Dayi Teabag Puerh

2006 Dayi Sheng (Raw Puer) Teabags

Two Dog’s Handy Guide to Writing a Shitty Tea Blog

  • Don’t post anything for over a week
  • After not posting for a week, make triumphant return with post about bagged tea

Done and done.

Dayi Teabags
Teabags and holographic collector box

Dayi recently began pushing  bagged raw puer and curiosity got the best of me. I entered into the experience with plenty of preconceptions, despite my best effort to come in with a clean slate. Judging books by their covers can lead to faulty conclusions, but when the book cover is a teabag, the book is probably going to be an bargain bin airport spy novel. It’ll do in a pinch on a cross country flight, but you wouldn’t read it on the couch in your living room.

Dayi Teabags
Shengpu Baggins

Dayi Teabags

And, so go the Dayi teabags. If you were in the need of a convenient sheng, this will do. Would you brew it for a session on a leisurely Saturday morning? Well, probably not – unless you are a tea blogger with a masochistic streak for sampling the scummy underbelly of the puer world.

The bags contain fannings [tea dust/fragments] of raw menghai puer. But, not just any fannings, 6 YEAR OLD FANNINGS! Nine out of ten puer experts agree, that the best way to age puer is in fanning form! (Nope.) The age of these tea crumbs does not matter much, if at all.

The 6 year old soup
The 6 year old soup

The tea is pointed and astringent, but manages to convey some semblance of raw puer menghai character, which is something. Airport spy novels have their moments. If they didn’t, nobody would read them. They would opt to stare at the seat in front of them for three hours until they arrive in Newark.

I have seen threads floating around on forums from time to time, people who travel or are in an office where it is inconvenient to have implements for brewing; the dayi teabag solution works. It is raw puer, it is decent, and it is not a lot of fuss. It is also an all-star in the teabag leagues, blowing Colourful Yunnan out of the water. It won’t ever have a major league career, but that’s why we have separate leagues.

Kudos to Dayi for a great business decision. Prior to deciding to bag and sell these “6 year old” specks of tea, I guess they were destined for the dumpster.  Whoever recommended they started bagging and selling it deserves a promotion.

Dayi Bagged Tea
If you look closely, you will see that this is a bag of tea sweepings
Colourful Yunnan

2012 Colourful Yunnan Puer Teabags

Puer Teabags & Bad Teabag Puns

I had high hopes about Colourful Yunnan puer teabags, the mass marketed bagged puer tea that swept over China’s grocery stores last year. My excitement stemmed not from a desire to drink it, but because it would provide me a sturdy soap box to stand on. This would not be one of those mysterious sessions, where the complexity of the tea left me grasping for adjectives. Nor would it be a session where my writing skills were painfully inadequate to describe the experience of the tea. And last but not least, it would not be a session where I was left feeling amatuerish, a boy playing a man’s game. One of those sessions where puer leaves you mystified, as if your years of experience amount to nothing more than a fizzling star in a galaxy of tea knowledge.

Colourful Yunnan Puerh
What a great box

No, not today.

Today is Colourful Yunnan. Today I get to plant a flag and stand my ground and call a spade a spade. Today I am Lebron James and my opponent is the Westside Middle School 6th grade basketball team…or that was what my initial reaction. However, after a bit of soul searching, I decided that dunking on 6th graders was neither fair nor productive. Rather than point out of all the flaws of Colourful Yunnan’s bagged tea, of which there are many, I ought to try to and focus on some of the good. After all, Colourful Yunnan does have a couple of major positives:

1) It increases overall public awareness of puer
2) It provides a relatively inexpensive and convenient way for people to steep puer tea, sans accoutrements
3) They make use of the floor sweepings left behind when average puer tea is produced
4) ???
5) The…er,…um… packaging is … presentable

His love of teabagging might break up their otherwise blissful marriage

Alright, maybe slightly fewer positives than I had anticipated, but let’s look at the first couple. It does do a service in terms of bringing puer to a wider audience. Maybe restaurants that would previously not have offered puer as an option will now stick it on the menu. Maybe they will stock it at offices next to the bagged greens and oolongs. Maybe it will start showing up as a free bagged tea in hotel minibars outside of Asia. When I was growing up in the US, the only tea option most restaurants had was a bag of Lipton. If they got into Bigelow territory, they were already ahead of 99% of the competition. As a kid, I remember going to a small hotel that had a tea box with several different colorful packets of tea on the table and thinking it was some sort of lost beverage treasure chest. Every tea drinker starts somewhere, and Colourful Yunnan could be a gateway drug. Even Lebron had to begin his career playing 6th grade basketball.

Puer Teabags
The dry teabag

Second positive, it is widely available and convenient to steep. How many people are willing to keep a puer cake, a tea needle, a gaiwan, cups, and a tea table on their office desk? There are a lot of people who scoff at that amount of equipment. Those very same people would be more than willing to have a mug and a tea bag in their desk drawer. Problem solved. Anyone who was turned off by the process of brewing tea just joined the puer team. Again, gateway drug. You start them off on bags, and hopefully within a few years they are brewing up 15 year vintage puer in a gaiwan on their 3 ton mahogany and stone tea table, complete with intricately carved scenes of phoenixes and monks and whatever the hell. Also, clay figurines of Buddha.

Now that I have respectfully acknowledged some silver lining, its time for some Harlem Globetrotter style disregard for my opponent. The tea itself is typical bagged tea. Dregs, fannings, whatever you want to call it. It’s a one and done brew, and the brew is not particularly smooth, a little bit harsh. It is floral in a generic (see: bad) way and has a slight sweetness. It is also perfumey and no doubt has some sort of standardizing additive. Additional silver lining, the liquor has a nice color and clarity to it; I must admit, it does have a nice color (colour) to it. Based on visuals alone, it’s quite nice. Throw the actual drinking of the tea into the mix and you have a bit of a problem. Rather than prattle on about how this tea lets you down in nearly every department, whether it be flavor, mouthfeel, and on and on, I will just say that it is somewhat like the Lipton of puer, and leave it at that.

Puerh Teabag
Some serious teabagging

I can’t really see myself drinking Colourful Yunnan for any reason other than hypothetical desert island scenarios, but then again, they don’t need me. I am not their target market. And if you are reading this, I suspect neither are you. The two things that it has going for it are mass marketing and convenience. I have seen promotions in supermarkets and office buildings in several major Chinese cities. There has been an assault of advertising, in an effort to secure some market share for people who want a bag of tea to brew and chuck into the waste bin. I would say that the price is good, but pound for pound there must be 10,000 other teas that are better. The bagged dregs weigh in at 2 grams, when considering you can get some really respectable 357 gram shou puer cakes for a few dollars, I can not claim their price is good.

Two Cups
Me, throwing out the remaining perfumey brew in favor of some sheng. Also, ran out of captions with sexual overtones. Boobs.

Whether Colourful Yunnan will flourish has yet to be seen. It will be a battle of marketing and mass appeal versus quality. Who the globetrotters are in that game, is still anybody’s guess.

“You bet against the Harlem Globetrotters?”
“I thought the Generals were due!”