efforts now to create a unique Vietnamese tea identity by encouraging local ceramicists and potters to make tea ware, and locals tea enthusiasts are putting a lot of effort into spreading Vietnamese tea to an international audience, and pushing to improve the quality of Vietnamese tea products. 

Thoughts on this input

A Vietnamese tea friend, Huyen, who any longer term readers would be familiar with, just posted photos of a new tea shop in Hanoi (or a relatively new place; it could be an update about a renovation, or new space).  It's my understanding that shops are developing, especially in Hanoi, as mentioned in comments.  Huyen and her family (Tra Viet is a family business) sell a broad range of teas, of course, but they also focus on sharing demonstrations of traditional tea brewing practices, which are essentially the same as Gong Fu Cha, but surely also slightly different.

Huyen and her brother (her family is also great)

that shop, in Hanoi

It's a great time to explore Vietnamese teas, before that trend for higher demand catches up with expanding production supply, and costs rise.  

More basic range is also high in potential for exploration, so one might stay open to that side too.  That range isn't as widely available online as one might expect; Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Indian teas draw a lot of online focus, and Chinese and Japanese green teas are more popular.  It's kind of a shame, because even basic Thai Nguyen region "fishhook" style green tea can be nice (and I don't even love green tea), and higher quality, more novel types all the more so.

tea meetup with them in Bangkok

Trying high quality Dan Cong in a Bangkok Chinatown tea shop

 

I visited my favorite tea shop to pick up some tea before I travel back to Hawaii, that CNNP cake I reviewed not long ago (a 2007 8281 Mengku origin sheng pu'er), and to get a bit of tea to give to monks I know on the way out of town.

While there the owner let me try some exceptional Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong (Chaozhou, Guangdong origin oolong, of course).  It was presented as from a single tea plant, which is possible, but you kind of never really know.  The quality was really high; it was at least one of the best Dan Cong versions I've ever tried, and maybe the best.  There wasn't that much room for improvement, only style difference.  

The pricing was eye-watering:  500 baht or $15 for 7 grams, so it's pretty much $2 / gram tea.  Too much, for an ordinary experience.  But I suppose people might see it as a unique experience they wouldn't get around to repeating, that "once in a lifetime" kind of theme.  I don't even consider such things; my tastes and appreciation are fine with drinking ordinary teas.  And I'm adapted to Bangkok pricing ranges, where you can eat a meal for a lot less than $15, or eat and also travel around all day.

To start we discussed processing, relative degree of oxidation and roast.  Kittichai, the owner, said that it wasn't in the modern very lightly oxidized and roasted form, that it was more in a medium range (for both), so a step towards a more traditional, older form.  Really whatever works best for that tea material is best, along with personal preference determining that.  It worked out.  

The scent of the tea was incredibly sweet and floral, or maybe floral and fruity, but very fragrant either way.  It didn't really come to life until he put it in a warmed gaiwan, then it did, even dry.  He was using 4 grams in an 70 ml or so gaiwan (not that I can assess volume like that).  Probably the infusions were even smaller, with the top that you don't fill and the tea taking up space.

It was bright, fresh, fragrant, and intense right away.  The taste was as fruity as floral, even though that type (Mi Lan Xiang) is described as honey orchid, and it's usually more floral than fruity.  It tasted like fresh lychee, the other owner claimed, and that was a good match, even if the power of suggestion may have helped cinch that judgement.

From there it intensified over a few rounds, really turning it up around the 4th infusion.  Sweetness was off the scale, astringency fairly moderate, although there was some, and flavor intensity was crazy.  It was really clean, with great aftertaste expression, and positive mouthfeel.  Good enough to justify the  $2 / gram value?  Who knows.  It was roughly as good as Dan Cong probably gets, although I suppose someone who has been exploring the high end of that range for awhile could judge better.

It didn't transition that much until around 9 rounds in, and then a little astringency started to pick up, which one might interpret as tasting like bitterness, even though the two things aren't the same at all.  It wasn't really pronounced until about the 10th infusion, and we let off around then, or maybe at 11 or 12.

Flavor complexity was so intense that you were just being blasted by floral and fruit range, so it might've been hard to do the normal round by round description of shifts.  If the relative balance of all that was there kept changing I didn't keep track.  It was definitely clean, sweet, intense, balanced, and complex.

I didn't mention the color; it started out with a pinkish sort of color, then I think it transitioned to a more typical light golden amber oolong range.  I'm not sure what that's about, the extra touch of pink, or if it signifies anything.

Packaging was definitely a bit much; it came in tiny aluminum canisters, like weed might be sold in, if there is such a thing as elaborately high end versions of that.  Then that was in a custom case.  This isn't so unusual for Chinese teas, presented as exceptional; they can go a little overboard.  I suppose status would be part of the appeal, drinking what is expensive, refined, and rare, and the packaging helps support that.  

Things are just different in China too.  One might expect lots of things to be rougher edged or more basic, somehow, but there's a broad higher end range of lots of types of experience or aesthetic context that's more the opposite.  Not that I've ever really been living the high life in China; I've visited that country three times, but as a value-oriented tourist (twice), and on a work trip once.  That almost leads into telling a story or two, doesn't it?  I probably shouldn't, but let's.

I went to China on business a long time ago now, maybe just over 15 years, so what I relate might be dated.  I'll skip the parts about the work context; it was somewhat IT related, since that's the field I work in, and from there it doesn't matter.  I was introduced to better tea in a Gong Fu ceremonial brewing demonstration at the company we visited (probably the one company you might think of).  

They were pretty good about not making it seem like tall, beautiful women were the norm in that country, even though they were that as hosts, and extending that not to make lots of claims about the tea brewing, hyping ancient traditional forms as being something they're generally not.  People might make wishes when they pour tea over tea pets; a fairly basic idea like that comes up.  Maybe that frog relates to money (it is holding a coin), and another to success with family, so it would be a good place / context for asking for a next child.  

Chinese people love to make wishes, as Thais do.  My wife loves to visit Hong Kong temples and go through all of that, or there are lots of Chinese temples in Thailand too.  We just happened to be walking into a local Chinese temple in Korat, Thailand, when we had just picked up Myra, our cat (then a kitten), back in 2021, so I took her in there and asked the multitude of Chinese gods to keep an eye on her.  So far so good.

 

some people might recognize this old Shenzhen mall space

Hong Kong; a temple, of course

Apparently drinking alcohol plays a role in business connections.  That's probably the last time I've been good and drunk.  The next time we met with another Chinese company I kept it bit more reeled in; it matches an expectation to go there, but it's really a bit much for me, as a non-drinker (now even more so, but mostly that back then too).

Enough stories.  Later I bought some tea in a shop, waiting for others to buy other things, and that started my next level of tea exploration.  But it was all normal enough.

Back to this tea, it was amazing.  Others would probably appreciate it a lot more than I did.  Earlier on in my exploration of teas I was really into broadening my horizons, and trying out exceptional range, and now I'm fine with just drinking good tea, and by that I mean anything with character and aspects one can appreciate.  That's most teas; they just offer different experiences.  Maybe the low end grocery store versions aren't like that, and other ranges that are comparable, but so, so much of tea range is interesting and pleasant, or at least just pleasant.

But it was nice having a unique experience.  I ran through a tasting set of pretty decent Dan Cong from ITea World a year or so ago (more now?), and it was nice trying the other types.  Mi Lan Xiang and Ya Shi / duck shit get most of the attention in "the West."  And they're often quite pleasant, so I suppose that they should, but others are also interesting.  I tried a number of them from Cindy, of Wuyi Origin, and that's a good source for exploring pretty far up the quality scale, at pricing that's quite fair for what they sell, even approaching $1 / gram.

Cindy!

Being more into sheng pu'er I don't even buy that much oolong now, of any kind.  Eventually I'll probably cycle back through a long exploration and experience phase again, but who knows how long that will take.  Good black tea is more my fallback, most often Dian Hong.  By good I don't mean searching out the high end, best of the best, I mean basic and pleasant.  And if good comparable forms are from Thailand and Vietnam I'll drink that instead, so I suppose calling that Dian Hong style tea is more accurate (DH adjacent?).

This shop sells pretty decent, upper medium quality tin packaged Dan Cong, at a much lower price point range.  That's more what I'd drink, but I only buy it there to give away to monks, to save my tea budget for the next sheng cake, or maybe black tea.

that tea I just bought, and already reviewed earlier, 2007, so perfect for getting to now

Self awareness related to using tools from Buddhism

 

This is from a Quora answer I wrote, about what most or many people don't know, but don't realize that they don't know.  I'm saying that limited self awareness is one answer.  

I add a little on how tools from Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness, can partly resolve this, but a how-to for more in depth guidance would be a short book, so this doesn't get far.  I did write a short book on that, about a year ago, and even it didn't get that far.  

This is that answer:

What are a few things that people think they know but actually don't?

Most scope of knowledge and aspects of human experience, taken a certain way, but I wanted to take this in a specific direction.  I’m claiming that people think they know themselves but really don’t.

I’m into a few subjects, Buddhism being one of those.  Not only do most people who think they’ve got an intermediate grasp on what Buddhism is kind of miss most of the point, most people also don’t get how their own life experience, perspective, worldview, and even immediate process of perception work.  

Let’s stick to the second part; it’s a lot to unpack of how Buddhism is often modeled, versus how I see it working out in practice.  I could write 1000 words just trying to justify being a subject expert, and different people would interpret that justification differently.  Someone with essentially the exact same credentials and background could be either be a great reference or else relatively biased towards unhelpful and impractical directions; it’s funny how the subject works out.

[Later edit]:  let's add the high level summary of my Buddhism background, a sort of resume, more tied to it being interesting background than a convincing foundation of expertise.  I was into Buddhism as a personal interest for awhile, a decade or so, attempting some degree of practice along with learning.  I went back to university studies to help extend that learning and convert it into a form I could communicate, getting one degree in philosophy and religion (a BA), and then a Master's in comparative philosophy (having originally studied Industrial Engineering).  I was ordained as a Thai Buddhist (Theravada) monk once, for just over two months, and have lived in a Thai Buddhist society most of the time for the last 18 years. 

There is a layer of subconscious input in lots of psychological models, so it’s normal to sweep lots of an internal model of experience into a black box kind of category.  This works, but you can break down what is going into that, what processing is doing, and what the output means a lot more than most people ever attempt to.  Of course you can’t access the mechanisms of your own thoughts and reactions, as if reading code that your internal “operating system” equivalent is running.  But you can switch an awful lot of what is normally subconscious to the range of partial and limited conscious awareness.

How?  What are the odds I’m going to make any sense of this claim?  Not great, based on what’s here so far, but let’s keep going.

We are built up of societal inputs, conditioned to be who and what we are.  That conditioning starts when we are a baby, or really as long as nine months before that, and by the time we’ve learned quite a bit of language, at age 3 or 4, a lot of other conditioning has already happened.  By 5 a lot of that gets “fixed” into a personality.  That will keep changing over time, but perhaps not more than it has already formed, in one sense, or range of senses.  

We’ve already learned what a social self is, at this early age, we’ve grasped how we relate to lots of forms of desires (for food, related to interaction, and it just keeps going).  Ideas about negative experiences become clear, related to pain (physical mishap, or violence), social interactions that cause stress, about how lacks of different kinds of stimulus play out (hunger, being left alone), about decision making gone wrong, and so on.  Lots of this maps to what we ordinarily see as cultural components, but lots is more basic than that.  Culture tends to be about clothing choices, or social roles, interaction norms, aesthetic issues, then on to ethics, but our conditioning to be a human runs a little deeper.  

We can go back and unpack some of all that, and see how we relate to it uniquely as an individual.  We can become familiar with our own assumptions, biases, goals, and most importantly self-image.

In one sense it’s not difficult to, but in another it’s absolutely impossible (conventionally).  We simply examine our own experiences, in two different ways, drawing on a different form of reference input about patterns we might find.  

Note that I’m going to tie all of this to Buddhism, just not so explicitly, and not in a really conventional form, unless one already knows that framework of ideas.  I’m talking about using meditation to examine patterns of thought and experience, as our mind presents them to us as mental noise.  The reactions and desires that are “running” in our mind, to the extent this even exists as a singular, unified thing, show up as a sort of noise when we try to just sit and quietly experience our thoughts.  

Don’t take my word for it; go and just sit quietly, with absolutely no stimulus, for about 20 minutes.  The first half will be so noisy you might as well be watching television.  Then your mind might settle a bit, and more distinct thought patterns might stand out as more important, or at least less inclined to just dissipate.  But it takes a long time to experience anything like more clarity.  The point never really is “going blank,” it’s about relating to the noise in different ways.

We can also use a different but somewhat equivalent process to identify how our ongoing mental state, and immediate desires, and model of self, all play into our immediate reactions to external inputs.  That just keeps happening, right, but we are present for it?  Not present in the sense of fully aware of our current internal mental state, and why we react as we do.  Our current emotional state is sort of relatively clear to us, sort of not.  Where impulses and intuitions come from is generally not clear; we aren’t completely “in on” that subconscious layer.  We function well enough without that, but without the benefit of much of a degree of self-awareness.  In a limited sense we all do really know ourselves, but if you ask yourself why you did something or made a choice exactly at that time, and in that way, you’d have to unpack things a bit to get to that.  

People would assume the opposite; of course they know why they do what they do.  Routine demands it; they have burdens to work, eat, sleep, conduct social functions, and so on, and each individual choice or action, or thought, relates to working through all of that.  That’s right, in a sense, but we can drill down to mapping broad inputs to specific outputs, if we try to.

Lots more channels through self-image than we might initially expect.  Or maybe we would expect that.  But the forms it takes, and individual inputs and finer reactions, thoughts, and actions, wouldn’t normally be apparent at all.  It’s all a little counter-intuitive.  In the end we have built up fairly developed images of social selves, with some dimensions that are more evident than others, and we act on goals related to maintaining or extending those.  In lots of cases the drivers we act on aren’t social in the sense of an external demand, limitation, goal, or pressure, but instead relate to a dimension of internal self-image and self-definition, which acts within and internal cause and effect loop.

So it’s hard to push all this to the next level, adding examples of that, making it clearer, but the claim here is that we can learn about the make-up of our internal reality by listening to the noise residue from it (using meditation), and we can examine the same kinds of things by breaking down our immediate reactions and process of forming external reality (using mindfulness training to extend momentary reality of internal mental inputs).

Let’s go with one example, and then let this drop, since it’s not supposed to be longform writing, but already is.  My son, who is 17, and his mother argue over what time he should go to sleep.  In this modern context, or I suppose when I grew up too, at that age he would normally be expected to make those decisions himself.  But among his friends all of them make terrible choices about this very thing; they sleep late, at 2 or 3, either getting by on 4 hours sleep a night or else that plus a nap.  It would be better to sleep 8 hours a night, or at the most extreme 7 plus an hour as a nap.  

He claims that he functions better on less sleep, which is difficult to evaluate, but it’s probably not accurate.  There is a genetic variation that makes that the case, for some few, but in general people still developing a complete brain structure need that rest to support a more positive outcome.  Probably all of this should have been resolved by better parenting and more assignment of responsibility when he was 13 or 14.  You try being a parent and making that work perfectly.

Here I’m claiming that it’s not just the extra activity of gaming or scrolling media that he is interested in, since he gets in plenty of that, but the relative freedom to make the same choices as his friends.  That’s understandable; that part kind of works.  But if he could take a longer view he might value having a better developed brain and mind more.  If he could see how it all maps out he should be able to notice that it’s all partly a form of protest, and that her well-grounded concern is valid.  His internal view of self, related to valuing freedom and self determination, is actually causing him a problem, because that sufficient sleep would benefit him.

Of course I’ve had this explicit discussion with him, so the theory behind this set of ideas is clear.  It just doesn’t map out to internal self-awareness yet; he can’t see all of the parts at work within his own internal processing.  On one level he really does think that he would function better on 6 hours of sleep.  That’s even though on another level he knows that boost in adrenaline from running short on sleep is temporary, and not completely sustainable, at least as an optimum.  

Looked at one way this all boils down to ego; his view of self and how he maps out reality is inflexible, and tied to inputs and outputs he isn’t completely clear on.  He is making decisions based on reasons he is getting wrong (the reasons and evaluation form, not just the final evaluation process result).  Looked at another way it’s a problem related to short term and long term decision making.  Two more hours of watching videos is a short term gain; two more hours of sleep is a long term better choice.  Kids need to learn this kind of evaluation process on their own, ideally at 14 or 15, instead of 17 or 18.  I suppose most really put it all together between sophomore and junior year in college, if ever.

It seems strange saying that if he sat in meditation 20 minutes a day he could figure all of this out for himself.  I guess that’s the general claim here.  He could also map out how he sees his future better, how he deals with childhood ending, and other thorny issues, like themes related to romantic relationships.  Pretty much no one is trained to evaluate reality in this way at early stages of life development; it’s rare enough for adults with real problems to take up such tools in adulthood.  And there are other paths to a similar goal.  During my freshman year of college I tried out all sorts of crazy sleep cycles and almost all of them not working well identified how normal sleep really is relatively optimum.  Who knew?

Someone would need to try to make use of these tools to confirm that they work.  In general that’s not normal, to do that.  There would have to be some unusual driver pushing them to put in lots of atypical effort and exploration.  That leads to another set of tangents I’ll not pursue here; why did I do that?  I’m kind of an odd person, and my life experiences were atypical.

I suspect all of this is not so convincing.  I do appreciate feedback about it though.  The more functional parts are probably a bit too vague to critique in standard forms, but input based on intuition or related or unrelated experiences would be interesting.