Gross Shu Giveaway

( note: A lovely lady has claimed these bricks.)

What am I even doing with such budget shu?   I originally had a value shu experiment in mind but since I drink so little puerh these days, I'm trying to downsize a little at a time.
 
If for whatever reason you like cheap shu(I don't judge),  it's all yours.  Actually the 2007 Tianpin is not bad. The 2008 63 6FTM brick  is not opened and probably isn't gross. Both are even sold out at tuochatea.com.   I've had some shockingly atrocious spit-out shu from one vendor that probably cost 10 times as much. The 2005 CNNP brick tastes decently woody but gives me the same heartburn that sheng does these days. If I'm going to get heartburn, I'm going to drink sheng.

Why don't I gift these to a friend? It's like giving a Hershey chocolate bar to a friend. I can't do that. 

It's been such tough going for the last year and a half. Without tea to drown my sorrows, I have only but the raw landscape to provide some solace. Only last month the green tufts of grass made me forget about the California drought but it's quickly dried to a golden brown.

Grocery Bulk Puerh

Out of curiosity I looked in the bulk tea section of Rainbow- a gourmet vegetarian grocery store in San Francisco. Yes- there is such a thing as a vegetarian grocery store and I embarrassed myself thoroughly a decade ago asking for the bacon section. I now go there to get chocolate and coffee for which they have a pretty good selection.

You can see that their puerh options are way expensive. $69/lb for sticky rice tuocha and $49/lb for camel's breath! That's way more than the 2012 Golden Needle White Lotus (~$37). I have a friend who works in their produce department. Perhaps I should mention something to him instead of putting it so publicly. But it's their suppliers Silk Road/Two Hills who have perpetrated the original up-charge.

I also checked our neighborhood Berkeley Bowl and they have one loose puerh for $17.99. I snagged $0.18 worth to brew tonight just for kicks. I can just see some of the hard core mavens just shaking their heads wondering why I stoop so low when teas friends have taken pains to send me such fine teas to educate my palate.

Since I go to Berkeley Bowl weekly, I have laid eyes on these tea dispensers more than 780 times. It would be a shame if it turned out to be pretty good tea and I was too much a snob to even try it. So is it good tea?

It tastes like loose shu alright- tad bit pondy but not offensive. I cannot will myself to drink too much.  I don't mind paying $0.18 to confirm the grocery store shu is nothing I'm missing. But  I sadly pay with heartburn to boot- often the real price for cheap shu.  

Shoveling Compost

Yesterday I went for a run at the Berkeley Marina when I was welcomed by tall mounds of pristine black gold.  Several times a year, city of Berkeley dumps municipal compost at the Berkeley Marina free for anyone to lug away. After trying to run a mile and half, I got excited and returned with my truck and a shovel.

The word "compost" shows up in many a bad shu review.  But after breathing in and tasting compost dust for an hour,  I'll never be so casual to overuse such hyperbole again. 

Ira has unexpectedly sent me a welcome box crammed with timely tea.  After a trying day, it warms my heart to see her handwriting. I know I've turned into a samples hoarder but winter is coming and I want to be ready.   I've thus far kept up my two month no-buy pact.  Tonight I brewed up perhaps one of the most expensive shu bricks to cross my path.  Although I am itching to use the C word on the latent wodui,  I've decided not to post anything further and let this sleep.  The shock is too much even for me.

Numi's Organic Puerh From 500 Year Old Trees

This morning, I had the surprise of my life. Puerh from 500 year old trees waiting at my desk!

"Numi's Organic Puerh comes from 500-year-old, wild, organic tea trees grown in China's pristine Yunnan Mountains."

Actually I almost fell out of my chair I burst out laughing so hard. You can see from the picture that these words refer to a rather humble shu brick.  How did I get my hot hands on such a brick? One of our I.T. guys casually mentioned that he was interested in puerh.  You can only imagine how my ears perked up.   He had his start with this Numi brick and I've vowed to introduce him to some proper pu-erh since.  We started easy last week with a mellow YS lao cha tou brick and an MGH shu brick.  He was kind and brave enough to bring his Numi brick in for me.

Numi - a San Francisco Bay Area tea company started by a brother and sister team, is known for their strong social values and commitment to community.  How is their pu-erh?

Drats. Am I the kind of guy that's going to diss tea from a feel-good fair trade organic tea company that provides jobs to the learning disabled?  Numi started a "Puerh to the People" marketing campaign and I'll all for pushing pu-erh to a wider audience.  But I think this brick may actually turn drinkers away.

I brewed it up tonight and as my husband says, "That's awful. That's just terrible. Throw that away."  I tried to take a few sips of all four brews but could not do much more. My top reasons why this Numi brick is not palatable:

1. Leaves are so finely chopped(CTC style) and the compression so tight, you can't really rinse any of the wodui flavor out. So the resulting barnyard brew is quite frankly not something you want to drink. Probably they took whatever they were going to use for their bagged puerh teas and pressed it instead of pressing direct from leaf. 
2. This here brick is a young 'un.  Shu needs a few years to mellow out.  Current year or even last year's shu is not really ready for drinking. Numi misleadingly calls this "Aged puerh tea brick".   The wodui cooking process of shu is not considered "aging". 
3. The crashed high expectations promised by the "superior tasting tea"of a 500 year old tree adds to the bad flavor.  Note to marketing department- supply of maocha from such ancient trees is so tight that none ever end up in shu let alone mass market shus like this one. 

I am not a shu snob and I enjoy cheap shu quite regularly. I think the Numi people should definitely give Jim at Puershop a call and have him help press their bricks.  He sells a non-organic non-fair-trade but smoother and actually drinkable Menghai Lincang blend-  2010 MGH Brick for 6.95.  I'm not a fan of puerhshop since I spent $180 and was burned by their high end offerings.   However their American Hao brick is a good deal and tasty too - the only one of my purchases I didn't regret and wished I had one more of... You can tell from the image below that Jim manages to include golden bud tips.

It's not just about price but does fair trade organic tea company with a social mission have to resort to misleading marketing and sell an inferior product to boot?   I'm an enlightened Berkeley citizen and support no shortage of organic fair trade businesses.  I could have just ignored this tea as I've done on other shus.  But I want Numi to get honest feedback from actual puerh drinkers so they can improve on future teas.  Whole leaf pressing should be one place to start.  Currently, this brick does a disservice to the tea that we love and obsess about. 

Brick from Middle Earth - What would Frodo Drink?

I set myself to fold 4 loads of laundry tonight before my husband comes back from levitation class.  But you know who would rather be steeped in tea doings.  After MarshalN revealed that my 25yo mystery brick had been roasted multiple times,  the DIY in me wants to give it a go.  I realize the problem with experimenting with my current collection is that the price of failure is too high since I bought most of my stuff 6-7 years ago. Even the cheapest 2004 sheng brick which I bought for $2.50 is now mysteriously selling for $40.

No matter, I just need cheap raw material. I'm willing to spend 10 bucks on a science project.  I need some disposable shu bricks and to learn the secret to a good roast. I went to Oakland Chinatown and got a 3 dollar barnyard shu that I'm going to wetstore for a year and then roast.  Should roasting should be done in an oven, fry pan, or a popcorn popper which is the preferred home roaster for coffee hounds?  I'm going to try over the weekend pan roasting a little loose pu-erh and flaked brick samples to start.

In the meanwhile, I opened this brick up for a tasting. You could see from the neifei that this was the shu of choice for dwarves of Moria- what else would they drink after a hard day's work mining mithril?  When I take 4 brews of it, it's a muddy earthy pondy unpleasant shu - definitely meant for the orcs of Mordor- they probably put a lump of it in their leather water bag.

Let me entertain my hobbit loving friends and others on what teas Middle Earthlings would drink:

• Smaug - no drinking, just hoarding all the vintage puerh of Middle Earth (Song Pin Hao, Tongchang Hao, Puqing Hao) which was simply in decrepit condition due to the dampness and awful dragon aroma
• Gandalf - aged sheng from Smaug's lair after using his wizardry to remove mold and said offensive dragon aroma.
• Bilbo Baggins -plain black tea before his "adventure".   After his return, keemun, yancha, and aged sheng which he split with Gandalf .  
• Frodo - Golden Yunnan. Really prefers uncomplicated mellow brews after the whole ring incident. He really never could get into pu-erh so he gave Bilbo's stash of aged sheng away to Sam before leaving Middle Earth with the Elves. 
• Hobbits - just plain black tea, don't go in for that foreigner brew.
• Dwarves - Elder dwarves go for wet stored sheng, particularly pure Lao Banzhang which make beards grow woolier.  Younger elves go for the punchy new born sheng- all wild tree of course!
• Aragorn - aged sheng only after reclaiming throne of Gondor. Just new Wild De Hong sheng during his days as a ranger.
• Faramir- Aged sheng for special occasions after Gandalf introduces him to pu-erh. He's working off that tong of stone-pressed Yiwu young sheng that's a bit too fragrant for aging.
• Elves of Rivendell - Oolong (floral Dong Dings of course!)
• Elves of Lothlorien - Silver Needles
• Saruman -  First generation De Hong Pao after he turned to the dark side. No need to ask. 
• Riders of Rohan - Wet stored shu!  Barnyard earth flavors are prized by the Horse Lords of the Mark.
• Ents - don't drink tea, kind of gross if you think about it...
• Sauron - tough one...

(For those who are not Tolkien fans, this Middle Earth has nothing to do with the Middle Kingdom- 中国.)

Mystery Brick From The Past

The joy of being a packrat is that sometimes you refind a treasure you had completely forgotten about.  Once I found two crisp hundred dollar bills in my copy of the Wind in the Willows. I was happy for a few seconds, but then soon felt quite defeated knowing how many books I trade and donate. But this week, I was richly rewarded by my forgetful ways.

So let's continue on with this mystery from circa 2000. Even before I started drinking pu-erh, I used to order oolong from Taiwan.  In one shipment they had mysteriously included this brick for free.  It smelled so funky back then that I immediately wrapped it up in a brown paper bag but I couldn't force myself to throw it away.  I vaguely thought it was Tibetan tea and maybe I would be lucky enough to find yak butter someday to brew it up proper.  I wondered how the vendor thought this gnarly brick would fit into the delicate sensibilities of an oolong drinker but I am happy they did.  I stashed this brick away in various kitchen cabinets forgotten over a decade until this week. 

You can see the leaves are rough and twiggy and  that I had made serious inroads in drinking it last week.  There is a sticker on the wrapper which lists http://verytea.com.tw/ but I got this tea via a different vendor which I can no longer remember despite a diligent search. The wrapper definitely is new since it has verytea's phone number on it. I also tried taking the way back machine and looking through their website to even figure out if verytea ever sold this brick on their on-line catalog. No luck.  (This is an aside, but it's pretty fun to do time travel with the way back machine to check out pu-erh selections and prices from the past. I should do a post next week. But have a look at these sites that use static html-  tuochatea in 2005,  Holy Mountain in 2005.  Dang... I really missed some gems... )

Only in the very first brew I detected a subtle mold flavor which I recognize as wet storage, but it was not unpleasant.  Even with my summer allergies, I can tell there was something special going on. This twiggy brick had more layers of complexity, medicinal bark overtones, camphor than any other shu I've tasted which are from a narrow range of  Menghai, CNNP, Feng Qing, Haiwan, et al.  Unlike most of the shu's I tolerate, there really was a there there.  And it left a lovely sweetness on my tongue for an hour afterwards. I was so taken aback that this brick was so much better than I expected, I drank this tea four times during the weekend with different brew parameters to make sure.  You can brew it dark which brings out a roast coffee flavor.  Unfortunately this brick lasts only two steeps.

This tea must have been wet-stored even if briefly.  There were carbonized black hard leaves which Jason points out in his blog as evidence of wet-storage.  I did see a few white dots of mold just in one section.  What's making this tea so above my ho-hum shus?   The question begs to be asked, is it complexity from the wet storage or the decade in dry storage or both? I think the decade of dry storage definitely aired out that barnyard smell but the extra something special is definitely from the early wet storage because my 2001 FengQing does not have this special depth (for a shu).

But then I finally spend $15 to get the handwriting character plugin for Pleco on my ipad so I can figure out what the wrapper says. I spend a painful amount of time wiggling my fingers to draw the label text just get "Taipei City Rd."  But then the back wrapper says-  年份:十五年 (niánfèn- a particular year: 15 years). OMG, it was 15 years when it came to me (or maybe less if the vendor is not to be trusted.). It's now a 25 yr. old. OMG. It's not the most mind blowing tea but it was free and it sure beats all my other shu's hands down.

Wet storage on a shu seems kinda dangerous,  just a step away from compost.  I procured mostly high end Menghai shus and gong-ting tribute beengs but maybe I should have been slumming it with the cheap rough bricks with a Guangzhou past.   Now this gem has given a new path for my shu drinking.