Evicting Sheng Duds

In the next two weeks, an immoderate amount of tea is to arrive at my doorstep.   I need to serve eviction notices for cakes which do not hold my favor.  The pickier part of me says I should start swapping out with more stellar examples of their genre but the retentive part of me has all sorts of creative reasons not to let go.

What are these despised duds wantonly taking up precious tea real estate?  

Back in early 2006, I saw the 2004 Changtai 16 Cake Set for a ridiculously dirt cheap price (~$80). I asked my husband if I should buy it as a learning tool and he said to me without any sense of future irony, "Hmmm. That's a lot of tea. What are you going to do with that much tea!" So I didn't get it and then it promptly sold out.

This 2 kilo 4 beeng Xiaguan Big G Set was the rebound purchase.  As you can imagine, it really did not make me feel better. I know the 2004 Changtai tasting set came under scrutiny and accusations flew that some cakes were not truly single origin due to lax oversight but I don't think I would have regretted that purchase- definitely not for $80.  Changtai beengs are sometimes known to have a wee bit extra oxidation but still, I would of had a lot more fun with that set than this Big G one which the vendor description indicates is all the same blend.   All same inside. All same (head hung low...)

"The four cakes are all the same blend of leaf: Orange Wrapper - Xiaguan Feng (Xiaguan Wind) Blue Wrapper - Er Hai Yue (Er Hai Lake Moon) Red Wrapper - Shangguan Hua (Shangguan Flower) Green Wrapper - Cangshan Xue (Cangshan Snow)"

Cangshan is the snow capped mountain range west of Dali with Erhai lake(ear shaped lake) sandwiched in between. Xiaguan is based in Dali and it's all a naming theme with no relation to the tea source. The vendor also described this Xiaguan collector's box as being the best quality Xiaguan produced that year. It has lost that sweet Xiaguan spring tea smell leaving that signature Xiaguan smoky leathery fragrance.  


For the first time in my life, I am able to break a Xiaguan product with by bare hands. I'm going to optimistically claim victory in Berkeley aging. My husband brewed it up tonight for the first time in 7 years and I am breathtakingly awaiting a report.  


Every collection must include some Xiaguan if not for reference and what's wrong with this best Xiaguan?  Every time I look at this box I sigh.  The ChangTai that got away caused me to overcompensate and buy all sorts of subsequent tea I should not have.  These 2003 Xiaguans are not a dud because there is something inherently wrong with them besides the chopped plantation leaves.  They just give me pangs and twinges of collector's remorse that I can't seem to dispel.

Second up is the 2005 6 FTM Yinji Series.  A friend moving back from Beijing proudly and cheerfully exclaimed on 7 cakes bundled in a bamboo basket(Ban Zhang, Yi Wu, You Le, Bang Wei, Nan Nuo,Yi Bang plus bonus Spring Cake), "Can you believe it! This was only $20!"  Yinji or "Spirit of XXX" series is 6FTM's lowest entry level offering which blends a very small percentage of mountain in question.   I desperately wish I had just wired some money to her but it's tricky letting a non-puerh drinker to buy pu-erh at Meliandao. I am hugely grateful she brought some pretty nice Doujis as well.

I was rereading Ethan Thompson's 26 Mountains, Fifty Cakes on the Leaf. He reviews the instructive Jing Mei Tang 50 Cake Set which he contrasts to his Changtai set. Ethan talks about "market-floor garbage" and "garbage cakes". I'm pretty sure at least this pile of 6FTMs could be a poster child for  "market-floor garbage".  But is this any reason to kick these poor cakes to the door especially since they came into the house as gifts.  I actually have never cracked open any of these FTMs because I always had better to drink.  


More and more,  I'm coming to the conclusion that factory plantation teas have a time and a place in my collection. While one shouldn't go out of their way to fill out a collection with them, if they happen to already be part of your collection, there are many good reasons to keep them around. Here are my top 5 reasons to keep my early mistakes:

1. I apparently like cheap tea.

I've been enjoying aged cheap quality shu recently. Even though I am forced to pay dearly for them now, those bricks must have been a few yuans back in the day with leaf quality to match. You can only imagine the hygiene of communist tea factory floors.   (Probably better if you don't).

All my dud cakes are much higher leaf quality than those filthy bricks and will probably end up being as good as or if not better than those shus.

2. Reference tea. You need big factory teas to make you really appreciate your small batch artisanal teas.

It's good to have special teas for special occasions. The single mountain teas tend to require attentiveness. I don't want to be drinking high end single varietals all the time because some days you just need a tea to get the job done.  

3. I need aging sheng to give away to beginner drinkers who need to broaden their palates with these kinds of factory offerings.

4. I need experimentation material.
I need ready material I'm willing to use for experiments with aging.  Why buy new when there is already this available supply.

5.  These guys have been aging with me and are part of the tea family.
Sounds ridiculous I know and such sentiments are common to those who exhibit hoarding symptoms. These teas have been with me for some of the hardest years of my life and the bitterness in life is best swallowed in tea.

And so you can see with logic like this, I have never evicted any cake from my collection.

Hoarding vs Collecting

Since I suffer from congenital pack ratting, I rather hesitate to write this post.  Clinical descriptions of compulsive hoarding(a.k.a. pathological collecting) on the surface appear to safely exclude the pu-erh collector.  After all we are collecting specific valuable things, not just piles of useless random stuff no one wants.  But when the sheer growing volume of your collection interferes with the organization of your life, one is still at risk for dysfunction as I am now.

My father is an economist and he's all about data collection to shed light on a situation.  In the early years,  I had a shu stuffed pomelo, some offensive mini-tuos, and a smoky Zhongcha cake which really launched my foray into sheng.   In the first three months of 2006, I went into a frenzy of ebay buy-it-now gratification.  The spurts in acquisition reflect the unfortunate budgetary fact that shipping costs from China are best minimized with a bulk order.  I am certain if shipping was not a factor, I would have fallen to a much slower and more thoughtful pattern of collecting.

Most readers of this blog probably own a pu-erh collection definitely north of a few cakes.  You start by tucking beengs away in various corners of your house. Once you have more than a dozen cakes, you have inventory that needs to be managed.  Then you have to start dedicate certain parts of the house officially for pu-erh as well as some sort of spreadsheet or software to remind you what you have.  You get to a certain critical point where you have a lot of unopened cakes and barely remember you even have them.  This is where the line becomes blurred.
 
My desk has become nigh unusable recently. It's just piled high with boxes of tea that had not found an official home.  With my china cabinet already crammed to the gills with tea,  I need to do something before the next 5 kilos of tea arrive on a slow boat from China.   I had already evicted some of the family china in the last round so I am left with the prospect of having tea boxes simply out in the dining room.

The largest basswood boxes I could find under $20  turned out to be a 9x8x8 "Cremains Box" which will now become a "Beeng Box". (What pray tell is a cremains box you ask? It is exactly what you think it is but I ordered the unassembled version so there is no chance of anyone having tested it for actual use.)  Even inside my cabinet, I prefer to use enclosed basswood boxes because sheng appear to hold their fragrance better.  Basswood has little scent and a cheap Xiaguan tuo can effectively blast the wood to smell like sheng.  But for those concerned with aesthetics, a basswood box is visually more acceptable than a cardboard box with Kunming Post stickers all over it.

I actually don't want this much tea but am at a loss on how to prune the collection. I would rather have 30 well chosen cakes rather than the current collection which holds a lot of gratuitous fillers. But I still don't know what's going to age well and hence I am stuck in a "Mediocre Sheng Conundrum".  I want as many reference points as possible so I am compelled to keep my major factory cakes (CNNP, Menghai, Xiaguan, Changtai, Haiwan, Douji, 6FTM) along with the few small presses and wild trees of various mountains.   I can come up with so many good reasons to keep holding onto the many dubious cakes clogging up my collection that I never kick out anything.

Yes I know. That is a distinct hallmark of a hoarder- can't dispose of anything.