pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou
Today I’m drinking another ripe from tea8hk2013 on EBay out of Hong Kong. Today it is the 2012 GuaFengZhai 500g Brick Ripe Puerh Tea. This is a very nice tea that has nearly completely cleared. There was a little bit of fermentation taste in the first couple of steepings and then no more. There was little bitterness and a nice semi sweet note throughout all twelve steeps. While I do not call this tea phenomenal it is a good solid ripe and it has less fermentation left than most teas. On top of that this tea which was certainly wet stored has no wet storage taste that I can locate. It was quite good overall. I bought five teas from this seller. So far I have tried three ripe and they have all been good solid teas. I have one sheng I bought that I have to try soon. We will see how his wet storage effects his sheng.
AllanK, wet storage and HK dry storage are two different things. The vendor’s teas are almost certainly sourced from Guangzhou, where the largest tea market in China is. It’s only two hours away by train. Down here in HK, the traditional method involves mass warehousing of tea by the waterfront, indoors, and the humidity here often climbs up in the 80-100% range during summer (I have a place near the tea warehouses and everything gets moldy in summer, even wood and fiberglass. I run a dehumidifier all summer to keep the humidity at bay). That is traditional storage. The tea is moved around within the warehouse to control the aging, and the pu is then aired out to clear out storage aromas before sale. Cakes are either wrapped in plastic when done or broken up in the case of shu, which is commonly sold loose for the Cantonese bo lei drinking masses.
I was in Shenzhen a few months ago to visit a tea market. The tea I encountered up there was SO WET that it was horrible, and they tried to pass it off as HK storage (right). It was pretty much RUINED tea.
At home the humidity can get pretty high (I cracked the window yesterday and the temp/humidity in my room climbed to 90 degrees and 85% humidity), but without the sheer mass of tea, the tea ages nicely without any off flavors and there is more fluctuation in humidity. This type of storage is what made the 88 Qing Bing famous. Then there is wet storage (like I encountered in Shenzhen) where the humidity is raised to a constant 90-100% and this causes serious off flavors. Traditional storage is an art—accelerating tea aging without ruining it is tricky. Shu was meant to satisfy HK demand for aged sheng tea without the aging. At the time, HK was pretty much the only place where sheng pu erh was aged and consumed in that manner. That tells you how wet traditional storage can be—it can turn sheng into something a lot like shu.
Sounds like you’re dealing with Guangdong dry storage (which is wetter than most people’s humidors for most of the year—humidity in winter can drop to 40% on certain days and temperatures can drop to 7-9 Celsius on the coldest days). If it was wet storage, you’d know it! The tea would have signs of mold and smell like it, too!
Additionally, well done shu will taste clean pretty quickly. Try a 2015 YS shu and you’ll see what I mean! Other shu will always taste like fermentation if the process wasn’t controlled well (blech).
I simply thought it would be Hong Kong storage because the vendor was based in Hong Kong. I bought two four year old ripes from the vendor that I thought had to be Hong Kong storage because one had cleared completely, the other nearly so. There is no way in my experience a ripe tea in dry storage clears in four years. But in the case of the sheng from this seller it may be something they bought recently from Guangzhou as you say because it certainly was not wet stored.
Traditional Hong Kong storage, after four years, would taste WET. Especially for ripe tea. It wouldn’t taste like wo dui, but it would DEFINITELY taste wet in a similar way, but different. You’d know it had spent time in Southern China for sure, once you knew what that kind of storage does to pu erh.
Hong Kong/Guangdong dry storage would give you results like you describe—cleared out with no off aromas/flavors.
Perhaps that is where he is getting his tea but he must then have some sort of humidity controlled vault for the time that he is storing it in Hong Kong. The time between when he purchases the tea and when he makes a sale, unless he stores it in the heavy duty plastic he sent it to me in. The tea did not have what I understand as wet storage taste, the note of wet wood I believe it is usually called.
Allan, some of the best dry storage pu erh in HK is simply stuck on a shelf or in a cabinet—no other precautions needed. There’s a guy called Cloud who is somewhat of a local celebrity in the pu erh scene…he aged some tea very well by sticking it under his coffee table in his living room. LOL. And he ran air conditioning on the hottest evenings. Our climate is ideal for pu erh aging.
It’s possible the vendor is based in Guangdong and ships tea down to HK for reshipping…very common on eBay for all kinds of items. HK is used as a transhipment point for Chinese vendors since our post office is much more efficient than China Post.
Pu erh is often wrapped in plastic here (HK and Guangdong) or stored in glass jars when it reaches an ‘ideal’ point to prevent further aging, so yes, maybe he/she is storing the tea in plastic. I broke up some tea during the dry season and it was VERY wet stored. It improved after airing out, but because of the high summer humidity by the waterfront, it’s doing the wet storage thing all over again and I won’t drink it until it dries out in winter.
That traditional/wet storage flavor takes prolonged humidity in the 80-100% range. Traditionally it is a carefully controlled process, involving rotation around the warehouse and precise timing, but now guys are faking it by elevating humidity too high for too long and this positively ruins the tea. Basically wo dui all over again with less control.
Traditional storage done right is really quite nice. Done poorly, drinking wet storage pu is an ordeal.
Humidity at home tends to be lower, especially since many HKers run air conditioning/dehumidifiers all summer. Dry storage (70-80% humidity for much of the year) HK pu erh is what started the pu erh boom in the first place, and is the reason why all of us are even storing cakes at all. Nobody even attempted home aging sheng the way we do until the 90s, and the old school merchants still think it’s a bit silly. Some have adapted and sell dry storage cakes to meet market demand, however, while others sell traditional storage pu erh as they always have. At one point the pu erh vendors here were confused when buyers asked for raw cakes, since nobody would drink anything less than ten years old here as it was considered undrinkable! Modern, single origin pu erh is better fresh, but for something like my 7542 or Shuangjiang Mengku cakes, I’m letting them sit for a decade at the least.
I offered one of the oldest vendors in town some maocha and he laughed and said maocha is rough on the tummy. He’s right, I often feel queasy after drinking maocha. Local tea vendors advocate drinking young sheng for weight loss, perhaps partially because of its laxative effect.
Source: born and raised in HK and live here now ;)
2016 Lao Ban Zhang sample bought from Die Kunst des Tees in Germany. Do I need to say more? ;-)
Figured I should ask this here. Is it ok to, say, break open a cake or piece of a cake, brew it, decide that it could benefit from some aging, and then leave the remainder to sit and age a year or so? I’m kind of under the impression that aging should only be done with wrapped & unbroken cakes, but I assume its fine to crack one open and THEN age the rest?
Presumably, yeah if you’re going to drink it yourself. Maybe not if you’re going to sell it later :P but I’m just guessing ha.
It won’t hurt it at all. It will still age nicely open wrapper or not. The wrapper is mainly to keep dust off and bugs out I think.
Yeah it definitely won’t effect the aging process to open the tea and drink it. Also, by drinking it now and then in another year you will get to taste how much it has aged.
Yeah that’s the idea, I’d love to buy a cake and then taste it every few months as it transforms. Glad to know that’s an option!
Proper rappers are of cotton or blend to promote “breathability.” Fancier wrappers are totally cotton. The way the material ages will depend on the type of vessel in which it is stored, but will definitely be faster than if left in whole form. Breaking apart some gives you an idea of what to look forward to in the whole form— all other variables being equal.
Along those lines, I took a few bits of a few productions and stored them in canisters and have tasted continuously for about a year. I noticed that some of the items started to taste blah, after which I placed in a plastic bag and back into the storage bin. They tasted better, so my conclusion is there might be a limit to how long you’ll want to store in canister and some older productions (’08 and beyond), you may not want to canister at all.
Yang-chu, some vendors store very old pu erh in glass jars to prevent further breakdown as the tea has reached its peak (and in some cases, surpassed its peak). This is the only time I’d suggest storing pu erh in a caddy—when the tea is right where you want it. You want to make sure the tea isn’t too humid, though, or it will ferment anaerobically (not pleasant). My mom stuck some twenty year old shu in a plastic jar and I really did not like the way it tasted when I found it in my dad’s kitchen cabinet in Austria. Really quite unpleasant.
Aging pu erh in dry climates must be quite the balancing act. Too humid and you might get anaerobic fermentation or even mold/rot. Too dry and the tea will age very, very slowly if at all (too dry can even ruin pu erh, IMO). With cigars, I open my humidor once a week during the wet season to keep the humidor oxygenated. I’d suggest anyone storing pu in the west exchange the air in their pumidors too, or you might get the wrong kind of bacteria working on your tea, leading to strange flavors.
I open them up and wave some air in about twice a week. I have fans set in there as well that I run to move the air around too.
Mrmopar that sounds like a good aging setup. I don’t like air blowing directly on my pu, though, and some think this can mess it up some as it causes essential oils to evaporate or whatever
Today I drank a tea sent to me by Angel at Teavivre, the 10 Year Aged Raw Puerh Tea Brick Tea 2005. This was an excellent raw puerh. It was somewhat bitter at the start, I’d say for the first four steeps. From that point on it developed a nice sweet note. Unlike many teas about this age it had developed no aged flavors good or bad. It was excellent tea. I may have to consider buying this if I put in an order from Teavivre.
Most of the teas I have drank from that era have developed what I refer to as aged taste, but it can also I suppose be a storage taste. Some teas I have drank of this age have developed taste of leather or tobacco for instance. This one had none of that. This one still tasted in some ways like a young sheng. It had a somewhat orange color so it seemed to have aged but I really didn’t taste it.
2007 material pressed in 2012. the Qi Sheng Gu from EoT. I rather liked it, but it snuck up on me some. More caution should be exercised, wee leaves can pack a lot of energy!
2003 “Red Mark” from Finepuer. They’re out of it, I believe, but you’re not missing much.
Still enjoying border tea sample from Chawangshop. Just opened up my big tea crock and the smaller storage crocks to welcome the extreme heat and humidity we will be getting this week.
I’m beginning to finish off the remainder of my WT2 samples.. Drinking 2015 Colbert Holland right now. Anyone tried WT2s 2016s yet?
Lao Man E Huang Pian from chawangshop. I really like this stuff for the price. Lovely flavor and great effects on my body. Very calming.
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