Revisiting the 2006 Live Journal Tasteoff with the 2003 Feng Zing Zodiac

In 2006, bearsbearsbears brilliantly organized a Live Journal pu-erh taste-off which was a great way of sharing within the community.  I still have these treasured samples which I have stored in an airtight tin for 6 years so it may answer some questions I have aging under sealed conditions.

Just from color of the leaves alone, it looks like these guys changed some because none of them have that greenish young sheng tinge.  Without squinting, the 2006 Xiaguan FT and the 2005 Nanzhao definitely looks darker than the 1999 Mangshi Melon. So how do they taste?  I may take decades to find out.

I still have sizeable chunks left because you will see from my setup below that I only need a pinky tip's worth and the samples were generous.  My sheng tasting teapot is about the size of a walnut so it allows me to make numerous infusions without having to drink a litre.

I chose the 2003 Feng Qing Zodiac for this morning since I drink the 2001 Feng Qing Ripe regularly and I had planned to do a little creative shu-sheng blending after the show...  Feng Qing Factory in Lincang is one of the original factories(1939) which has the recipe last digit #4 after Xiaguan #3. They changed their name to Dian Hong group but I have only seen low-end pu-erh from them recently. The 2003 Zodiac appears to have been a special issue and it was not on sale over the internet even back then.

This mini is now a 10 year old and the brew color is still roughly similar to what it was in 2006 as compared with Jason's review.   I normally take a few sips for flavor and dump the rest into the larger bowl which you can see looks darker but the color in the cup is still the hay hues of a youngster.   It must have matured if only a little because the smokiness and grassy green notes which were definitely present in it's infancy were gone.  The bitterness was slight, not harsh at all.  Only after the 6th brewing, I tasted some slight camphor notes.  

It's kind of pleasant albeit boring tea but it still ripped up my stomach.  You can see from the spent leaves that it's  pretty much plantation leaves. I cherry picked the whole leaves but there's no shortage of broken leaves and stems in the teapot.

Aging is occurring albeit very slowly and due to my limited experience with dry-aged sheng tens and tweens, I'm not sure really what to expect. I went through Hobbe's posts for 2002/2003 tastings and his brews definitely look darker. So back to my previous post about aging in sealed conditions, these samples were in ziplock bags in a airtight puzzle tin for 6 years.  Some aging has occurred. But for my collection, I have to find out if they aged any more quickly than my cakes which were sitting on a shelf.   Also I have to account for differences in sample size vs. whole beengs as the rate of aging for broken samples should be somewhat accelerated. The real problem is that I can't tolerate sheng so I can't do serious taste testings to efficiently determine this fact. The only solution is to send away samples to experienced drinkers. 

Aging Under Sealed Conditions

I ran across hojotea's minority view on pu-erh storage of which I have included the juicy bits below.  What hojotea is saying is ringing all sorts of bells in my head:

"We however think that pu-erh must be kept without oxygen. Therefore our tea is packed without oxygen even if we need to spend extra effort in packing. First of all, the primary reason why pu-erh tea is compressed is to ensure that there is no oxygen inside the tea leaves. Those ancient people in Yunnan has known that in order to get tea matured nicely, it is essential to remove oxygen. Similarly, Taiwan oolong is sometimes kept without oxygen. With this method, the original floral flavor of the high mountain oolong becomes a distinctive peachy flavor after being kept for 3-5 years. For pu-erh tea, the same theory is also feasible."

This goes against all expert advice which recommends the cakes need to breath to age- not too much but a modicum amount of airflow.  Experts also recommend putting beengs in airtight storage to stop further process of fermentation.

I tend to buy kimchi in vacuum sealed bags from Korea and I can tell you first hand serious fermentation continues to occur.  Actually if you have ever experienced an exploding jar of kimchi which was packed and sealed tight, you know what hojotea has to say is not untrue.  Bioactivity in pu-erh probably requires only thimblefuls of air.  I feel this could be a way for me to beat the low humidity in Berkeley.  I'd somehow have to wait until it's about 60% humidity when the cakes are at an ideal level, then put them in airtight heat sealed mylar bags maybe using nitrogen preservation.  Well, I had better just start with the used resealable mylar bags I have for my other teas.

Following hojotea's argument, storing shengs in airtight packaging with sufficient moisture should solve the lack of ambient humidity no?   I must experiment for myself but if anyone has any experimental results already, please let me know.

Looking for an Internet Vendor for Aged Sheng

My eyes were glazed over various vendor websites in an effort to find a decent aged sheng for purchase when I found this gem on ebay:

Semen Cassiae Seeds Mini Tuo cha Ripe Pu-erh Tea ...Relaxing Bowel

Is semen and relaxing bowel a cracking way to sell tea? I put it on my ebay watch list to find out.  I definitely know many people who would benefit from relaxation of the bowel.  Back to my original task at hand,  I ended up in steepster.com which I am not familiar with.   I noticed that verdanttea.com is one of the most commented vendors for pu-erh. Then I ran across this bit of crazy price inflation from their website for a YongMing 2006 Star of Bulang Cake:

1 oz. $16.50

4 oz. $56.00
8 oz. $105.00
brick $156.00 (actually they mean cake here)

$156 for a 2006 cake from the low-end Yong Ming Factory of the double elephant trunk logo?  My eyes popped because $156 for a 2006 cake means it is one of the most premium cakes in the world on the ranks of Yan Qing Hao and Xi Zhi Hao! However they do not show the front wrapper for the Star of Bulang.  The fact that a Yong Ming Bulang Yinhao cake which sold for $9.50 by yuncha on Ebay recently makes me wonder how this supposed premium "Star of Bulang"  blend from Yong Ming factory compares to the $9.50 version. Normally when a factory tries to introduce premium versions, they can charge only so much above their current offerings. (Update: I found the said premium tea for taobao for $17.)

 

The reason I even wrote this post to begin with is the fact that at a glance I found Verdant Teas to have some of the most expensive prices I have ever encountered on the internet.  I have posted the explanation given by

vendor David Duckler of Verdant Tea for the hyper-inflated price of his Star of Bulang in the comments section of this post so you can decide for yourself.  He says his cake is premium and "Our markup is extremely low."  However MarshalN confirms for me that YongMing is a low-end vendor and their 2006 cakes don't go for more than 100RMB(~$15) in China.  Regardless, $156 for a 2006 sheng would make it probably one of the most expensive in the world, esp. for a Bulang which does not have the market hype of Lao Banzhang or Yiwu coming from a factory which lacks any premium brand recognition.  Is this $150 Yong Ming Star of Bulang  really 10x times better than the $10 version? Just as a comparison, Essence of Tea is selling 1998 Heng Li Chang Bulang for ~$180.

Down memory lane, I almost bought a YongMing Bulang cake from tuochatea and I am embarrassed to say I went for the Wild Elephant Valley beeng instead because it had a way cooler looking elephant wrapper than Yong Ming. (Actually I had been looking for a Chun Ming cake  because who doesn't love two x'es on an elephant butt but I had to settle in the end.)

So I am back to the conundrum of looking for aged sheng on the internet. I would buy from Guang of Hou De but his "Aged Puerh" section is a little thin with four entries right now so Essence of Tea is my next best bet. I do have a friend visiting San Francisco from Hong Kong so this would be a last resort.

Don't wait for aging

All weekend I was down with a wee bit cold so my plans for a proper tea tasting was blown with an impaired olfactory system. Even the lovely shus I felt good about earlier this week tasted just like boring old shu-  comforting yes but without the ability to pickup the layers of sarsaparilla and caramel notes, I just felt like an old Chinese man quaffing restaurant tea to clean my pork loving greased up pipes.

Then a light bulb when off in my head. Your olfactory receptor cells degrade as you age- almost everything in the body appears to do so except a sense of humor. Perhaps it's not worth waiting even a decade for your sheng to age. You should taste aged shengs when your taste buds are their height because the flavors may not be as vivid when the time comes around.  Maybe in the world of sommeliers- like professional athletes- there must be a peak to their olfactory prowess.  As our bodies fall apart, you might have to start taking pharmaceuticals and suffer "dry mouth" and other indignities and perhaps not be able to enjoy the nuance of a ripe sheng.  I had better present this new brilliant argument to my husband and procure some aged stuff pronto!

Yunnan Purple Beauty from Simao by the Sea

I took a selection of teas for our friend Irish Karl who planned for us a delicious smoked pork shoulder lunch.  Karl being an imbiber of much harder stuff than tea enjoyed only the imperial Yunnan golden tips.   Actually I have yet to find anyone who doesn't like imperial Yunnan, but the shu tasting just did not fly. Karl who is the king of Irish patois was so taken aback by the ripe earth taste of shu that he could only sputter words like "vile" and "nasty" prefixed liberally by "fookin".

Pu-erh is an acquired taste for many western palates. Otherwise Thomas Lipton would have made a fortune off of it centuries ago.  Numi teas is trying to introduce pu-erh to the west with blending it with more familiar flavors of Earl Grey and chocolate, but I think their success is marginal.  I tried the Numi bottled pu which they were giving away for free during the Oakland Street Food Festival last year and it was brewed so weakly, I'm not sure you could call it pu-erh.  Even the last brewing of a low-end shu could not be weaker than what was in the Numi bottle.  Numi bill the bottled pu-erh as "functional and delicious".  Yes, let us enjoy some functional tea. Shu is not an obvious palate pleaser for the coke drinking west.

I myself did not initially enjoy the taste of pu-erh even though my first exposure to it 15 years ago was with seriously aged shu at a potter's house in the island of Jejedo. He routinely took monks to China to procure yixing pottery and boyicha -Korean term for pu-erh. (Yes you are thinking, I definitely missed a golden opportunity.) In Korea, Buddhist monks are the serious pu-erh drinkers although the health crazy Koreans have taken it up in the last few years.  This original session lasted for dozens of brews developing complex mushroomy medicinal flavors which my then unschooled palate did not enjoy. It's only when I started cutting most sugars and fire chilies out of my diet ten years ago that I really began to appreciate and understand the flavors of pu-erh, sheng and shu.  Cutting out the spicy gochujang out of my daily diet healed my tongue to perceive nuance. Cutting out the sugars allowed me to taste the subtle sweetness of puerh. A soda drinker will have a hard time detecting the caramel sweetness of a shu.

Back to the photo then.  My husband and I also brewed up a small pot of Purple Beauty(Purple Bud Stone Tea) which is a hybridization of Da Hong Pao tea. Our sample was an autumnal pick processed as a sun-dried oolong from YS. You can totally see that the leaves brew purple. As I sadly had a cold and could barely taste anything, my husband vouched for it's unique taste. The usual astringency I associate with purple bud in sheng pu is not present at all, tamed nicely as described.   Last week I tried a Da Hong Pao I had forgotten about for five years and it was still a wrong balance of sweet and astringency so it would be great to taste these side by side some time.