Aged Pomelo Stuffed Oolong and Puerh

What am I doing with such an assortment of stuffed pomelos?  The first fat death star of a pomelo I got ten years ago from Samovar Tea for $65- a princely sum for tea back then.  But my husband had a persistent cough and I read on the internet with some hope that these were a natural cure.   Samovar Tea advertised the vintage as 1993 which could be up for debate. I also drunk a loose leaf puerh advertised on their menu as being "1950 Vintage Ancient and Amazing" at Samovar back in 2005- a story for another time. 

These pomelo skins were hollowed out, stuffed with steamed oolong and licorice and then charcoal fired to oblivion.  It's pretty cheap grade oolong judging by the broken leaves and stems. Why would anyone use top grade leaf for something you're going to flavor and bake to death. The brewed tea leaves are carbonized jet black.  I've read Hakka tea farmers in Taiwan commonly make this type tea for medicinal purposes but I'm suspecting the versions I have is bottom grade Wuyishan yancha.

The Samovar version was misadvertised as being stuffed with puerh and it's definitely oolong.  This tea did little to cure my husband's cough but it was tasty enough for me to search for more.  Lightly smoky, the comforting citrus notes of this tea is just the thing to warm you up on cold rainy days. The next speciment I found was dated 2001 from Seven Cups but the tea proved still too astringent to drink even in 2006 which made me wonder if the Seven Cups version was either potentially younger than advertised or such pomelos require at least eight years to reach drinkability.  The type of astringency is what I've often experienced with young roasted yancha.  I would estimate the Samovar 1993 version was at least five years old when I got it in 2004 making it at least as old as 1999.  

Two pomelos were not enough to satiate me and I bought three more from Holy Mountain Tea. They are the youngest at 2003 and I have yet to even crack them open.

Do you see the odd man out in the above photo? The gaudy hot pink wiggly ribbon should tell you there is something more exciting going on.  I went on one last pomelo rampage in February of 2006 and got two puerh stuffed you zi cha(2002) from YS. These appear not to be baked but sun dried and were advertised as being "Pomelo Sweated Puerh".  The citrus taste can definitely overpower the gong ting loose shu.  You can sometimes lighten and perk up other boring shu with tiny pieces of pomelo skin. I generally prefer my teas naked but a marriage of citrus and tea can be a fruitful one.

If you are wondering, age appears not to make the tea any more wonderful.  Being baked to death, there is no more transformation besides mellowing out. It may wrongly appear I drink a lot of this tea but in reality, I gave most of the missing chunks away. I hoard this tea mostly because of the lovely pomelo scent that relaxes me.  It's too expensive to put out as potpourri so I bring out the storage boxes to sniff them from time to time.  

Pretending with a Beeng

This here furry sliver tipped mini-beeng could almost pass.

But wait there is something different. It's like walking past a really well-done up trans lady on the San Francisco streets.  Yup. This is no shengpu. It's actually an oolong in beeng form- an Oriental Beauty no less. Why? What form of abomination is this?  Maybe it's for tea drinker's like me that can't drink sheng anymore but still like to pretend...  It tastes nothing- nothing like sheng.  Let us not press this tranny metaphor further.

Oriental Beauty can definitely be aged and this is the main reason I got this pressed beeng. But perhaps the tea makers also needed to do something creative with those broken up leaves that can't be sold at top dollar.  Inspecting the brewed leaves confirms my suspicions.  Also it's not entirely clear the green leafhoppers have done their magic on these leaves as most of them look quite unbitten.  For those unaware- yes it is insect damage which forces oolong plants to produce antibodies that lead to that fruity taste. I've had leaf hopppers going rogue in my organic garden but they don't seem to work their magic on all edible plants.  

Is the vendor's price reduction from $27 to $22 an indication that this novelty pressing might be just a passing experiment?  The tea as it is now is good but nothing amazing.  Actually I think Scott's purple Dehong varietals have more sparkly fruity juicy mouth satisfaction than this.   I'll age this little OB for another few years. I've been slowly drinking through my oolong order.  The teas from this vendor are pretty reliable- their dong ding is good.  I'll most likely order more tea from them when I am forced to drink oolong which is my current sad state.

I sniffed through my sheng collection this afternoon and found half of the pre 2006 cakes have taken on a distinctly less sweet smell- a tad more closer to dry compost.   The colors are darkening considerably, some cakes more than others.  The 2006 Douji Big Leaf is the darkest of them all with serious staining on the wrapper. I need to give them a brew but I've somehow lost my masochistic inclinations. I'm hoping just a few more years and the sheng would have mellowed out enough for me to start up again. 

Back in the game with GABA Oolong

I'm really cleaning out the tea closet.  A true sign of a hoarder is a painful inability to part with any piece of their treasured hoard.  My first serious subtraction is a box of shu little over 5 pounds that I dropped off at the post office today.  I have 10 more pounds ready to handover to a friend visiting from Hawaii this weekend.

What's the first thing one should do after clearing out tea?  Buy more tea of course...  I limited myself to a small box of oolong as it's the only kind of tea my body tolerates these days.  I ordered from mountaintea.com mainly because they ship from L.A.  A box full of tea waiting on my front porch warms my heart like no other delivery.

I ordered a spectrum of oolong to refind my preferences.  I used to drink high mountain oolongs fifteen years ago when I didn't know too much about tea and thought they were quite the bee's knees.  Who knows what I was actually drinking back then- probably some mediocre oolong marked up as Alishan. I probably would not have known any better back then either.

You can see this vendor thoughtfully color coded their pouches to match oxidation levels with yellow being their light roasted oolong. The tea in the purple pouch is in a unique category of its own- it's an oolong oxidized in the presence of nitrogen to increase naturally occuring GABA levels.  The Japanese came up with this discovery twenty years ago while experimenting with alternative preservation methods.   Most humans probably could do with more GABA- a neurotransmitter which increases mental alertness as well as tones muscles. The reputed health claims of GABA are so wide and varied that if true- GABA would be a wonder drug.

I don't have an entrance exam to take but I'm always keen to enhance my flagging mental functions.  I was playing hooky today to go to the post office so the most mentally taxing thing I had to do was organize panda and polar bear photos on pinterest.  I'm not sure I was the beneficiary of increased mental function but if GABA tea had such noticeable effects, should we not see it in almost every store that sells tea?  But then America is not so much a hyper-competetive society and not all Americans actually want to be smarter or more focussed.  In fact many citizens in Northern California prefer the opposite it seems.

The tea was a pleasant affair - one notch above ho-hum and I'm not motivated to draw it out. I would probably not buy or drink this tea without the reputed health benenfits.  In the summer, I love sipping my tea in front of my squash and tomato patch contemplating novel ways of enjoying the summer veggies.  After seeing me struggle with my ipad camera and wobbling tea plate,  my husband sweetly volunteered to be the hand model in this shot.