Livestream： Deep dive into Bulang Shan

Hi everyone, I hope you're doing well. It's a nice afternoon in poor city and yesterday we had our first live stream. I hope the connection will be better today and so I want to keep the momentum going up and just start with the more in-depth presentation of each tea area. I will just check. Maybe you can tell me in the comment section if there's no problem, how the sound is. I tried to tweak some parameters. Let's see if it works better. Of course if the video is of poor quality I still record it on my computer so I'll be able to upload a good version of it if it doesn't work during the live stream. So today I'm going to talk about Bulangshan. I said we started from south to north so we're going to start at the Burmese border and today I'm going to drink this tea. This is from Mong Noi, so a village really near the border, near the Burmese border and this is spring 2023. We will open it here. I can show you a bit the leaves. So we'll start brewing that tea and then we'll go into the exploration on Google Earth and I will show you some pictures that I took during my travels. You can see here the leaves are bigger than average but not really that big. Lao Mana typically has bigger leaves and for the rest of Bulangshan it's usually medium sized or slightly bigger than average. So we are going to extract some leaves. Again I don't use a pick because the leaves are loosely pressed. For the videos I like to use a dark gaiwan because that way you can see the leaves better typically. When brewing tea I just like to extract, to loosen the leaves like this with my fingers. That way the rinse goes faster. You make sure that the tea is more like loose leaf tea, like Mao Cha. Okay let's just brew this quickly. So what is special about Bulangshan tea? A lot of people know Bulangshan for the bitterness but I think this is a cliché, this is kind of true that on average Bulang tea is a bitter area. But you can find some examples which are not extremely bitter and I think it's not the main point actually of a good Bulangshan tea. Bitterness is good when it pairs well with astringency, I would say, when it pairs well with a powerful tea. So if you only have bitterness in the tea but the soup is weak, then the bitterness will come across as unpleasant I think. You also have to check how long the bitterness lasts. Usually we like that kind of bitterness that quickly changes into sweetness. So yeah, hello everyone! Okay, you get some static in the sound. Okay I tried to tweak some parameters but anyway yesterday I managed to save the footage that I recorded on my computer. I don't know what's doing this because when I try a live stream in private the sound works well and then when I go public it seems there's this problem coming. Okay no problem I will. Anyway I can edit the video after. So yeah okay let's just give it a... I don't want to lose that first time after you rinse the leaves. Yeah you get a typical fragrance I think in Bulangshan tea. That's one of the characteristics. In the past they used to be very smoky. It was mainly due to the house design. They had old style houses built on wooden pillars and they would have a big living room and they would typically keep a fire lit in the middle of their living room and store the tea on the side so the tea would get smoky as it was stored in the house. Now of course since maybe 2012-2013 everyone started building new houses and this problem doesn't really occur anymore. But I remember back in 2010 when you tried Bulangshan tea you expected it to be quite smoky. We can see the leaves are quite a dark green. Let me zoom in again. Maybe you can see better. So you can see that the leaves have a dark green and it's an indication I would say of... well they are still slightly yellow. It's an indication that they give a fairly long shaqing. We'll talk about the processing technique. Bulangshan is quite a conservative area. They tend to... they like to make handmade tea still a lot compared to other areas like for example Jingmai embraced the machines much more early than Bulangshan and when they do the shaqing it's quite the opposite of Yiwu. They like to give a long shaqing with a lot of steaming typically and this might be just because their tea is naturally quite bitter and if you don't give a long shaqing that bitterness will tend to be a bit more nasty. So in a way giving that long shaqing with lots of steaming just like we do in Jingmai it's a way to to tone down the bitterness and somehow make it change into a more palatable kind of bitterness. And it also does good for the sweetness because I think through that process you kind of convert some of the bitterness into sweetness and that's to me after the fragrance the second main point It has a very very good sweetness and very good depth but not the same kind of sweetness as Yiwu nor the same as Mongku. So that's one of the things that keeps me enticed into drinking and studying Pu'er tea is that you have those words like sweetness but in practice you could define different types of sweetness I think. And usually a good Bulangshan tea it really coats the mouth from the start but it also takes some time to take off. Jingmai tea tends to be quite straightforward and give everything from the first or second brew while Bulangshan tea tends to be more long-brewing and you need a bit longer time you need to appreciate it over the whole session. It will start slow and increase and then will reach a peak and will also take quite some time to to go down to a more stale level. So Bulangshan tea is really really good for long gongfu sessions. Grandpa style of course if you're hardcore you can enjoy it but it's more suited to a gongfu session grandpa style. The bitterness can indeed get a bit overwhelming and it's also a material that fits well into blends. The classic Monghai taste like the 7542 involves a lot of Bulangshan material that's usually what gives the punch of that tea. But it's not a tea that's particularly astringent and that's also one characteristic where you get more bitterness than astringency and this is quite rare. A lot of teas have more astringency than bitterness and that interplay between astringency and bitterness they form the minerality I would say and so I would say this is part of the somewhat mineral teas you get. The most mineral teas in my opinion would be Mongsong in the north of Monghai so we'll see that later and for example Jinggu or Yibu to me don't come across as particularly mineral because they don't have much of that bitterness nor astringency to make that playful on the tongue. So let's just start on Google Earth. Sorry I'm in the and we'll go to the south. Xishuangbanna is about here the limit okay this place and we will go to Monghai so again remember my live stream from yesterday you have like three big plateaus here this is Monghai we go south we go to Monghun the Monghun plateau and we will keep going south we will keep going south until we see that kind of spaceship shape I don't know it looks a bit like a Mon Calamary cruiser if you're a Star Wars fan okay and here you see there's a big valley here this is already Myanmar so it's too far the border is around here so we'll zoom in here and we will arrive okay the border must be that mountain range here so we will start by going to Bulongshan town so this is the administrative town there's not that much to see in that place I will show you a few pictures this is this was taken back in 2010 when I had my first camera just a very cheap point-and-shoot camera so I hope you will forgive the lack of picture quality in those earlier pictures but you can see at that time most of the houses were of the traditional style and that's why I said it's smoky because it's basically one big living room and people have very tiny bedrooms which are more like closets on the side or alternatively they would just sleep in the living room so in that design you can see the more collectivistic mindset of those people where the living room was the most important and the largest place they tend to have very small living rooms they're very small bedrooms and Bulongshan tea at that time had mostly Tai Di Cha as I said it's a staple for the blends in Menghai for the Menghai taste so you have a lot of tea in Bulongshan really and you can see a lot of small trees like this so this is back in 2010 this is a bit so these plantations we can start again maybe our journey on Google Earth and this is if we go west so going from Bulongshan we're quite in the south of the Bulongshan area if you look at the it's about that big it's a fairly big area you can see a cross how big is it the cross yeah 42 kilometers across so it's not a single tea mountain it's more a mountain range and a group of villages so what I define here is roughly the administration area but you could say most of the tea will start from Mannan okay we'll go there later we'll let's say we're in Bulongshan because you know back in 2010 I didn't have a car I couldn't didn't have much money to hire a taxi or something so I just took the public bus and the public bus just brings you to Bulongshan Xiang so you're right here and you're not far from the Burmese border south you have a village which is called Manno and it's pretty hard to access now you can see unfortunately the pictures on google map are quite hazy but I hope you will still be able to see it looks like it hasn't grown that much and it looks the houses look quite traditional you can see tea plantations all around here they also have some gushu but I don't have that much experience there because you need to take a small road there and there you have a checkpoint probably this one managed by the army and it's kind of a buffer zone between Myanmar and China so the access is a bit restricted so yeah I went there once in 2010 but I didn't have a camera at the time and since then I haven't gone back I tried once back in 2017 but they wouldn't let me go okay so I won't be able to talk too much about Manno village but I remember back in 2010 I just started walking west so if you follow that path all along that path here you have a couple of villages and so in those villages that's where those pictures were taken roughly and to the west you come across very traditional villages so that was back in 2010 and at that time yeah it still looked very very preserved and people were yeah people were in this tea industry making tea the place of course is mostly populated by the Bulang and the Bulang I think are the biggest tea producers so basically in Bulangshan you don't have a lot of gushu but you have a little bit in every village and most of the gushu are in the north in Laomanna we'll talk about these later let's first go west yes so you go on that road this is mostly Taidi there this is the main road and then you have a crossroad here and then you arrive in the Zhangjia area so did I get lost already no that crossroad must be a bit earlier I think this is the main road yeah it should be around there and then you keep going no it's not it's more in the south it's more in the south yeah it's it's through this valley this is a beautiful valley there you can see the big mountain ranges and there you have scattered villages it's really not a densely populated area you can feel it's quite wild but you can see all here is a plantation tea tea plantations one of them is owned by dai so they get a lot of material from that area and so this area southwest of Bulangshan so it's mainly the most famous village is Zhangjia Sandwe and it's famous for being the most expensive Taidi cha that you can find in that area so you see if you try to get a view from the road you're following this small road and you can see that you can see Myanmar in the back you have lots of temples because the Bulang are buddhist and they are very faithful they tend to invest a lot in the temples you can see that big one here and this is Zhangjia Sandwe and you can see this hill it's quite fun because it's totally covered in tea plantations and even I went I went back there in 2019 and it still looks the same there's no trees at all you know that it's been a common trend in the famous areas to to convert those plantation teas into natural tea gardens but it's not the case there and I think it's because they probably have contracts with the big factories or at least they have that demand for plantation tea which will likely be used either in blends for the big factories or for making ripe work and the the plantation tea there is really not cheap for plantation tea it's basically same price as what you would pay for for natural tea gardens like in Jingmai or in other places in Bulang San I went there I tried the tea yeah I find it not so not so worth it I still prefer the I still prefer the the natural tea garden taste I think it's more powerful and they also planted more so this is Zhangjia Xinzai I think like the new village and the old village but as you can see these are pictures from 2021 and they totally rebuilt the place this village is this village actually so I was surprised in 2019 when I went there because they totally rebuilt it was part of what they call the tauping policy that policy which was aimed at like lifting people out of poverty so so it's kind of governmental projects you know like like what NGOs would do in poor countries they they just rebuilt the villages so apparently in those areas maybe the income is not so good actually which would be still surprising because they they have a lot of tea you can see that's another picture we can see the the big mountains from Myanmar in the background and all in the foreground it's all plantation tea yeah this is I think what Zhangjia Sandui that famous village with the small hill look like now you also have even back in that time it was still a pretty big scale production so you had those maybe old state factories that had some higher outputs and then you had the farmers trying to make tea on their own my my visit in 2019 was quite quick just one morning so I didn't get to to see much but it seems indeed that the area looks a bit less developed people don't really have factories like they would have in other parts of of Bulangshan so I don't know what's going on why why are those people not making money or developing because sometimes in some areas they do make money but maybe they use it for gambling or they just do something else they're not really doing the tea business big so okay so that's one that's southwestern part that's one spot you you can remember it's the Taidi the plantation tea most famous plantation tea in Xishuangbanna comes from there now if you go more in in the west in the northwest like this this is a vast area and I haven't explored it that much you could think you have Jieliang at the northernmost and I know they have tea gardens but I haven't visited there we can probably see the tea gardens you see yeah this looks like looks like Taidi maybe or corn I'm not sure actually but if you look around the village you can see this is definitely some young trees there and you might have old trees or older trees growing around the village the Bulangs they they love to to plant trees around their villages then you go down Manmai I'm not sure you have a bit of tea everywhere and it's sourced by by the big factories these are really not big names and you can see a lot of forest as well so you have a kind of natural reserve in Bulangshan and when you take when you take the main road you will go through a really beautiful kind of primary forest I could say but yeah I won't go into detail on that western edge because I'm not familiar with it then we can just go back to Bulangshan and take the road east and this is a place I like very much same all along that east eastern edge you have a lot of tea gardens the pictures look terrible but if you zoom in you can see this is probably some Taidi here ah but I didn't put Google Earth I'm sorry okay I still need to practice my live streaming skill so yeah yeah I was just explaining in the west I don't know too much it's quite scattered you don't have uh you have a bit of tea in every village now now we'll go back to Bulangshan and go east and through that valley that that runs parallel to Myanmar you can see you have those big mountains which are the we which are the border we will arrive to a nice village which is Mong Noi you can see it's very very tidily packed and this is this place this was taken back in 2017 I think it was a really beautiful morning I remember with my wife we we walked around the village so it was established in the paddies around the paddies where they will grow rice and corn as you can see and the tea there is on the hillsides you can see this is a newly built village they had an old village which they they have to move out from to be closer to the road and I don't know for some seismic activity stuff it's not exactly clear but the government told them to and you can see the the tea gardens are on the side and so this is quite common in Bulangshan you have like a little a little plateau and some hills around Laumanna is also a bit like this so they tend to to build the the village in the middle of that plateau and not really on the hillside maybe it's a tradition a habit from the Bulang because usually most of the villages are built on the hillsides so we we walked at that time we walked through the tea gardens and so this is the tea I'm drinking this is the village from the tea I'm drinking now and there were some questions actually as to the the age of the tea gardens I labeled it big trees because they have two different qualities of trees as I understand they planted the the tea trees during two in two stages they have all tea trees but which aren't really huge tea trees but they date back to maybe a long time ago probably 50 plus years but it's not really clear because last time they told me the old village was established 30 years ago and then like 10 years ago they had to move to the new village but now I'm a bit confused the old village might have been established a longer time ago these people are not Bulang they are Ghani hey why is it going back to to this picture oh I don't have all my pictures that's really bad I thought I had planned all this okay let's see how we can solve this because I miss a lot of pictures here so yeah you can have a look here on this picture this is I think their older tea gardens are on that area this is what it looks like the environment and they have more growing in the forest okay then how can I show you the pictures maybe I will try something else let me see why can't I display all those pictures okay I will just do a very bulbaric thing that way that way we can see the pictures um yeah is it working correctly like this yeah uh so this is yeah Weidong village and um so you have the yeah this is what like the probably the older plantations look like so they might be 30 years old but I think more I would say something like 50 if you look at the garden design um they are they look a bit similar to the the landscape in in Jinmai actually you can so and this is some more recent plantations built on the hilltops near the new village so you can see the village is quite well arranged here and they also planted when we visited they had just started to plant some some tea in the in the forest so you can see that the tea trees are really young here maybe three years old and I don't know what they did with the forest now now in Bulangshan in a lot like I said they are quite traditional they do I would say apart from Lao Manha they tend to do a lot of smaller scale production although like people try to build more modern factories but still back in 2017 you can see they would dry the tea on mats like this and you can see that the the leaves are not that big in that village yeah so this is other views you can see some tea in foreground okay um yeah let me just check the comments so I've been sourcing I've been sourcing the tea from this village quite regularly since we started doing business because I like the taste I think it's a good representative of the general Bulangshan taste it's not too expensive but it's not the the cheapest tea you can find either it's not common plantation tea it has a moderate bitterness that's what I like in this tea it's not a cliche Bulangshan tea if you want a more Bulangshan tea maybe you can try Manxinlong or you can try on Zhangjiazhai in the western area they've planted a lot of tea from Myanmar from the bitter varietal oh yeah I forgot to mention this but there are two varietals in Bulangshan growing you have the sweet tea called Tianzha and the bitter tea called Kuchha and so each of the village will typically have the two varietals growing together either they separate they know each tree so you can taste the leaves you can taste the leaves and know which varietal it is or like in many villages they don't separate very accurately they just know that in one garden you have mostly bitter tea and in another one mostly sweet tea so each garden might taste different because it would be a blend of the two varietals and bitter tea I find it quite hard to to enjoy but recently I visited my friend in Laomanhe and I have a good one actually from Laomanhe it seems that the strong bitterness tend to tone down as the tea trees age at least that that's what I think I understand let's go to another brew of this tea so I really recommend trying that this Mong Noi tea because it's a good general representative of Bulangshan it's not the most famous area not the best tea you can find that would be Laomanhe definitely but you can say it's a daily drinker and so in some years we had the the younger tea trees the cheaper ones but this year we decided to buy the more expensive ones so that's why we labeled it as big trees but it's not exactly big trees like you would find in Laomanhe, Hekai or Laobanzang it's older gardens now we always have this this problem with the denomination because saying small trees and big trees is very relative to where you are in lots of places the trees are not that big maybe we can have a look at the leaves so you can see they they look a bit quite yellow I would say quite similar to our Jing Mai tea and the leaves look I would say a bit bigger maybe than Jing Mai tea but I would say the processing style is very similar so those were cooked in a wok and you can see the soup is also quite thick not the thickest tea you can get it's a daily drinker it's surely not as good as like Laomanha Gusu or something but it's fine let me just check the comment section you can send a comment if you want me to discuss and then I will move on to the big piece of this presentation which is of course the northern part and Laomanha. So did the Chinese quality standard for tea so no I think the question is before before Bulangshan tea was smoky what factors led to the change it's mainly people having money to build new houses I don't think the government played an active part in changing this maybe there was some training done I'm not sure about this but it's mainly that now that people have those modern houses they don't put the fire in the living room anymore yeah actually there were some training done by by doctors you know like the the health department because living living with your fire all the time it gives you lung cancer it's like smoking maybe even worse because the you know the the smoke lingers in the room so at that time yeah that was the lifestyle and and they encouraged people to to create a kitchen and have the fire in the kitchen so nowadays it's very rare to find those fires in the living room but in Southeast Asia you still do yeah yeah doing fancy names oh I don't think about this because I think it's still important for people to learn to learn name the tea by their proper area of origin so that hopefully you can slowly learn the different names of the villages and then have some different comparison points if you add a fancy name on on top then it's even harder to remember the origin of each tea I guess how well traveled are tea producers well that's the difference I think between you could say conscientious and generally good tea producers and people who just do that because they were born born here and just do do it for a living people who are interested in tea generally they like to travel so it's still common that people who know a bit about tea and and make tea in the villages it's common for them to to travel around and it's also good to build a trade network because if you have customers for example who visit Chiang Mai and then want to go to Bulongshan well I can say I know a guy in Lao Man I know a guy in Mong Noi you can stay with them so it's also a kind of trade network and sometimes people also recommend some customers to us so yeah ah yeah why blue roofs I think it's some kind of fashion in southern Monghai so we will go actually straight to Lao Man I so let me yeah indeed Lao Man I has a lot of blue roofs like you can see now that was taken in 2012 at the time that the village was being rebuilt you can see you still you still have some older houses but of course back in 2012 Lao Man I was already famous so now we're north yeah let me just show you on the map we're now north so we go back to Bulongshan and now we go north so you have a road it's about 10 kilometers away and here you have Lao Man I ah fortunately the pictures are a bit better on this side and Lao Man I same is in a is in a kind of pit so they don't have a lot of land I guess the village extended a lot maybe there were fewer people but it's the biggest village now in in Bulongshan and it's by far the biggest village for ancient tea gardens because you can see here all what's scattered forest here scattered forest cover is ancient tea gardens and they they work really hard in Bulongshan because as soon as the tea got expensive in the early 2000s they started planting massively so they have a lot of tea everywhere and it's uh it's Shanghai natural tea garden you can see they have a lot of gardens actually their gardens extend quite far away from the village I've heard they they even maybe uh get some gardens in in other villages or buy some land from other villages to plant some gardens you can see all these places I think are are nowadays tea gardens and why because they have good soil the the tea they have there just tastes really good so you can see the pictures back in 2012 that was our first visit ah yeah we were quite young at that time so it was in the the Gushu gardens and yeah so they have some really big trees there the soil is is said by the locals to be quite fertile in in Bulongshan like in Mong Noi, in Lao Man O, the tea trees grow quite fast so you can see this is also from 2012 and you can see you have that scattered forest cover this would this would be newer tea plantations maybe those were planted in 90s and this is a modern picture of roughly the same area I feel the forest cover has grown a bit so maybe they also took in more techniques of that natural tea gardens conversion and somehow rebuilt the forest cover during this time and you can see this is modern Lao Man O in the background this is a nice hike you can take up the temple so the village has extended a lot and so they are Buddhist and thanks to their new stream of income really with the tea they invested massively into building temples and doing Buddhist events there are so many events now that you have a kind of committee for that and it has to be more regulated it means you have those offerings to Buddha so usually every family needs to do the if it can afford it the family should do the offerings to Buddha once in its lifetime but now there are so many offerings to Buddha that you have to book a date for doing that because otherwise everyone would be doing that continuously they have like five temples some pagodas some kind of retreat centers they invite monks from Myanmar and they have like a lot of events and interestingly despite being that developed sometimes they like to keep some animals in their house so they are rich but not as I don't know not as to how not as a new rich as Lao Man O for example I feel they they keep a good balance they manage their money in a wise way you could say because they still invest a lot towards their cultural activities their cultural life with the Buddhism and they also like to keep some some animals or some kind of farming and in the processing techniques it's still largely done by walk even up to this day so this was probably in 2017 taken yeah so you can expect most of the material in in Lao Man O to be processed by hand but this is changing for the small trees especially because they really have a lot of tea actually probably even more than than in Chiang Mai so this is also good because Lao Man O tea is maybe a bit less faked or at least it's not really hard to get true Lao Man O tea if you pay the full price and the price is pretty high but they have a bigger big amount I don't know maybe 100 tons a year something like that this is Ai Xiang Nan so we met in 2019 and he's my good friend so every time I go I'm in the area I like to to stay stay at his home or pay a visit and this is his new factory that he built I think in 2020 maybe or 2021 so you can see it's not a huge factory but like they tend to manage the money pretty well in Lao Man O you know they invest really the money in improving the tea production and you can feel that they are really conscientious you can feel they they really love tea in Lao Man O it's a big part of the culture it's not only a business for them so they they try to improve their technique and so that's why you typically don't have processing issues in Lao Man O because they make the tea well so this is some new machines that Ai Xiang Nan bought and so this is the better Shaqing machines you could say more modern ones which are pop which have been popular for about four years now and it's supposed to give you more control so you can do a better job it's still small batches you can do a better job at processing the tea but you can see it still has a nice line of wax and you can see also his drying area and so it's nice to have a good greenhouse like this you can usually when you go in the countryside you can check the size of the operations by looking at how big the greenhouse is because that's the limiting factor when you make poor tea so if you have a big greenhouse you can dry a lot of tea so you have that big production capacity and he even has a tasting room so you can feel surely the difference in terms of welcoming the guests and stuff in Lao Man O because everything feels very professional you know without being tacky so if you visit Ai Xiang Nan in Lao Man O he will brew different kinds of tea he keeps teas he makes from every year and you can see now Lao Man O is quite a bit more developed than back in the day and you can see here all this landscape it's all tea gardens and even the mountains in the background it's also probably tea gardens that they own now in Lao Man O the tea leaves are really big that's one characteristic of Lao Man O tea and if you have spring tea it tends to be very furry with lots of hair on the buds so you can expect really big buds and that's a clear difference for example Lao Ban Zong tea the leaves are not as big typically well it's complicated they have several varietal so I hope you will have the opportunity maybe that to visit me and I can take you on a trip with Ai Xiang Nan so let me just see yeah and one other particularity of Lao Man O is the low altitude it's only 1200 meters so it's quite interesting because typically we say good tea grows at maybe above 1400 1500 okay most of the good tea mountains are above 1500 but it's not the case in Lao Man O and despite that it's really good tea to me I would say it's my favorite village actually overall I don't know what's going on with the soil there but everything you plant even the small trees they make really good tea really intense taste so that's why I decided this year to produce cakes from Lao Man O of course for the big trees but this is very expensive material because it's a famous village and I still I'm still okay with the price because I think it's worth it really if you look if you compare in that price range I think it's still the best tea and I also sourced some of their Shang Tai from their natural tea gardens and you can compare the natural tea gardens from Lao Man O to the bigger the older gardens that they have in Mong Noi and I would say it's kind of a close the close difference I think I tried a blind tasting of that and I still preferred that the the older gardens from Mong Noi overall I don't think there's a wide difference of taste in Bulang they all have that similar profile you have some bitterness which can be like which goes from moderate to really strong astringency is medium and astringency the bitterness tends to be higher than the astringency and the combination of the two builds that minerality but it's not the most then the fragrance it tends to be quite smothered I think it's also due to their processing style because they like to cook they like to cook give a strong Sha Qing with a long time like in Lao Man O they will typically cook for 30 to 40 minutes it's big leaves and they want them to cook for a long time with lots of steaming and low temperature which makes them turn yellow and that contributes to toning down the fragrance if you gave a shorter Sha Qing you would have a better fragrance a more explosive fragrance I would say not necessarily better in terms of complexity and that's what I like in Bulang Shanti there's something in it you know it's a bit smothered but there's some really good complexity something animal something leathery and slightly smoky actually so back back in the day I said the tea was smoky because of the smoke but once they changed their house design the tea was still a bit smoky it's just that I think it's not it's not from the smoke it must be maybe from the varietal or from the soil something something from the terroir gives that slightly smoky edge a bit tobacco-y maybe a bit like a dry cigar oh and now now I can feel that the bitterness is uh but that's a lively bitterness you see because when you drink you have it comes like this and when you swallow after one or two seconds you don't feel it anymore and just uh sweetness remaining small trees would have more astringency than the big trees and overall the big trees would be more powerful so then the the most obvious and that I didn't mention why are these teas so expensive it's because they have a good huigan they have a good chachi they have what I would call depth once you swallow them you can feel them flowing down the throat you know and it makes your whole body a bit fuzzy I would say it's very pleasant people say the chachi in uh in that area in Bulangshan tends to be more energizing than calming for example Yiwu tea is known for having a very calming chachi I don't know in practice what really creates those um those feelings but I can surely say I acknowledge this when you drink a good Laomanna tea you feel a bit like you're going to fly so let's see what questions or comments do we have I think I have about finished my presentation of Bulangshan tea let me just check because I took some notes I don't want to forget anything in there so yes special sweetness minerality and good depth that's really important then we started in Bulangshan in the western part we explored Zhangjiajie so three villages which are completely cultivated with plantation tea I said the the south I don't know too much it's at the Myanmar border they also probably get tea from Myanmar but I know even less about this then in the east we went to Mongnoi the tea I'm drinking now Mongnoi is not the only village there it's one of them but I had to pick one of course and then yeah the big western area I don't know too much they are scattered villages with mostly plantation tea and some Gusu some ancient tea gardens in every village but in very small quantity and of course where I like to spend more time is the north with Laomanna and Laomanna has the the biggest area for ancient tea gardens and it's also the most expensive the most famous tea of that area um what else can I say so lots of plantation tea and shanghai bitter and sweet Luca what are you doing Luca I'm doing the live stream connections with Myanmar so yeti across the border that's something that needs to be explored I know that they they took a lot of those bitter varietal cuttings that they will plant there they took them from Myanmar and planted them in um in southern now and planted them in the villages in southern Bulang so because bitter tea it's too bitter for enjoying on its own but it can be good for blend you can put like five or ten percent of it in a more high blend and that will make some pretty stale tea turn into something more dynamic of course that's for lower quality tea the soil is said to be quite fertile indeed and that's why the tea trees grow fast that's maybe why the tea trees are are so big in in Laomanna I had to identify the type of bedrock what's interesting is uh it's um if I looked at that big complicated soil map bedrock map Bulangshan seems to be homogeneous I needed to do that but I wasn't really able to to translate the the Chinese of that because they they have rocks of different eras and I don't know really much about this but it's interesting to notice that that Bulangshan area with the more fertile soil than the rest of Shishongbanna grows over a same common bedrock same uniform type of bedrock then the ethnic groups yeah I forgot to mention but um sorry somebody is calling me okay I forgot to mention it but um Mong Noi is is a Hani and these people come from Laobanzang so I think I will do a dedicated video on the different ethnic composition of Bulangshan but not all the villages in Bulangshan are Bulang most of them are but some aren't there has been some complex migration oh yeah and I forgot to mention making aggressive tea is usually more risky than a sweet tea and this is also true for buying because because when when you make a weak sweet tea it will taste a bit bland but it will taste boring but it will still be okay I would say while um if you if you have an aggressive tea and that it's weak you have that strong bitterness but a weak overall tea and it really tastes nasty a bit corrosive I would say so if you're into cheap tea I recommend it's better to buy a cheap Jinggu or Yiwu tea or or even Bangwai like we do now because those are naturally sweet and even if it's weak it won't be really terrible but a cheap Bulangshan tea unblended it can be really hard to palate and I think you can understand that by drinking like a young 7542 these teas are quite uh hard to enjoy especially when they are young now personally maybe I would prefer to drink a nasty tea than a boring tea that but that's a personal opinion yeah so that's about all what I had to say about Bulangshan I hope you enjoyed this quick presentation I will just go through the comments a bit and I'm sorry again for the audio I will try to fix that in the post-processing are the Taiye Zhong varietals adaptable to colder climates you can do it if you can try to nurture a cold resistant Taiye Zhong but naturally they are much more vulnerable to frost than the small leaf varietal so I don't think there's any big leaf varietal growing in temperate or not tropical climates if you look at Korea Japan I think it's all small leaf varietal now I guess if you go to the higher altitude places you can find some cultivars which are adapted to frequent frost episodes so what do Laomana people think about other Yunnan Puerhs? I'm not sure actually well when you're drinking Laomana tea every day probably you find that all the other teas taste a bit weak I haven't asked their opinion on the matter but it's good when you visit the tea mountains that you bring them other samples that way you know it's always good to share tea I hope they can still enjoy a good tea despite being in one of the best tea wars yeah okay so thank you very much for watching thank you for your comments and as I'm being told the sound is glitchy then I will try again to fix the problem and I will upload a clean video so thank you for watching and see you later bye bye