Bai vs Mao Chinese tea terms

He's posting through Google groups from a cybercafe and is forgetting to do the foo that enables the quoting.

Comes from being the hot young dude having the great adventure and facing all jealous old farts. The young dude feels guilty that he's so ahead of the game, so he fumbles a bit.

Yes indeed we are. Some of us may be jealous of his youth (huh?), his opportunities (huh huh?) and his enthusiam (agreed, no huh here); he has made a lot of observations, and not all of them accurate or true, so if we were to provide our opinions on his opinions, are we guilty of being old farts, yourself included? Wait a minute, I'm 25!

I post through Google and I can't remember the foo required to enable quoting so it must be the default but then I don't have a government interested in what I read or say on the Internet unless it conflicts with the Patriot Act and then requires the obligatory signature of a judge which I can't read because my eyeballs have been burned out with a cigarette by some interrogator who found an instruction manual used in the Vichy French prisons to protect the occupying army. Most of the time I can match up his reply to a post but on more than one occasion I can't. Unless I missed something I don't remember him mentioning a cybercafe and his age. I do remember him saying something about his apartment and a computer hooked to the Internet. You're right travel and adventure is for young people. I did my share. I'm perfectly happy with the continental US. I can't think of a language on the international stage that isn't spoken in my local ethnic areas. More importantly if I fell off the wagon at least I can order a barrel of wine across state lines without ever having to visit the winery. I always top post because my fans demand it from me. They're more interested in what I say and not who I quote.

Jim

Rebecca Ore wrote:

I'm 57. There are polite ways to suggest alternative explanations to people.

I don't see Mydnight being as dogmatic as some people here were suggesting.

Mydnight,

you posted this elsewhere, but I thought I'll digress from the Mao & Bai discussion here...I think you have asked but not received many reply on whether the Liu Bao Cha tea is good for keeping. The answer is yes if you keep it well. Place the tea in a new earthern jar, and get some clean bamboo charcoal from the local supermarket, or wood ones if you can't find the former. Wrap a few pieces in a cheesecloth and place it in the jar with the tea. Cover the jar but not tightly, and place the jar in a cool place above ground, as it can get humid on that level.

Guangxi Liu Bao is not a pu'er. By definition pu'er has to be produced in the regions of Yunnan using the large leaf varietals from Yunnan, such as the Camellia sinensis var. assamic cv. Yunkang 43 or the cv. Lincang-dayecha. Guangxi liu bao uses a different varietal altogether, which is the Camellia cv. Liubaocha, also the var. pubilimba cv, Liudong-dayecha.

Liu Bao is a Chinese black tea, not a pu'er. A pu'er can be a black tea in broad terms, but technically, it should be considered as a post-fermented tea (which black tea also falls under), and is divided into into 2 broad categories: Speed post-fermentation (also called ageing) by piling, and slow post-fermentation over time.

Under Speed post-fermentation by piling, it is again subdivided into 2 broad categories: wet & dry storage. To encourage further and faster post fermentation, the tea is kept in storage houses with high humidity level. This can be done in 2 stages: once right after the piling and compressing process, and another time by the tea vendors in rented storehouses. The latter fermentation is often not agreed upon by many serious pu'er collectors.

To encourage a more natural albeit slower post fermentation, the tea is picked, fixed on low heat - usually under the sun, compressed and kept in a dry storage house with low humdity and low temperature to slowly take out the dampness in the cake and allow it to age naturally. After this, tea vendors can either put it right back into a wet storage storehouse to kick up the post fermentation - which is very undesirable, and which can be seen on the surface as a white-bluish frost with dark black leaves, or let it age naturally in a dry storehouse, or at the teashop itself.

Liu Bao doesn't do through this tedious process, but it is the forefather of modern day speed post fermentation process, as in late 1960s tea makers from Kunming and Menghai came to Guangxi to study the process of Liu Bao making and applied that on the pu'ers.

There's a new class of pu'er over the last several years that's gainig popularity, I think someone has posted it as green tea pu'er. It is just as what it says. It is a raw pu'er made out of mostly young bud leaves and flushes which many people like. The only serious problem with this sweet delicate tea, is whether it will keep well. You see, the tea is made under high heat fixation, similar to that of a green tea, and green tea doesn't keep for long, even if it uses the Yunnan large leaf varietal. High heat fixation such as hot drum rolling, frying and high heat steaming destroys much of the enzymes in the leaf on which the microbes need to feed on to create the unique flavour of pu'er as we know it. Such green tea pu'er generally lasts a shorter lifespan, and most serious pu'er collectors will advise against collecting these cakes for ageing - they believe that the tea liquor will be sweet, but there would be no nuance, or depths a good pu'er should have.

& sorry Michael - you know what I'm talking about... :")

Danny ps. Hey, I'm observing from the ground too Rebecca, as you have said Mydnight does, do I get some praise too? Puuurty pleeese? :")

Wow Danny, thank you very much for this post, it is really interesting to me. I like that you specify variatals, that's detail that I feel I miss a lot of times in other cases.

Thanks!

Melinda

I dunno but it's fascinating to me. My love of tea has made it incumbant upon me to learn some Chinese, and while your conversation is way over my head it is nevertheless very interesting.

Melinda

Rebecca snipped-for-privacy@news.verizon.net5/18/05

14: snipped-for-privacy@NOHarvestverizon.net

I'm not sure what the orgin of this post is....because I haven't read all the previous. Mydnight, how old are you? You don't have to answer, but now I'm really curious, oh youthful, opportunistic, and enthusiastic one.

Michael

Rebecca snipped-for-privacy@news.verizon.net5/18/05

15: snipped-for-privacy@NOHarvestverizon.net

Rebecca,

It is, in my ever so humble opinion, time for you lay off. I don't give a rat's ass for your educational background. You still get a C for your sloppy scholarship. - end -

Michael

samarkand428ba0b5$ snipped-for-privacy@news.starhub.net.sg5/18/05 16: snipped-for-privacy@uk2.net

I admire your youthful enthusiasm, son.

Cool. No rooibos required. I have my sources direct from Africa. Just bring your ennobled and ennobling self.

Would the true linguist please stand up. .. Michael

snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com5/19/05 05: snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com

I echo Melina's thoughts. I enjoyed the information contained in your post.

Michael

I meant I understand nothing to the crappy logic (if any) of your demonstration, that's what made me speechless the other day.

The end.

Kuri

While we are on the topic: I greatly prefer if someone has something to say to me that they address me directly, I would assume that most others feel the same way. Veiled comments, intentionally indirect statements, and coy references lack conviction in my book. It is a ploy I have often seen used by those who want to allow for deniability later. Jim, you don't strike me as being that timid, these indirect "you know who" comments are discourteous to all who read the post. If you have a question or comment for me (or anyone else for that matter), say so directly, even if you have a criticism at least show the respect to say so forthright.

Mike

So, tell us something about Japanese tea growing already, and don't try to tell me that Japanese and Chinese are related languages when Turkish is more related to Japanese than Japanese is to Chinese (loan words don't count).

Also, a quick run through academic sources shows that computers changed the picture yet again with regard to characters -- and make being able to "draw" much easier.

If you know Japanese, which I assume from your use of a Japanese character set in your posts (which I switched to Unicode UTF-8 so my replies would wrap properly and my spellchecker wouldn't mark everything misspelled, you would also know that things can be spelled out as well as signed.

I've read Sasha's posts about some tea ceremony he'd done with a captured and not- repatriated WW II era Japanese in either Russia or China -- and that sounded like bullshit to me. If you take his word over Mydnight's about what's going on in various parts of China (not Japan), I'm likely to think that you prefer colorful tales to anything remotely resembling a fact on the ground.

And for that matter, I don't believe Sasha travelled in parts of China unaccessible to other Europeans or Americans after the 1960s because Russia wasn't a great and good socialist friend of China's after that time (some good things came from the Cultural Revolution -- the Russians got kicked out). The border now may be looser, but I doubt seriously that Russians now would be getting more privileges in terms of travel than say, Canadians or the French, both of which countries normalized trade and diplomatic relations well before the US did and pose no military threats to China as they don't share a common border.

Re the tea ceremony with the captured Japanese, where were they getting the tea for it? Is there a non-matcha way to do the tea ceremony? This also begs the question about how comfortable anyone who'd been kept captive for 25 or more years would be doing a tea ceremony with one of his captors' children, or how much he would have really remembered about the tea ceremony after all that time.

Or even if the tea ceremony in the 1940s was still something commonly done by samauri.

I've heard that most of the contemporary tea ceremony students are women.

Learn to interleave quotes so I can figure out what you're talking about.

I had this one out with the head of the Cherokee Museum. I believe that being in a culture sometimes makes one oblivious to aspects of the culture (an Indian's tour through the South gave me some perspectives on Southern culture that I hadn't had before). Not every outsider is going to come in without the usual filters, but Westerners appeared not to have gotten Eskimos as well as an African who decided to go to Greenland.

Okay, you're Chinese. I don't think you necessarily know everything about all of China and I don't think the East is mysterious (the West way more hysterically mysterious than the East, judging from the furniture alone).

*Everyone* in the linguistics world says that what China called dialects of Chinese are separate languages.

Japan isn't Chinese. Computer-assisted character generation doesn't help us understand what literacy might have cost in earlier times or how literate people might be in various parts of China.

One of the problems of jumping into a flame war is that the person being attacked (kuri and Sasha were the main people saying the undefensible things) doesn't tend to at that point distinguish between people offering polite suggestions and people trying to score points. Mydnight withdrew at that point. Sasha tried to continue the attack like the person he has appeared to be all through this -- someone whose own stories about his travels in China and his experiences with the captured Japanese tea person sound to this teacher of English like stories that he made up. I am willing to call him a liar until proven otherwise.

If you have any reason to think that Sasha had his experiences in China after the Chinese decided that the Russians weren't their best friends and went where other Westerners couldn't have gone (my guess is that the French and Canadians were going to be more welcome more places than the Russians these days), then cool, but I know when the mainland Chinese who were students at SUNYA stopped studying Russian and started studying English.

What Mydnight wanted to do was let the whole thing cool off. Sasha as flamer boy didn't want the whole thing to cool off.

It's going to be easier to have a conversation with Mydnight if you learn some Western customs about flaming and when to back out of a conversation since when the flamers are playing, rational conversation gets lost in the noise. Kuri and Sasha (and Sasha in particular) are being naughty by design.

Yeah, but be careful to stay away from people who confuse China with Japan or claim to have travelled in places Westerners couldn't go after the Chinese switched from studying Russian to studying English.

The western rule is don't stand beside a man throwing rocks.

(I know some of you have met Sasha and like him, but I think of him as a ne-kulturni vez umni malchik c deneg, if I'm remembering my russki yazik correctly. You guys are free to have another opinion).

I mostly ignore him unless he's trying to wrangle up support for his unverifiable stories (and for me, his own word isn't good enough).

The third person is good for for webmasters who should create private forums for their own websites than criticising those who do and inviting them to post here. I occasionally reply in the first person. I don't plagiarise under the guise of public domain. I'm not a webmaster who uses Usenet for advertising. I don't lie. I am the self appointed curmudgeon.

Jim

Mike Petro wrote:

references

forthright.

Thank you for the informations. Your are using the charcoal to reduce humidity or for other purposes ? Is it good for it to be humid or not ?

BTW, does anybody here uses bamboo charcoal in their kettle ?

Kuri