Just had a 30-year old Tieguanyin today with some tea friends here in Fuzhou. This was tea that tea farmers hung up inside the rafters of their house and forgot about.
Tieguanyin has gotten a really bad name lately and fallen out of favor with tea drinkers. Tieguanyin vendors struggle to stay in business, at least in Fuzhou.
Sometime this week, I'm going with a group of tea friends to Anxi where we'll make some tea ourselves. Hope that works out well. I'm told the raw leaves will only cost 1 yuan per pound.
Kind of strange how Yancha has gone for a wild ride lately too, but a lot of us think the Yancha market is going to spiral downward soon because leaf quality has really gone down in recent years; plus they're doing lots of tea blending to make up for taste and fragrance discrepancies.
Warren Peltier <chuanming.cha...@gmail.com> writes:
>Just had a 30-year old Tieguanyin today with some tea friends here in
>Fuzhou. This was tea that tea farmers hung up inside the rafters of
>their house and forgot about.
>Tieguanyin has gotten a really bad name lately and fallen out of favor
>with tea drinkers. Tieguanyin vendors struggle to stay in business, at
>least in Fuzhou.
>Sometime this week, I'm going with a group of tea friends to Anxi where
>we'll make some tea ourselves. Hope that works out well. I'm told the
>raw leaves will only cost 1 yuan per pound.
Wow. If that’s true, it sounds worse than the aftermath of the Pu’er
bubble. Maybe it’s a similar phenomenon, though: lots of money suddenly
sloshing into a market lacking enough committed consumers to support all
that investment/speculation?
Yeah, the Tieguanyin bubble bust because there was too much of a demand, so farmers had to increase pesticide applications and fertilize heavily to increase production. Plus, leaf appearance (green) is particularly important for light floral TGY, another factor for needing pesticide application.
Trouble is, the soil buildup of pesticide residues, the fact that many TGYs are blends from different farms, plus pesticides accumulate in clay soil, and tea plants have natural tendency to absorb nutrients heavily from the soil - all of those factors meant disaster for TGY market.
In China, even much of the domestic market is afraid to drink TGY. It's also perceived as hurting the stomach - so it's a tea not looked upon favorably now.
On Monday, August 6, 2012 12:02:49 PM UTC-5, Warren Peltier wrote:
> Yeah, the Tieguanyin bubble bust because there was too much of a demand, so farmers had to increase pesticide applications and fertilize heavily to increase production. Plus, leaf appearance (green) is particularly important for light floral TGY, another factor for needing pesticide application.
> Trouble is, the soil buildup of pesticide residues, the fact that many TGYs are blends from different farms, plus pesticides accumulate in clay soil, and tea plants have natural tendency to absorb nutrients heavily from the soil - all of those factors meant disaster for TGY market.
> In China, even much of the domestic market is afraid to drink TGY. It's also perceived as hurting the stomach - so it's a tea not looked upon favorably now.
> > Wow. If that’s true, it sounds worse than the aftermath of the Pu’er
> > bubble. Maybe it’s a similar phenomenon, though: lots of money suddenly
> > sloshing into a market lacking enough committed consumers to support all
> > that investment/speculation?
I was saving a small bit of my TGY for autumn hot tea drinking. Should I throw it away instead? Toci
In article <4f5e8d42-db4e-4e83-9b94-54f4edbf0f9e@googlegroups.com>,
>Trouble is, the soil buildup of pesticide residues, the fact that many TGYs
> are blends from different farms, plus pesticides accumulate in clay soil,
>and tea plants have natural tendency to absorb nutrients heavily from the >soil - all of those factors meant disaster for TGY market.
>In China, even much of the domestic market is afraid to drink TGY. It's also
>perceived as hurting the stomach - so it's a tea not looked upon favorably
>now.
The domestic market is starting to worry about contaminated and fake foods,
just like happened in the US a century or so ago. I'm not sure that they have
the power to have anything done about it.
They're still growing guanyin tea in Taiwan, though, and some of it is excellent.
--scott
-- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Recent trends in Asia have been black teas. The TGY (iron goddess) has two types the Chinese non roasted called Anxi iron goddess or green goddess with orchid fragrance and the Taiwanese one called Mucha iron goddess which is roasted with chestnut fragrance.
