Qiu Xiang Tea - A Revisit

I spent my Easter weekend in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  As usual, I stayed in Chinatown, reasons being; night market is there, lots of good food especially the street side food in the evenings, central location to shopping and yes, tea shops as well.

Qiu Xiang Tea has a branch in Chinatown.  I like the ambience and the friendliness of the sales staff since my last visit (see 8 July 2011 blog).  This tea shop opens at 10am every morning and I was their 1st customer on Friday morning.  As you can see from the pix, this shop is well stocked.  I like the tea set in the 3rd pix, where the tabletop 'tea table' is made of a gorgeous dark green stone.  The color of the stone looked like old jade.  I am tempted to buy this tea table.......perhaps in June this year when I return for the KL tea expo (commencing 16 Jun for a week at Tropicana Mall).  

I went to Qiu Xiang with another purpose this time.  My Malaysian tea friends had asked me to try the Qiu Xiang house brand of pu erh cakes.  They seemed to have a good opinion of these cakes.  Qiu Xiang produce a good number of house brand cakes, cooked and raw pu, over the years.  

One of these cakes is the 2003 raw cake (see last pix).  Known as the 'big Q' among my friends for its massive 500g size.  This cake looked really big as the compression of the tea leaves was not very high. This tea is nice - whole leaves, a pronounced mellow medicinal taste, herb and camphor aroma with a nice delicious subtle minty finish.  The price of this cake was 250RM (it was 200 last year).   

I bought a few of these house brand cakes before I left the shop with a considerably lighter wallet.  I took the KTM Komuter train to Kepong to visit more teashops that afternoon and a tea-jamming session with my Malaysian tea friends.