Very Very Old Liu Bao

The best aged teas are time machines letting you taste memories at your throat- memories both joyous and sorrowful. The age of a tea isn't always a direct dial of a time knob but when you get the rare opportunity to partake an old old tea, you happily let the tea carry you to memories which predate your very existence.  Due to Su's incredible generosity, her tea transported me deeper into the past than any tea ever had.

Su procured this liu bao from a man who had held onto this tea from his grandparent's sundry shop which closed during the Japanese occupation. This puts the tea to early 1940s possibly late thirties. Great quantities of liu bao were originally imported to Malaysia for tin miners to drink all day long, brewed grandpa style in giant cauldrons.  Fermented and aged in woven bamboo baskets, not all liu bao turns out to be something amazing pending original source material and the vagaries of storage. However the decades of favorable Malaysian storage have transformed this particular specimen into something wonderful.  

Su has excellent taste in tea and many of her teas share the "jiang xiang" quality prized by collectors. Jiang xiang denotes the incense-like medicinal fragrance which itself can be quite varied. I've smelled and tasted a range of jiang xiang from more woody resiny juniper notes to more vegetal herbal notes through her teas.   Some of her puerh display a more prominent incense scent but present less so in taste but this liu bao had a more elusive jiang xiang fragrance but surprisingly prominent jiang xiang taste.   I brewed Su's liu bao for twenty infusions-  the quiet strength of the brews reminded me overwhelmingly of my dear maternal grandmother- so much so that tears fell away from my eyes. 

Before we deconstruct this tea any further,  I share with you my most treasured grandma story from this very era.  The 1940s was an unspeakably tragic time for my grandparents' generation and the entire nation of Korea.  But there is one happy family tale from these turbulent times which I cherish most because my mother(hence yours truly) would never have existed without the resourcefulness of my grandmother.

During the height of the Second World War,  Japanese soldiers dragged away my grandfather to a holding prison along with other unfortunate men in town as their names were chosen as the first wave to be sent to work the dreaded Sakhalin coal mines.  The working conditions in the mines were such that those men would have held no hope for return as countless simply perished after being brutally worked to exhaustion.  The unmarried able men were drafted into the army and the married family men such as my grandfather were reserved for forced labor but neither group enjoyed favorable odds.   Facing such a dire fate for her husband and the survival of her family, my grandmother sprung to action. 

My grandmother first hired a carpenter to fashion an exquisite cedar box.  She filled the box with emerald green mosses and laid on top the freshest fish of a kind prized by the Japanese.  Apparently it was a fish at the time exceedingly difficult to keep fresh.  She presented this box to the wife of the Japanese head of their prefecture and tearfully pleaded her case.  As a mother of four young children with the youngest still being weaned, my grandmother beseeched her to save them from destitution and undue hardship they would face without their father.  The wife must have been moved as my grandfather was spared from the mines. The Japanese head of the prefecture did not have the power to remove my grandfather's name entirely from the labor list, but he did have the power to assign men to their final destination and so my grandfather was instead allowed to work the stone quarry a few miles outside of town.  He and my grandmother went on to have have four more children, the eighth and final child being my mother.  (Actually seven years after this incident before my mother had yet the chance to be born, the North Koreans would drag away my grandfather again for forced labor but that is another story for another tea. I shudder thinking how many times I came close to non-existence but we are all side effects in an incredibly long chain of consequences. )

I have tried only one other liu bao before this occasion- a blind sample sent to me by Wilson. I had never tasted any other heicha and had mistook it for being a light shu.  So to taste such a venerable old liu bao without having hardly tasted liu baos at all- I have no reference points except for aged sheng.  I really did not know what to expect except a calming qi conveyed with a medicinal sweetness.  Starting the third and fourth brew, the tea presented the elegant long lasting smoothness with herbal incense overtones- the delicacy of the sweet aftertaste is lovely.   However, I was most intrigued by the later brews after the eleventh brew.  These lighter brews held a beguiling complex flavor akin to well water- the sides of my tongue and insides of my cheek swelled up in anticipation.  Hmm- that sounded a bit racier than intended.  The closest description I could find of such aged liu bao is of "rain water taste" on teachat.  When a tea captivates your mind and mouth taking you to the twentieth brew wanting more- well that's a great tea. 

Liu bao is currently undervalued in relation to puerh of the same age but of course good aged liu bao on-line is no means cheap- just relatively affordable compared to an outrageously priced aged puerh.  (Tea Disciple does this topic more justice) I went into a frenzy trying to buy some aged liu bao on the internet after this session but stopped myself at checkout. After tasting this aged liu bao, I'm probably setting myself up for disappointment to buy off the internet.   I've put myself in a curious tea buying limbo not only because of incredible tea gifts such as this one but because the care in which someone sent me tea has taken on greater meaning. When I drink aged puerha that I just bought off the internet (even after intense nights of agonizing and weeks of working hard to reward myself)- even good teas don't entirely satisfy because it's just one more beeng I've gotten for myself.  Perhaps this is a temporary reprieve but I've appeared to have come naturally to the end of my puerh collecting phase.

First Hit of Puerh

My very first inoculation of puerh was 15 years ago on the Korean island of Jejudo.  For those of you who hate cute honeymooning couples in perfectly matching outfits- Jejudo is not for you. My husband and I traveled to Jejudo from Mokpo on a slow ferry filled with uniformed school girls on an overnight outing.   You can imagine the four hours of non-stop giggling going on above deck and below.  Luckily we hid ourselves in the ridiculously cheap and spacious "Luxury Suite".

 

(These are just pretty pictures from previous trips to Korea, nothing to do with the actual trip which unfortunately predates owning a digital camera...)

I tend to avoid hotels and by chance or luck I ended up booking a home-stay with a most unusual woman who turned out to be a passionate disciple of tea.  On our first night, our hostess sat us in her tea room. She said that she had been the happiest woman in the world with a perfect husband and perfect children.  Others told her to be careful because fate is jealous of overly happy women.  Tears filled her downcast eyes as she told us how her husband unexpectedly passed away of a heart attack while mountain climbing in Peru.  Even an average Korean is a cauldron of passion but our hostess was a molten planet of passion.   After four hours on the rough seas,  we didn't know what to say. Home-stay with a Korean household can be an unimaginably intense experience that I highly recommend a traveler to Korea try it at least once. 

Our hostess gave us a most amazing inside tour to Jejudo.  On the second night she took us to a local potter's house for dinner-  the potter was a serious appreciator of puerh known as boicha in Korea. He actually arranged tea buying trips to China for various Buddhist monasteries as puerh had a following among Korean monks.  His house had a shelf full of lovely yixing pots but he also had a playful daughter who would race around the room smashing tiny little pots against each other.  Even to my untrained eyes back then they were precious looking and who knows how many she did crack.  Apparently she had knocked out a treasured pot just the week before and her father's stern warnings of "those pots are not toys" had zero effect.

After dinner, the potter brought out a beautiful shiny zhuni clay teapot filled with aged sheng.  I really was not ready to appreciate profound teas at that age as I was chasing flavors and mouthfeel of oolongs, whites, and gyokuro senchas back then.  To my beginner's palate,  I could tell this aged pu-erh had a great clarity, depth, and complexity yet I could not appreciate the taste.  I tried to drink it as slowly as possible as my then sugar junkie brain kept translating it as a medicinal/herbal taste.  I didn't know anything about the fortitude of puerh leaves and I kept expecting the tea to end after a few brews.  The magical pot to my ignorant dismay lasted hours. Hours! Oh how kick myself remembering the travesty of my unschooled tastebuds.

The next day our hostess took us to see a Buddhist monk with whom she studied.  He said we needed tea and then smiling at us as if he were providing a special treat, he whipped out an aged sheng.  I remember my young uncouth self thinking then, "Oh no! Not more medicine tea!" I really kick myself for not being able to see into the future.  Neither teas tasted wet stored nor did they exhibit any hints of bitterness or dryness; they were smooth yet deep, their effect was gentle and warming on the body.  It was only at the Pasadena tasting of the six decades of tea that my husband and I realized we were served some serious quality aged sheng all those years back in Jejudo.

This first exposure set what I think as being good aged sheng,  but most importantly it set my puerh karma. The best teas have only come to me not through purchase but through friendship and other means.  After a certain point, one will hit a wall with just internet puerh buying.  I've already hit that wall multiple times but I still keep hoping to simply by myself into good puerh. (The budget ebay experiment was for curiosity more than anything else.)  I think I should just give it up now; I should not force my way in.

Not All Tea is Sacred

One of my lovely friends A is one of the most open minded generous souls I know.  She's traveled to many remote corners of this world including Afghanistan but now is happily rooted in the Big Island of Hawaii.  She told me a golden tea story which I share with you now.  She was hiking in a remote valley in Nepal when a traveling Nepali family joined them on a narrow footpath.  Sometimes they would overtake her, and she would overtake them. After a few hours, they were sitting for a break and waved to her to join them for tea.

My friend was honored to be asked and as the guest was offered the first cup.  Every one was smiling at her urging her to drink so she enthusiastically took her first sip.  It was and remains the most vile thing she had ever downed-  she struggled mightily to keep her gag reflex in check.  She even managed to smile and finish a cup.  She was certain yak dung was the principal ingredient in this horrible brew. Though she graciously tried to refuse any more, she had to endure unending rounds of refills till the tea ran out.

I think there is some debate currently about relativity in the quality of tea.  I thought I would talk about shu since it's a genre with less dogma or ego.   Shu drinkers are already a beaten down lot without the pride of connoisseurship.  Shu tends to be made with lesser grade leaves that isn't good enough for sheng, composted in giant piles under stained wool blankets then raked around by men without hair nets.   Generally shu drinkers do not make too much an effort to pretend shu is something refined and amazing and are most grateful when the tea doesn't taste like the smears of a barnyard.   Also with shu,  a drinker's reaction tends to be more visceral:

Bad shu=triggers gag reflex and/or delivers regretful amounts of intestinal distress.
Good shu= does not offend and can be drunk without a grimace.

I've had a friend spit out his first cup of shu- a Menghai Golden Needle White Lotus no less and to those unaccustomed to the taste of dirt- it's undrinkable. It took me years to get past my initial unfavorable response. But among those who count themselves as shu drinkers, I rarely see heated debates around the merit of a shu.  At the positive end, reviews tend to cluster tepidly around "not so bad" to "pleasant".   Drinkers tend to have lower expectations with far less at stake with shu which makes for a more open mind.  No one to impress and not much to be impressed by.

When a shu is even a notch above ho-hum i.e. mellow, smooth, and drinkable,  I am exceedingly pleased.   These De Hong High Plateau bricks I re-upped last year at $16.80 a kilo are as fabulous as cheap shu will ever get- it's got an herbal finish with a lively mouthfeel.  I had to go through perhaps 30+ shus- most forgettably decent, some scar-inducing - to reach a shu I consider kind of compelling.   I've drunk enough factory floor shu to know I don't have to keep on prying my mind open when the shu is out and out disgusting even after multiple rinses and past the fourth brew.  But most often, many shus are just kind of pleasantly boring and really - not many will think too hard about it or get too hot under the collar about it.