Fujian, Fu'an and Flowering Teas

We fly to Fuzhou via Kunming, and I get ridiculously excited while waiting at the flight gate to find that there is wifi and one of my email accounts is working. Cue frantic sending of blogs and pictures to my daughter Hannah, who is going to post on my behalf, and also make it look elegant and professional in the process. There's no access to Blogspot, Facebook or Twitter here so I depend on her a lot (thanks Hannah). Ironically I might not be able to send her this blog until right at the end of the trip.

Fujian is a coastal province in the SE of China, and home to an extraordinary range of teas - white teas in Fuding, flowering teas in Fu'an, Tie Guanyin Oolong in Anxi, Lapsang Souchong  and Rock Oolongs in Wuyi. And a number of areas seem to make black teas, including the famous Golden Monkey and rarer Tang Yang Gongfu. So it's a good place to visit and experience all these different types.

The first thing we need to come to terms with is that we will be city-based for much of our time in Fujian. The industry here is much more complicated than Yunnan, and on a much larger scale, with companies involved in growing, processing and marketing their own teas. Some of the final processing is carried out in city warehouses that also contain tasting rooms and sales offices.

We start in Fu'an, the home of flowering teas. You've probably seen them - they start off as small tight green balls, and open out in boiling water releasing strings of delicate flowers. I've never been a great fan of them, being a bit of a grumpy tea purist, but I'm curious to see how they're made. More than anything I want to be satisfied that they're made in good conditions - clean, well lit, no duress, that kind of thing. I've always had a nagging doubt that the delicacy of the work might mean children are involved in some way.

The industry in China is of course well aware of such concerns. Some companies (and this is common to many other sectors) produce glossy brochures with pictures of what they think Western buyers want to see, even if the reality bears no resemblance; it will never be possible to visit the actual factory. It's easy to see why they do this when so many customers are happy to take it at face value and just 'tick the box'. So it's not a surprise to see pictures of people in a spotlessly clean factory, togged up in ridiculous amounts of protective clothing, as if they're making microchips rather than sewing tea and flowers together. We prefer not to go to these places, but to work with people who are much more honest and open, and happy to show us round. This depends completely on the groundwork done by Jennifer Jiang, who has spent a lot of time visiting Fu'an and working out who are the genuine suppliers.

The first stage is tying tea stems into bunches

The bunches must all be the same size

The stems are stripped of leaves but the large white buds remain

The first surprise when we arrive is the age of those doing the work. The first process is tying long thin leaves together in bunches, and none of the women doing this is under 40; some are very much older. The second stage is more delicate, requiring small flowers to be threaded onto cotton and sewn through the bunches of leaves, and the women are probably in their 20s and 30s. They are wearing hats to cover their hair. The rooms are light and spacious, the tables are covered in bits of tea and flowers, and the atmosphere is relaxed. I've been trained as a Social Auditor* and know what signs to look for, but it seems ok. As you would expect, it's piece work, and seems to operate on a kind of flexitime basis - people are free to come and go, and get paid for what they make.

Sweing the flowers through the leaves

Completed sets

A 'flower basket' design

The bunches are folded in on themselves and tied with cotton, then wrapped for drying 

We leave feeling quite positive. I'm not sure it's really changed my option about the teas themselves, but it has removed some concerns (but only about this particular company - others still have big question marks against them in my mind). I'll be happy to buy from here for Fortnum & Mason.

This is one occasion when I won't be open about the details of the company. I think it's important for buyers to take responsibility for their sources, and I don't see why I should make it easy for them. So if you want flowering teas, buy them from people who really know the source - like F&M, or the other people I'm travelling with.


* that sounds a bit pompous, but it's true. I've always been interested in the people aspects of tea, and decided to get properly trained a few years back. It involves being able to get under the surface of what's going on in factories, how people are treated, how to read the signs. I won't bore you with any more detail here.

Chilli

They like chilli in Yunnan: it brings food to life. This is a slight problem for me.

Chillies at the market

Don't get me wrong, I like a bit of chilli. That is 'a bit' in the genteel English sense, enough so you can taste it and get a lingering tingle on your lips. I tend to avoid the hardcore stuff, especially when I'm travelling, it just doesn't suit me. I know many of you will disapprove, pointing out that I'm missing out on one of the joys of travel to distant exotic lands. You're right of course, but I got very ill on my first trip to India and that experience lingers. And I've never quite embraced the thrill of having my throat ripped out and insides purged. But each to their own.

This lady has a  rather knowing smile

As I mentioned earlier, I had a very pleasant meeting over lunch with Leo Kwan in Hong Kong. Mostly pleasant. During the course of the  meal I was surprised by a lurking chilli and had a bit of a moment. For those of you familiar with the closing scenes of the original (and definitive) version of Total Recall, I found myself on the surface of Mars, frantically writhing and gasping for air as my skull and eyeballs exploded. Quite a spectacle, which I attributed to the sensitivity of my highly developed tasting throatparts.

This bravura performance was however eclipsed in Jinggu when Ken discovered the exact combination of chilli and rice wine that would make his whole body turn purple. This is not expected to happen to locals.

Ken on another day. In fact this colour is just about right

It made sense of Leo's parting comment - "Remember, Yunnan is a dangerous place".

So what exactly is Puer tea?

This is more for those interested in the tea detail, but hopefully also readable enough for anyone with a passing curiosity.

I've spent a week in Yunnan, been up four tea mountains, watched it being made, tasted many samples with a tea master, and I still don't fully understand Puer.
As someone who normally likes to have things clearly defined and contained, this should be frustrating, but in fact it's the opposite. It's fascinating, challenging, liberating - much more an art than a science, and to be appreciated in the same way.
So I can't define Puer, but I can describe what I've seen and tasted. It won't be definitive, and others will have different experiences and opinions.

I first need to explain that the Puer I have experienced on this trip is 'Shengcha". Sheng means raw, uncooked, or alive; cha means tea. Commonly called Raw Puer, in many ways the description 'alive tea' is more appropriate. I'll try to explain why below.

However, for most people outside China their experience of Puer is the cooked (or ripe) version. This is made by creating a large pile of raw Puer, wetting it, covering it and allowing it to ferment. The fermentation process takes around 45 days and converts the greyish-green Raw Puer into dark brown Cooked Puer. It is a skilful process, requiring the tea to be turned regularly to maintain even heat distribution. When the tea is ready, it is usually pressed into cakes, which are slowly dried in a warm room before wrapping in paper. The porous paper allows the cakes to mature, ideally in a cool dry store. A good Cooked Puer has a deep ruby red colour when infused and a rich flavour that starts off quite earthy but becomes sweeter as the tea matures. My first experience of cooked Puer was an inky black, turgid, musty horror, which I now recognise as a short-cut fake version produced for a western market unfamiliar with the real product. Things have moved on a bit since then.
Cooked Puer is produced on a large scale in factories whose names have become famous over the years. The largest and most famous is the Dayi factory in Menghai, whose processes and blend recipes are closely guarded secrets. The factory is closed to visitors. (An interesting aside is that Zhong Xin rents a house in the Dayi factory compound - he has no connection with the company, but conducts his own ripening and pressing experiments in the house).

So we return to Raw Puer. As far as I can tell, the key aspects are that the trees must be on one of the famous Yunnan Tea Mountains, the leaves must come from large leaved trees, and that the final process is sun-drying. What happens in between seems to have some flexibility depending on the region and on the individual tea maker or Tea Master.

This tree is 800 years old

These older leaves are not used to make the tea 

A typical Yunnan mountain village, woks in the foreground

After picking, the leaves are cooled (withered, wilted). The next stage is a short heating and turning process in a wok, resulting in a further softening of the leaf and a partial 'killing' (denaturing) of the enzyme that causes oxidation of the leaf polyphenols. The leaf is then scattered thinly on bamboo trays, turned gently by hand and put out in the sun to dry.

Fresh leaves cooling & wilting

The wok frying process

Leaves drying in the sun 

I'm not sure that this wok stage is always used in the Raw Puer process, but some form of partial leaf cell rupture takes place, even if only by gentle rolling. This cell rupture, together with the sun-drying stage, results in a tea that is unfinished - 'maocha'. This means that there is a partial oxidation of the tea, but that it is also affected by post-oxidation, i.e. it continues to change and develop. Hence the name Shengcha, alive tea. This seems to be connected to the sun-drying process in some way - perhaps the cell structure is more open than when a tea is oven-baked, but that's only a guess on my part.

The process differs from that used for Green, Oolong and Black teas, and makes Raw Puer difficult to classify. I quite like Leo Kwan's category of 'Partially Oxidised Teas', which includes White and Yellow varieties alongside Raw Puer, but others will disagree.

Raw Puer maocha is greyish in colour, twisted and wiry in appearance. The infused tea is a pale greenish-gold colour, and the flavour is a combination of early astringency followed by sweetness and aroma, and in the best teas a thick mouthfeel and cooling finish in the throat. It needs to be infused many times, each infusion lasting no more more than 30 seconds or so. When tasting with the experts I was unable to appreciate all the subtleties of this but enough to get a basic understanding. What is clear is that old trees and individual varieties give a particularly fine flavour, and that the making process has a big impact on the taste. 

On our last day in Yunnan we tasted maocha from wild tea trees, which we all agreed was in a different league from anything else we had tasted. The fact that the farmer walked for five hours up into the mountain to pick the tea, and that it was for family consumption and not for sale, tells its own story.

Tasting the Wild Tree maocha tea with Zhong Xin

This is only the beginning of the process for Raw Puer. It needs to be stored and matured for several years, preferably in the form of pressed cakes. During this time the tea undergoes a secondary ageing process involving natural microbial activity. The conditions in which the cakes are stored are critical to development of flavour and texture during ageing.

The pressing is done in factories, and the finished product carries the factory name rather than the source of the maocha: in most cases it is blended, as the quantities from individual farmers are too small for a pressing batch. I can see that there could be a demand for cakes pressed from specific maocha, probably supplied by a Tea Master, if capacity can be made available to accommodate this.

A variety of Puer cakes

Wrapped and ready for storage

So that's my take on Raw Puer. It's not widely available in the UK, but Fortnum & Mason have a small selection. A wider range is available from those nice people at Canton Tea.