mediocrity

And that's a very good point Lew what does Zhu Cha mean literally? (Guess I could get off my lazy such and such and use the babelcarp hmm...) but it brings up a good point that sometimes I feel hopeless about and sometimes when I'm being Zen I just accept that it's part of the journey: namely that the English names we know teas by are different from their Chinese (meaning "real") names and that sometimes a tea sold by the same general name in the US (for instance, "sencha" though not Chinese) can have a HUGE variation in quality etc. Almost like a different tea. And sometimes teas sold by a name (especially popular ones like Long Jing) can be not really Long Jing at all (as per another group, "counterfeit").

But Mydnight, yes I can see the similarities in the rolled aspect between Tai Guan Yin and Gunpowder, though to me (and let me just say the gunpowder I have at the moment is cheap...nevertheless I kinda like it...) they don't taste at all similar. I would HOPE (grins and crosses fingers) that if I opened a container marked gunpowder that actually had an oolong in it, that I'd be able to tell by taste. If I opened a container marked Tai Guan Yin that had gunpowder in it though...that would upset me just a little, lol. I ordered around five or six different kinds of Assam about a month ago and after drinking on them I can now tell the difference between them without looking...training myself.

what kind of tea is it exactly then, Lew? the people that I talked with that referred to it as Gunpowder were people that were trying to market their cheap wulong to foreigners; it was in one of the Shanghai TianFu tea shops, I think. I've been a little confused about it since trying to research it here in the states. Can you explain a bit about it please?

I'm really curious and I want to learn more about it.

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

And sometimes teas sold by a name

indeed. I encountered a coffee shop that was telling small amounts of tea and also doing a by-the-glass thing that had "zhejiang lengcheng" (long jing in cantonese). I was rather excited, to see the label but when I looked in the jar, it was hardly as it was being marketed. It smelled slightly like longjing, but it was basically cheap red tea...to my disappointment. What i really hate is when someone tries to tell me that they are selling high quality chinese tea, then they have no idea what they are talking about when I ask them questions....such as, 'what kind of tea is it?' heh.

I wonder about that. I don't doubt your palate or anything, hehe, but I really had no idea what wulong tasted like until I got some while I was in China, even though I had drank wulong before in the USA. And, even then, the variety of tastes can be confusing when it comes to exactly what type it is. Most tea masters can't discern between a regular wulong and some types of tie guan yin.

What in the devil is gunpowder tea anyway?

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

It appears to be a rather nasty export green rolled into pellets most of the time. What I got from Foojoy was rather strong and smokey. There are some higher grades, but looks like most of it is for consumption outside China. The Chinese name is something like pearl tea. The pellets are much more compressed than the Ti Yuan Yin I've bought in Chinatown.

Interesting. I guess it's peddled to the lao wai or something.

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

What's typically referred to as "Gunpowder" in the USA is definitely a green tea, though one that often doesn't taste much like a Chinese green; it's also usually pretty cheap compared to other Chinese greens. For example:

or or 2+04+00+31+1&cidC or see Upton's ZG20, ZG21, 24, 25, 30, 32, or ZG34.

Doug

ahhh, i see now. it's just interesting though; i have been to zhejiang and i never heard of a tea being called gunpowder or zhu cha. it looks like a cheap version of tie guan yin called 'guan yin wang' (iron goddess king). i had a friend of mine that worked in a shop just give some to me because she said she got it for so cheap at market. heh.

i did see a website with some biluochun that looked a little like that.....but it was low grade.

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

Very popular in the Middle East.

Google turns up a number of sites for "gunpowder tea" and "middle east"

for an example.

snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com/23/04

20: snipped-for-privacy@askme.now [Mydnight on lying merchants, etc. snipped]

We have a shop here in New York City (Big Apple Tea House) where they sell "Wulong" which is not Ti Guan Yin, and several Ti Guan Yins, which they claim are *not* Wulongs. So, having thought that "Wulong" is the name given to teas in the partially oxydized catagory, I resurrect the question, What is Wulong? I should mention too that lately their stock seems to have fallen. Previously, their Wulongs, whatever they might be, were absolutely delicious.

Gunpowder is a hyped green tea of low and generic quality, sometimes somewhat smokey, but nearly always boring, and seldom complex. If you find an expensive version, that adds insult to injury. My friends tell me to always add "IMHO" when I rant like this.

Michael

I don't know how to specifically define Wulong other than to say it's half fermented, but I'm about 98 percent sure that Tie Guan Yin is a type of Wulong; the wulong family branches out to many different types of tea, but regardless of what their claim it is, it has to be a type of Wulong. I say 98 percent because I consider all my knowledge questionable because the shopkeepers could have been lying about certain things to try to make a sale..heh. The other way around may be true; I was told that Wulong is a type of tea and a classification as well, if that makes sense. So, it's possible to have a Wulong that is not a Tie Guan Yin for instance, I have some Gao Shan Wu Long (a li shan...tall mountain wulong) that is not a tie guan yin. There was a shop in Dongguan, the city I stayed, called Shang Ming Ming Cha that had many such teas.

A friend of mine in Hong Kong has a pretty good website concerning teas, and sells a bit of it. Check it out:

Beats me, I had no real desire to buy any but now that you've said that, it reaffirms my position. heh. I saw it once in Shanghai; looked cheap and smelled bad but was expensive.

oh yeah, IMHO. heh

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

That may be because it's made primarily for export, especially to the Mideast. On the other hand, I just did a Google search for zhucha using the Chinese characters, and came up with 7,920 hits.

/Lew

which zhu is it? is it the one that means 'burning'?

Mydnight

-------------------- thus then i turn me from my countries light, to dwell in the solemn shades of an endless night.

No, although that might describe the taste of bad gunpowder: it's the one for "pearl".

/Lew