pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou

drinking the 2014 Man Zhuan Spring Raw from Tea Urchin.

Cant get my head round the bitterness in this one. Other people reported creamy vanilla and i can get some thickness but the bitter tastes like a green tea can be and its a bit finicky, once oversteeped easily the taste doesnt want to leave my mouth.

Oh and its really buzzy too! Got me up quicksmart this morning but you have to treat it with kid gloves if you’re sensitive

I reckon it will age lovely though! Theres a 2012 which might be a bit more mellower on the bite

Starting the day off with some 2012 Yong De “certified organic” ripe puer from YS. A solid tea, that delivers a tasty cup over and over with no frills.

Sipping a sweetish dry stored 2000 Yiwu Zheng Shan from Chen Yun Ming that I bought from Terre de Ciel in France. Very clean with no funky taste or aroma sheng.

Drank a very different ripe puerh today, tea from EBay seller tea8hk2013. It was the 2012 KunLuShan Ripe Puerh Tea Brick. This tea had definitely been humid stored. The first thing I noticed was the absence of fermentation flavor. It had basically none. Almost nothing to indicate I was drinking a ripe except it didn’t taste at all like a sheng. As to storage flavors, you would expect a lot. However there wasn’t much. There was what I would describe as a spicy note for the first three or four steeps. I didn’t find notes of wet wood which is the note I frequently find in wet stored tea. There was also a sweet note from the start with this tea. The best description for the sweet note is prunes but of course without any of the associated thickness of prune juice. I fact this tea had a very thin nature to it’s tea soup. Not the thick broth you would normally get from a ripe puerh. I’m finding I’m liking this tea and that it is a very different experience than I’m used to. Very few teas I have drank have cleared to this degree. One that I recall was a twenty year old dry stored tea that had cleared and a 1996 tea I bought from Yunnan Sourcing. This tea was different from those teas however and in a way I’m not sure how to describe. I do not know if this is typical Hong Kong storage or exceptional Hong Kong storage. I look forward to trying the other teas I have from the same seller. This one was just so different from every other ripe I have tried I don’t properly know how to describe it. It was quite good though. It was not a cheap brick costing nearly $50 but it was not really expensive either.

This is likely old news to some (forgot to note it here when I wrote the tasting note), but today I had the 2005 CNNP Grand Yellow Mark sheng from Puerhshop. That vendor is very hit and miss to me, but this one scores a clean hit.

2016 Yunnan Sourcing “Wa Long Village” Yi Wu old arbor sheng 25gms sample.

Trying out my second tea from the EBay seller tea8hk2013 today, another ripe. This one is the 2005 GanRun Yunnan Tuocha. This one had also cleared. There was literally no trace of the fermentation of this tea. There were also no storage tastes to this tea. It had a sweet note from the start and a lack of bitterness. I also noticed that the tea soup was a little bit thinner than the average ripe tea. Must be because it had totally cleared. Overall this was very good tea. I am beginning to think this seller has very good storage. It must be humid stored because it is Hong Kong but this one had no wet storage taste to it at all. Perhaps after a few years of humid storage they put it in a controlled humidity environment, the opposite of one of our pumidors, I don’t know just a guess.

Today I am drinking a semi aged raw from Yunnan Sourcing, the 2006 Chang Tai Hao “Tian Xia Tong An” Certified Organic Raw Puerh Tea. In the end I was somewhere in the middle on this one. I did not really like it or dislike it. It had no great positive notes and no terrible notes. It did get better over the course of twelve steeps. It had not developed any terrible wet storage tastes. It did not taste of leather and tobacco or wet wood. It just didn’t have a great taste to my taste buds. In the end I neither liked it or disliked it. It did get better over twelve steeps. Developed something of a sweet note. It had no qi to speak of.

Today I sipped an excellent and very young 2016 YUNNAN SOURCING “MAN LIN” ANCIENT ARBOR raw pu’er from a sample I ordered. From all the 2016 teas I have sipped this was by far the best. Excellent aroma from the leaves, both when dry and wet. The liquor has a beautiful yellow colour and besides the usual taste of a young gushu there is a very slight bitterness complementing this tea.

2009 Dayi Lao Cha Tou brick. This tea seems to be less flavorful than it was when I first tried it; I think it may have soaked up too much humidity from the atmosphere. This is a Kunming storage brick and it came in quite flavorful. Some of my ripe tea seems less flavorful right now, but I think it is just a summer thing and the tea is wetter than usual. I don’t know though. I guess I won’t know until winter, when the tea dries out again!