There’s an antique store in my neighborhood that I walk by all the time. I’ve never paid it much notice until recently, when some yixing teapots in the window caught my eye. I’ve also noticed that the owner likes to sit out front and drink tea, often late into the evening.
So the other day I paid him a visit. I figured maybe he’d have some interesting older yixing teapots, just something fun to look at. I had no idea what I was in for.
The second you walk in, the whole place smells like tea. And then I saw it. Boxes upon boxes of pu’er, stacked up all around the inner depths of the store. The owner motioned me over to a staircase that leads to a small attic, insisting I go up. It was completely packed with pu’er. Literally thousands of tea cakes. Mostly factory productions.
It turns out he’s had this shop for more than 20 years, and while antiques are his main business, he happens to love pu’er, has been collecting it for a long time, and sells a bit on the side.
In the West, pu’er drinkers sometimes talk about the near-mythical “private collectors” that stockpile large amounts of sought-after pu’er productions, and occasionally make it available to friends. I couldn’t believe I had stumbled on one accidentally.
I wanted to know everything about this man and all his tea. What gems was he hoarding? I didn’t really know where to start, so I asked about Xiaguan, which I find can be a decent barometer of what’s in a factory tea collection.
He brought out several Xiaguan teas from the early 2000s, including some I’d never seen before. One was a huge 2kg melon in a hongyin wrapper. The material was quite nice, and less choppy than many other Xiaguan productions. It had some slight smokiness but was overall smooth, easy to drink, and fairly warming.
The atmosphere of this shop is pretty different from your typical tea shop in Taiwan. While there’s usually some degree of order and cleanliness, sometimes even a zen-like ambiance, this place is more of a cluttered mess, with layers of dust and who-knows-what stuffed into every nook and cranny. Granted, it’s not actually a tea shop. While we drank, there was rock music blaring from the back of the room. Also I’m not sure he ever sat down, even once. He was pacing across the room, poking around for teas, checking on the tetsubin, and just constantly making more tea.
Next he pulled out a 250g Xiaguan tuocha, also with a hongyin wrapper, but this one using brown kraft paper, from the mid ’90s. This tea had been through Hong Kong traditional storage, but the storage note was pretty subdued. He likened this to stinky tofu — some love it, some hate it. A comparison I’d never heard before, but gladly tucked away for future use.
As I tried the tea, he watched excitedly and maybe a bit anxiously to see how I’d react. I’ve had plenty of trad-stored teas and while it can certainly be a little off-putting if you aren’t used to it, I thought it was quite nice. He was thrilled! It felt like it’d been a test, and I’d passed. And, the tea was really good. Quite mellowed at this point, though still strong, and increasingly so as the session went on.
We were having such a good time, he clearly just loves drinking and talking tea, that he decided to break out something special. He brought over a large mason jar with a broken-up cake in it. It was a Menghai Tea Factory sheng/shou blend from 1995. He mentioned that, if you could even find it today, a full cake would sell for well over 1000 USD. Incredible tea, beautifully aged. It had this really interesting sweet fruity note, a bit like fresh cherries (not to be confused with the cherry cough syrup note some teas have). The tea was intensely warming, like sticking your head in a sauna. I could feel my whole body heating up within a few minutes. It was a memorable tea and I was grateful to try it.
I’ve drunk tea with a lot of different kinds of people since living in Taiwan, and it’s interesting to see the different attitudes people have towards their tea drinking.
Some place a lot of emphasis on precision and high-quality yixing, frequently older pots. Others will very strictly only use gaiwans. Plenty too just don’t really care what pot they’re using. Some lean heavily towards younger gushu-type productions that are lighter in character, mostly from Taiwanese boutiques. Others really like famous Dayi recipes. People drink tea for different reasons. While I’m severely overgeneralizing here and there’s a lot of overlap, there are certain “tea drinker profiles” you start to notice.
The owner of this store is pretty no-nonsense when it comes to brewing vessels and methodology. He used a range of rather large teapots, brewed longer and with less leaf than I’m used to. His tastes skew towards aged pu’er, 20 years and older, and teas that are comfortable on the body. He repeatedly emphasized that, for him, famous factory names and productions don’t matter; just drink what makes you feel good.
He also breaks up most of the cakes he’s actively drinking, and stores the chunks in large mason jars. This is at least in part because a lot of his teas are older and trad-stored. It’s a noticeable contrast from most of the pu’er vendors I’ve met in Taiwan, who tend to keep their sample cakes whole and in neatly stacked round cardboard boxes. Though most of these people are more concerned with tea sales, whereas he’s really not.
Occasionally he’d go over to a corner where he had some unknown quantity of tea, pondering what else to bring out. We drank quite a few teas. I could’ve sat there for hours, but realistically had to get on with my day. I asked to buy one of the teas we’d tried, and he immediately began showering me with free gifted tea, at a level that was pretty staggering. It never ceases to amaze me how generous tea drinkers are. It’s a wonderful feeling to share this passion with others, and one of my favorite aspects of the tea community. He encouraged me to stop by anytime, not to buy, just to hang out and drink. I’ll be back soon.
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