pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou
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2014 Tie Guo Li “Lun Dao” Ripe Puerh Tea of Menghai by Yunnan Sourcing
Sometimes you just got to get your funk on. This is one of those teas that I find has good tasting fermentation funk, I really enjoyed it. It is a burly one, kind of in your face. It is very strong and simple, quite dark and thick and just a little sweet. As Alan said, it is strong with fermentation flavor being so new, but I think this is going to be a very good tea after it settles down. There is no bitterness at all, and a real smoothness underneath that is undeniable. I think the strong smooth character might very well take over after a time.
Finally getting around to my sample of 2015 YS “Yang Luo Han” ripe. Rich and Allan have both reviewed this tea and have nailed the flavors and I don’t really have anything to add. I like this ripe and will enjoy the rest of the sample, but there are others ripes on my “to buy” list from YS and other vendors ahead of this one. If were more of a hoarder I’d probably buy it anyway, lol.
Drinking the 2015 Rama Lama Bulang from Mandala and it is good. It was bittersweet in the start with a lot of fermentation flavor. It took about five steeps for the fermentation taste to go away. There were some notes of chocolate in there and a fruity note towards the end. I steeped this ten times and it was good. While there is a certain amount of hype about this tea it is almost as good as that hype.
Today I drank the 2011 Noble Mark loose tea from Mandala Tea. This is an excellent ripe. It has a fair amount of fermentation flavor that took four or five steeps to go away. It had very little bitterness and was naturally sweet as puerhs go. There were some notes of chocolat in there and it developed a nice fruity flavor in the latter steeps. I gave it a total of ten steeps and if I wanted to continue I think I could get fifteen out of it but I have just drank a liter and a half of tea and want to go on to something else. This was one enjoyable tea. I also have the cake in this but it is so long since I’ve drank the cake I really can’t say how it compares.
This afternoon I have been drinking the 2002 White2Tea White Whale. This tea packs quite a punch. It is somewhat bitter in the beginning and quite smoky. It had a bit of a camphor aftertaste. I also seemed to get what I would describe as notes of whiskey without the punch. Although this tea certainly packed a punch. Enough of a punch to knock you out if your not looking. This tea only got smoother as I resteeped the leaves. It was quite smooth in the tenth and final infusion. I’m not sure where I stand on aged sheng. I think I in many ways prefer a young sheng to an aged one. Although I have considered the possibility that I have not yet tried a true quality aged sheng. This is after all a cheap brick but an aged cheap brick.
I’m with you on that. It makes me wonder about buying lots of young sheng that I will presumably be drinking years from now. I bought some samples of YQH teas from Emmett, and these are aged shengs that to me taste like a different league than the aged factory teas I have tried so far. I like them much better. I expect the quality shengs we are buying from W2T, CL, YS etc. will age more like those teas, but then again, we are storing them differently.
I think this is a tricky question and I did not try the YQH when they were young.
That being said, I’m slightly skeptical that buying sheng at the same price level will result in a similar caliber of tea.. The TsangLiu for instance is $0.35/g. That’s cheaper than half of W2T’s young teas ($70/200g cake) and a lot of YS Yiwus (equivalent of a $87.50/250g cake). I’m a fan of both of those vendors and think that they generally represent decent enough value and a very reasonable markup.
There’s also the storage aspects which are equally tricky to predict, but I’ll say that the storage from Yang on these teas has been very good.
Indeed. Many of us are spending quite a bit on young sheng, and hoping for good results with controlled home storage. We could all be in for a rude awakening. That’s my concern and one of the reasons I am keeping my sheng purchases to a minimum. Like Allan, shu is another matter for me. It is a much safer bet storage wise, plus I drink more of it. I tend to buy it with reckless abandon.
I’ve found myself gravitating more and more towards spending the most on these semi-aged teas. Buying very fresh sheng isn’t necessarily much of a better deal although you do have many more options! Unless of course, people prefer to drink young sheng.
I have a hard time keeping my interest with much more than a sporadic shu session, but it’s a pretty decent and affordable way to drink tea if you like it!
Rich, I agree that shou is a safer bet storage wise. I don’t think it needs the high humidity that they say sheng requires. I find my shou does fairly well in the Long Island dry storage, humid summers but not too much humidity the rest of the time. I like you tend to buy it with reckless abandon.
I have not yet come to the conclusion that I like aged sheng but aged shou is another matter. I recently sampled the 1996 CNNP “Green Mark Te Ji” Ripe from Yunnan Sourcing. I really liked this cake so I bought one during the ripe sale last month. It goes for $116 but was in my opinion worth it.
As 4 me I prefer caramel toffee, like this one
http://www.tea-and-coffee.com/buy-teas/type/pu-erh
Does someone else likes this one?
Today I drank a tasty ripe from Aliexpress King Tea, the 2015 Tae Tea Dayi ChuanQi or Legend Cake. This is a very tasty tea. It has a lot of fermentation flavor to it but the taste was clean. It was bittersweet in the first infusion but began to lose it’s bitterness in the second infusion. What was left was a nice sweet puerh teta. This tea also has a very cool wrapper. One that celebrates a time when America and China were allies. It celebrates the American Volunteer Group or Flying Tigers.
https://www.instagram.com/p/-cJPl5zDWguGBkY9HYf8xx4vGpxfFfzCMBIjc0/?taken-by=allanckeanepuerhtea
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