Here is all the Jingmai Pu-erh tea we made in Spring 2022

Hi everybody! Today is the end of the early spring 2021 production run. Yesterday and the day before yesterday it was raining constantly, so it's the second rain episode we've had during the season, so we can consider that it's now the end. And so with the end of the season comes a crucial step in the tea making, and this is the assessing each of the batches that we've made, and then doing the proper blends for teas. So we are at the assessing step now, and we've gathered all of our teas in our greenhouse. We'll keep them here for one day, that will allow the batches to dry out, especially considering there's been two days of rain in the past days. And so, well, it's always nice every year, I always like to see this, to see all our teas gathered here. This year we've made about 500 kilograms of tea. You can see here that these are the shengtai that we've made with the machine. Now over there is the shengtai that we've hand processed, and all what you have there is the gushu. You have the single trees here, and all the mixed picking there. I'm going to go over each of the areas in more detail, but today I think it's a good opportunity to take a look at the dry maocha, at the dry leaves. So we are going to start with the machine made tea. Well actually I found out that it's not that easy by the look of the leaves to differentiate between handmade tea and machine processed, because once you do the rolling, you can't really make the difference. So sometimes you can smell our, this one has a very nice, very specific fragrance, this must be from Erdui. So, well, if you look, the difference can be that usually our machine tea is processed slightly greener than our handmade tea, but it really depends on the technique you use. We can see here that some stems are red. These are really, really long stems, and that's interesting. We had to turn on the machine maybe three days, during three days, because we had too much tea at that time. So, yeah, what you have here is the production of three days of machine processing. And the natural tea gardens we source tea from, well, there are four different tea gardens. You can, so they have pretty underwhelming names, they are called like team one, team two, and team six. It's because, well, when they planted the tea gardens, they gave it that kind of factory style management. And so each area was assigned to a specific team in the village. And that's where the names come from. We really need to find more romantic names for these places. And actually, there are, but we need to do more research for this. So I think you can come here, and I will show you something interesting in these hand-processed tea. This is from the same tea garden. This is Liodue, our own tea garden. And this is the first batch that we've made in the season. That was on March 24th. And this batch is probably from early April. And can you see the difference between those two teas? Look at this. On the left, you have this very early spring tea. And on the right, you have what would be the second flush. So the second flush is darker. It has less buds as well than the first flush. Now, it's very confusing because there are several factors that make the look of Mao Cha. Now, well, this is very bud-heavy, but in part it's because the earliest leaves look like this. They tend to be more furry. They have more hair on the leaf. And also, it depends at which stage of the growth you harvest them. So it seems that that day, on the 24th of March, they harvested quite tippy leaves, you could say, tender young leaves. So it really depends on each day. So if you look at each of these batches, you will find out that they all look different. And it's actually very hard to find a logic behind their look, because the look is the result of many parameters. So, you know, when you meet people who tell you, oh, Gu Shu should have thick leaves, or Gu Shu should have thick veins, or it should be hard to tear apart the leaves. I think this is all bullshit. They obviously haven't been making tea in a factory every day, because every day the material you get is different. Now, I would say you could draw some general lines on which you can think. For example, forested tea will be greener, will be richer in chlorophyll, so it will have a darker green than unshaded tea. And so unshaded tea tends to be more yellow. And if it lacks of nitrogen, for example, it grows on poor soil, it will be even more yellow. So by the color, at least that's how it is in Chiang Mai. But in many areas, for example, the Gu Shu are not more forested than the small trees, so you can't use color to make the difference. So we, well, by looking like this, I'm surprised, because in the end we made a lot of, we made more machine shangtai than handmade shangtai, it seems. That shows how useful the machine is when we have a lot of production. And I'd like to taste the difference between these two batches furthermore. And I think what we'll do this year is that all the machine-made tea, we will press it into one type of cake, and the handmade tea will be used for our typical So you will have two cakes of shangtai at two price points, and you'll be able to make the difference, hopefully. Now we can have a look at the Gu Shu. So I've sorted it with each, I've sorted it by tea garden. So for example, here we have Nogu Wan, what we have about 40 kilo of Nogu Wan. This is one of our garden, this is our only ancient garden in Tapingzhang. And I will display a map for you of all the tea gardens. You can see these very well on Google Earth actually, so it's always cool to study their geography. So, well, also something handmade tea tends to have more huangpian, at least with our cooking style, because well, we like to cook it quite well, and it can create more huangpian. Also, the amount of huangpian will depend on the harvest. For example, this is the early harvest before the rain of Gu Shu, and this is the same. So here you can see that was before the rain, and this is the same tea after the rain. You can, yeah, it's really not obvious, but you can see there's a slightly darker shade. This one is a bit greener. The tips are more furry. You can see if you look at the bag, here you have less furry tips, less golden tips. You can also see that even the huangpian, they look brighter in the tea before the rain. But again, here the rain is only one parameter, but yeah, it tends to make the rain, tea after the rain tends to make the leaves grow faster, and therefore you have less buds, and they look darker. So it's a very nice garden. This is Ai Ban. This is my favorite garden. Again, you can easily see this is the tea. This is the first flush of Ai Ban, and you can see a lot of small tips, and interestingly, no, actually, it's not the first flush. It's the, yeah, it's all the first flush of Ai Ban. It sprouted quite late, but you can see that this was made on the 9th of April, and this was made on the 12th of April. So it seems they first picked a part of the garden, and then let it grow further, and then three days later, we sourced this tea. So sometimes, they will do like this. They will harvest the first flush in several goes, if they think that a lot of the flushes are not mature enough. So we've made only three bags of Ai Ban, and what we made most is He Huan. It's because we know two farmers who we source tea leaves from. So yeah, this is the bulk of our production, I could say, He Huan, but it's quite a vast area. So we source from two farmers and three tea gardens, actually, or even four tea gardens, actually, in He Huan. Yeah, four tea gardens and three farmers. We source from one new farmer this year. So it's interesting. It's really in the middle of Ta Ping Zhang, and it's heavily forested there. So theoretically, since it's heavily forested, the leaves should look greener than some other gardens, which are less forested. And two of the gardens in there are quite difficult to access. There's no road on which we can ride motorbike, so we have to walk. But well, compared to Yi Wu or other places, it's still really easy to access in Jing Mai. So I'm not going to complain here. And then, so He Huan has a very balanced taste. I would say not too much bitterness. The good, the typical Jing Mai fragrance is present. You have a bit of everything in He Huan. So it works well, I think, as a base for our gulan cake. Now here we're in Guang Jing. Guang Jing is just above the village. You can see the temple from Guang Jing. And well, it's a nice garden, not too heavily forested, quite lightly forested. And it has a particular fragrance, I would say, what defines this garden is the fragrance. You can see here that all the leaves are quite small. On this bag, they look very, very fury. It feels to me that the Sha Qing was a bit strong on what's on the top, like it's a lot of Huang Pian. And you have these very, very tender, looks like one but two leaves. But it seems to me that on this batch, the Sha Qing was a bit strong, maybe cooked too dry. Anyway, so this is good for adding that typical Jing Mai fragrance because it's very intense. I think where it lacks is a bit on the Sha Qi side and stuff. This is Wang Bo. So Wang Bo is, you could say it's all the upper slopes that are around the village, mainly above the village. So it's not purely, it's not proper Ta Xing Zhang here, it's not on the plateau. So you have much less organic matter in these soils because it's heavy slopes. And so the organic matter will run off. So you have a sandy soil and no organic matter. So you could say that's where you have the poorest soil here. And Wang Bo usually gives you quite a strong bitterness compared to other teas. So it's good, it's kind of the salt for Gulan maybe. It can add a bit more bitterness, but it's also heavily astringent. And to finish, we have our single trees here. So all the ones I've been through so far are from, they are what we call Hun Cai. It means like we pick all kinds of trees. So it will mainly be nowadays the medium and the small trees of the ancient tea gardens, and all the big trees which make maybe what, 10% of the tea gardens, of the tea garden output, the really big trees. We pick them separately. So we've gathered a couple of them. We have way more this year I feel than last year. What we must have maybe 25 kilos here, maybe even 30 kilos. So that's a good news. We managed to get a lot of single trees production. And this year we're trying a new one which is Awadong. So Awadong is a tea garden that we've never sourced tea from, but we got a new contact. And I think because it has a special taste, I think I will not press it, or maybe we'll press it as a unique cake, or either sell it as matcha or make a small cake. And the others, I will blend them and make a single trees cake like we did last year. And this is actually also Gusu from, this one is all the Gusu from Awadong. So yeah, we've got that extra too. And I don't know too much yet about this tea garden. So I need to do a bit more research, do a bit more tastings. And so that's it. So that's about, that's what 500 kilogram of tea looks like. So we're gonna taste them. We're gonna taste hopefully each of these batches, check if there's no problem. Problem could be like a taste, a burn taste, like too much hatching. Or it could be a tea soup that is muddy. That could be a problem with drying, for example. Or it could be also a problem during the rolling, too heavy rolling. If the leaves are still warm, can cause this problem. And if there are any really outstanding batch, we can also consider selling it as matcha. So we will see. We have to decide. Every year we have this dilemma. And this is of course, this is somehow a bit heartbreaking because you see all this diversity of teas and you'd be really happy to explore and compare each of these batches. But in the end, we have like, what, 60 different bags here. But in the end, you have to make the case. You have to give up on this diversity. Sure, we can take, we can collect one sample of each bag as a souvenir, I would say. And we've done this in the past years. But I think what really matters is to just try a lot of those teas and get a general feel of the garden. The problem is each factor is influenced by other factors, of course. And I would say, if you want to know what a tea garden tastes like, for example, well, you have to do a lot of tastings. A lot of tastings that will depend whose result will be affected by weather, by the maturity of the leaves, by your processing technique, just by the vintage. Which means that if you really want to understand the taste of a tea garden, maybe you have to taste 20, 30 samples before starting having a conception of what this tea garden is. And that's why it's very slow research. And that's why even after years of tea processing, we keep separating these batches. Because most farmers in Chiang Mai won't do that. They just separate Gusu and Shanghai. So big like ancient tea gardens and young tea gardens. And they don't really explore the diversity of each of these tea gardens, which is a shame because there is a lot of things to explore in there. So I think that's about it. Now we're going to start tasting these teas. And tomorrow in the afternoon, we will have decided on the blends we'll do. And the day after tomorrow, we'll be sorting the Huang Tian. And then we'll take this tea to Puerh for pressing. So that's it. I hope you'll be happy with the new harvest. I think overall, it's really good quality, maybe even better as last year. So well, I hope you will like our new cakes. Meanwhile, we have a lot of tasting to do. So I'm going to leave you here. Thank you for watching and see you later. Bye bye.