Back from China!

I am a rank beginner but here are 2 greens to try

The 50 gm yin hao from Jing Tea Shop is very good I believe he sell one as a sample, I liked it enough to order a kilo.

The Dai bamboo 500gm from Yunnan Sourcing is in my cup right now and I like it very much, initially I was using water that was too hot but once I dropped down to about 190 it became special.

You're still sure you're looking at the correct uncook all green Xiaguan tuo box? The outside will say Xiaguan and have the crane emblem. The other green like export box with the cooked Xiaguan tuo will have the wording for Chinese National Native Produce on the outside. It sounds like someone took the cooked Xiaguan and put it in the box for the uncooked. The two prices are the same. Supermarkets only worry about the retail markups on their shelves based on wholesale. The managers don't know tuo from duck. I can get Xiaguan

Jim

Kathy wrote:

yeah, i haven't seen any since...january i think. we still get cooked tuo in export boxes, xiaguan cooked bricks, "jujube fragrant" papery cooked bricks, lincang mengku cooked bricks, the menghai-region "7262" (faked or stolen recipe number), and various supposedly aged bings priced from $8-199, though these 'aged' ones all look and smell cooked and have the same wrapper (same fonts, same proportions, etc.) regardless of age. I should take a picture of them and post it here sometime. Several grades of loose cooked pu'er are available, including $200/lb that's also supposedly very old.

I have the 'aged' cooked b> For years and years every Chinese supermarket in town stocked the green

The shop had only one type of toucha for sale and this was it. Green box with crane on it. When you opened it (it was taped closed) there was a card in the bottom saying it was A grade pu-reh which had been steamed . But the wrapper on the pu-erh didn't have a crane (Chinese writing instead) and the leaves were dark, cooked leaves, and not very good when I tried them. I've had better cooked pu-erh before. I might have forgiven them somewhat if the tea was good, but it wasn't.

Kathy

The other odd thing I find puzzling about the recipe number is grading information. I think it is more indicative of taste or leaf quality than leaf size. So how can the grade for one factory be the same as the grade for another? I got a tong (10x100g) bundle of cooked Jingmai mtn wild tree from Lancang factory. The first cake has a neifei with just the number 5038 which I think is the recipe. The second cake just has the Lancang logo for the neifei. I didn't check the others. It would be the oldest recipe I've seen and predate the modern factory recipes from the mid seventies.

Jim

Jason F in Los Angeles wrote: ...

The other odd thing I find puzzling about the recipe number is grading information. I think it is more indicative of taste or leaf quality than leaf size. So how can the grade for one factory be the same as the grade for another? I got a tong (10x100g) bundle of cooked Jingmai mtn wild tree from Lancang factory. The first cake has a neifei with just the number 5038 which I think is the recipe. The second cake just has the Lancang logo for the neifei. I didn't check the others. It would be the oldest recipe I've seen and predate the modern factory recipes from the mid seventies. Jim

Cooked Pu-erh and 1950's doesn't add up in my books. It was "invented" some 20 years later. This number is probably something else; like a batch number maybe ? 5 being 2005...even then 38 batches for 1 year isn't possible....no idea what it is.

Kevin.

The 5038 is NOT one of the standardized State sponsored recipe codes. It is a non-standard code that was privately done by that one single factory. I sincerely doubt that the first 2 digits of "50" have anything to do with a 1950s recipe. Is is just a batch code with little meaning outside of the factory.

Those old codes are pretty much meaningless today unless they come from one of the old State run factories that have since gone private, like Menghai or Xia Guan. In most other cases those codes have taken on a new persona and retain little of their original meaning. They are more of a SKU and/or marketing method now, more than anything else.

The ORIGINAL standardized factory codes were developed (in the 70s) by the State run factories as a means of identification of recipe information. Since the privatization of the State run factories these codes have been copied and adulterated to the point that many of them no longer have the same meaning that they did when they originated. While some of the original (now private) State Run factories are still using those codes to represent the old original recipes, many new factories are simply copying the codes to cash in on their popularity.

I have heard 2 schools of thought about the standard factory codes. One school of thought comes from the Hong Kong corner, and the other comes from Taiwan. The main difference being the definition of third character.

Scenario #1

1. First 2 digits represent the first year of production for that recipe. IE 7542 was first created in 1975, the same recipe in subsequent years would be suffixed by the actual year and represented as 7542-89 etc. However, you typically don't see this suffix except in collector or business circles.
2. The third digit represents the grade of the leaf which was related to size.
3. The fourth digit represents the factory.

Scenario #2

1. First 2 digits represent the first year of production for that recipe
2. The third digit represents the recipe within that year
3. The fourth digit represents the factory

In both scenerios the factories represented by digit 4 are as follows, all of them were Government owned factories at the time, some of the original factories don't exist anymore hence I don't know their codes. Kunming Factory - 1 MengHai Factory - 2 Xia Guan Factory - 3 FengQing Factory - 4 Unknown - 5 Unknown - 6 Unknown - 7 Haiwan Tea Factory - 8 (also used by Long Sheng Tea Factory) Langhe Tea Factory - 9

I personally believe in scenario one, my reasoning is this: the third digit can only be one of 9 possibilities which easily corresponds with leaf grades. If the third digit is a recipe code then 9 digits might not have been enough if there were more than 9 recipes in a given year, and I don't see the factories as limiting themselves to only 9 recipes per year. On the flip side of the third digit issue is the fact that modern cakes are seldom made from a single grade of leaf anymore. Many cakes will have higher grade leaf on the surface and lower grade leaf in the middle. This is done for flavor blending, smaller leaves are sweeter while larger leaves add strength, as well as for appearance. For example you might have a grade 6-7 leaf in the middle with grade 2-3 leaves on the surface. This is common on both bingcha and bricks.

Mike

Thanks Mike, for the informative post. I'd have to get another bundle to see if it is a batch number or private recipe. Don't anyone hold their breath waiting for me to find out. The number gets lost after the first cake in any case. Maybe the number is used by the collector to give the wrapper blemishes an identity. Most of my puer don't indicate a recipe. The only reason I see a recipe becoming popular is because it has proven good aging characteristics, supposedly.

Jim

Mike Petro wrote: ...a little of me and you...

Why not? Nine *new* recipes per year might be a lot.

Not that I have any specific knowledge, but this seems more cogent to me, for why would they use names that had no meaning?

By the way, what does "modern" mean in this context?

Is it possible that the third digit meant leaf grade until the transition to multi-grade compressed Pu'er, and then its meaning shifted to recipe number within year of origin? The latter meaning would in a sense be a generalization of the former, for a recipe would specify the leaf grade(s), right?

/Lew

My gut tells me that no Factory in their right mind would back themselves into a numbering scheme that would limit them to only 9 recipes a year. Now the possibility does exist that back in the 70s they were so short-sighted that they thought they would never need more than 9, but I give them more credit than that. Heck, today some factories have as many as 50 recipes in a given year.

I am not sure when this practice started , but clearly it has been widespread since at least the 90s. This could very well be one of the reason the old standards became obsolete.

Possible, yes, but again I find it hard to fathom that intelligent Factory Engineers would back themselves into such a shortsighted numbering scheme that only allowed nine recipes per year. I suspect the "sa-mian" process (better grade on the face) evolved quite naturally as a means of making prettier and tastier cakes. Independently, with the privatization of the factories, the various factories drifted away from the numbering standards. Now they are no longer relevant, with a few exceptions, outside of the marketing realm.

Mike

In cup is a wonderful 90s cooked puerh, thanks Seb.....

Yeah - that would be about as dumb as a software major limiting file names to 8 characters, or virtual memory to 2^32 bytes... Oh, never mind.

ObTea: My large stash of tippy Yunnan reds has been kept fairly well sealed for a year or so. Flavor is dropping off, but no stale notes emerging. Anybody else notice a decoupling of flavor loss and adverse taste buildup on age?

-DM

Mike snipped-for-privacy@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com4/11/06

Mike, Should we even be convinced that the recipe numbers, whatever they turn out to be, have much consistency and thus much value? There appear to be differences in the style and amount of mixing of cooked and uncooked leaf in some of the recipes, and as usual I'm thoroughly confused. I'm going back to talking about milk in tea. That, I can handle without feeling overly jerky. Michael