About another meetup, one that resulted in trying a lot of pretty good teas. I wrote this event summary in the Facebook group I organized it through, the Bangkok Tea Tasting Club I founded there (just cutting out the thanks part):
We tried a crazy range and amount of tea, I think the most I've ever tried at one time.
It covered white tea, green (Longjing), several Wuyi Yancha and Dan Cong, a Taiwanese and a traditional Anxi Tie Guan Yin oolong (so a lot of the main oolong range), hei cha, sheng and shu pu'er. Wow! Odd no black tea; that's almost all that we missed.
I'll write more about details in a blog post. Chinatown shops tend to let you try teas but nothing like that; they took it on themselves to make it into a special tasting event. Then again Sen Xing Fa probably is the best shop for trying a range of teas I know of here in Bangkok, related to the kind of shop it is.
That's what happened, in short. I'll break it down a little more by topic but will try to keep this short and readable.
Sen Xing Fa (the shop): they're close to the main tourist area in Chinatown, on a main food street soi off Yaowarat, the main strip. They sell a really broad range of teas; pretty much all across the Chinese tea range, onto Thai and Taiwanese oolong range. This shop was the first place I bought decent loose tea in Bangkok (Longjing), on advice from Chinese vendor staff, or at least a second outlet shop of theirs was, in a market alley a few sois over.
It's interesting contrasting this shop and Jip Eu, the one I keep calling my favorite. They carry a more limited range of teas, but some options really stand out in that range, unusual versions and great value. Jip Eu's customer base is locals either buying inexpensive Wuyi Yancha / rock oolong, blended Shui Xian or else good Wuyi Yancha versions, and either tourists or local foreigners seem to be the main customer base for Sen Xing Fa. Sen Xing Fa may be a better place to try teas because it's set up for that as a result; tourists explore range that's new to them more than locals buying similar teas over and over. SXF carries a lot of Thai oolong as a result, and Jip Eu really focuses most on Chinese teas, with some exceptions.
As to value since that ties just as much to personal preference versus price as to objective quality level--interpreted in one way, at least--you have to sort through options to maximize that anywhere.
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Mr. Tian, one of the family member owners |
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maybe from 2017, added to this 2018 post |
who attended: it was nice seeing two people I've met before, one a member of the early tasting sessions that FB group was founded to support, Noppadol. He was sort of a co-host of those, and serving as a part-time tea vendor he shared or sold me some very nice tea, including a Thai Lamphang sheng tuocha, and this sheng sample from Myanmar. A couple of the others I've talked to a good bit by message, so they all felt familiar.
In a sense the other earlier tasting seemed less formal, more like meeting at an uncle's house to try some teas with friends, in part because of the smaller group size and less structured theme. This felt like a tea tasting, even working from lighter to heavier teas, the standard approach.
what we tried: what didn't we try? I'll just mention unusual exceptions. An early Longjing / Dragonwell wasn't atypical but for that being a good quality example of the one type of green tea I really like it was nice (they're probably still a good source for that in Bangkok). Some of the Dan Cong was pretty good, and good range Dan Cong is a really nice experience. "Good" is all relative; maybe quality level was still in a upper normal range but pleasantness stood out. Flavor range was very positive, generally type-typical, sweetness pleasant, and astringency quite moderate, with only secondary factors like full feel, length of aftertaste, and refinement falling short of the highest end versions.
We tried pretty good sheng and shu pu'er, an older CNNP shu (99?), and a CNNP / Zhongcha 7542 version from 96, I think it was. That's more typically a Dayi / Taetea version (recipe), but CNNP did make their own versions earlier on. Another participant mentioned that the separation between Zhongcha and Dayi may have been different in form in the mid-90s, which is tea history that I'm not clear on. Storage input for that aged sheng pu'er seemed too clearly positive for the tea to have spent most of the time in Bangkok, since heat and humidity is great for pushing aging transition / fermentation tempo but not for the most optimized outcome for conventional sheng style teas, and the shop staff confirmed that it had spent more time in China, in the Menghai area.
It was interesting trying a pretty good hei cha, light, complex, and spicy, kind of rushing through that for it being at the end, even though it could've been more of a centerpiece of a less crowded tasting agenda. One oolong was unlike any version I've tried, described as processed to a finish that doesn't involve completely drying the leaves, pressed to small square tablets, and distributed and kept frozen. After all that it was still not too far off higher end and typical Taiwanese oolong style, but a little different.
I think a Rou Gui towards the end was better than I could fully appreciate for being so blasted by all that tea at that point. Quality markers stood out quite positively in that, if I had it right, the few aspects that show how the tea would probably be evaluated in tea specialist circles (feel and aftertaste again, a match to the pronounced cinnamon input, getting the oxidation and roast inputs balanced just right).
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our first host in that shop |
So that's it; lots of nice teas experienced with good company. It was great that the shop seemed to really respect that tasting event as something more than a few tea enthusiasts dropping by, which was kind of how I saw it. If you signed up for that sort of tasting as a paid event--not that anyone would schedule trying that many teas at once, which didn't fit into the 3 hour original scheduled time--you could expect to pay $50 or more (1500+ baht).
I'm familiar with the shop, and I've been there a number of times, but that still doesn't explain them taking it all that far. It seemed they saw it as an opportunity to share some tea and make a special event of it, which was really nice of them. The one staff I had met, a primary owner, showed up late and swapped in as the shop host, and us trying a few extra really interesting versions late in the session is probably another main thing that extended it. If you visit there they will try teas with you too, and I suppose if you never leave and keep trying them the count could add up.
A quick word about good form: if you taste a tea or two and don't like them there's no obligation to buy the teas, but if you do try a number then it's appropriate to buy at least a little of something. Or so I see it.
That reminds me of a tangent: if your tea budget is a little loose I tried an aged brick of Oriental Beauty oolong there once that was really something; you might want to check into that. That was 8 years old (9 now; that was last year), a half-kilo / 500 gram brick selling for $200. It sounds like a lot given my budget but that's really inexpensive for aged OB of that quality level (although maybe the price went up too; the price of everything else everywhere did). Maybe some of the other teas there are selling for rates that aren't as good a value related to market rates, but whenever rarity of a type of version come up there may not be a lot of clear comparisons to be drawn on. They sell basic factory sheng for reasonable prices, or aged Xiaguan tuochas; that's a nice resource to have.
It's not unusual for something like aged white tea in Chinatown shops to be whatever it happens to be, something unique related to variable starting point and a random aging input, which is exactly why sorting through options in Chinatown shops is all that much more special than conventional online sourcing. Not as special when you experience misses along with the hits, but if you are trying what you buy first that helps.
On this visit I bought a couple of basic Taiwanese oolongs to give away to monks, and a standard benchmark version Dayi sheng pu'er cake (8582) to try and probably hold onto for awhile; that's more where my budget lands. Not according to my wife, who is convinced that I have enough tea, but she's a little more open about teas for that particular gift purpose (monks can't shop for their own tea), and I had to spend a little in thanks after that extensive tasting. It's a little odd trying a dozen or so really interesting and novel teas and then buying very basic factory sheng, but it's a gap in what I own.
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the kids visiting there during covid era |
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