pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou
Misty Peak Sale Today:
Rolled Raw Pu’er BOGO
http://steepster.com/discuss/9165-rolled-raw-puer-buy1-get1-free-extended-through-tuesday
2012 Autumn Mengku Ba Nuo Shan Raw from ChaWangShop. A very nice mellow and smooth body with gentle floral and fruity notes. I enjoyed this one all day today with only minor astringency at the end.
2005 lao tongzhi.
Not a whole lot of flavour in the mouth, but whatever there is is a very mildly sweet, potato like flavour, with the beginnings of some aged taste. It’s really quite rough, and it seems to be one of those shengs that makes my stomach a bit queesy if I drink too fast.
The aftertaste is rather nice, and goes a long way in redeeming this tea.
Today I drank a different ripe puerh, a tangerine puerh, the 2009 Aged Chenpi Ripened Tangerine Puerh. I brewed it with somoe of the smoky tangerine skin and may have used a bit too much of the skin. It was very smoky in the first infusion, too smoky. It quickly dissipated, leaving a nice flavor behind. Tangerine Puerh is not something I want to drink everyday but this one was good.
2008 Bulang Shou Imperial Grade from Crimson Lotus Tea. :D
Rich and sweet, but smooth without the tarry, smoky, or overly earthy traits of some shou puerh. The hint of earthy bitterness here makes the profile more appealing to me; while I like smooth/sweet shou they can sometimes be a little too “safe” and predictable. This one is nice!
Still doing flash steeps on the 6th infusion, which is making me very happy and awake while I do some late-night (err, early morning) reorganization of my tea cabinet.
Nice writeup Rie! Thanks. :-) You picked up on the Bulang bitterness that comes through in that shou. It is appealing to me too.
Welcome Rie! Glad to have your input. Crimson, I am on your site now. Please label as “samples”…..LOL!
Thanks! I’m definitely elbows deep into puer exploration these days, so this thread is awesome. :D
Glen, definitely enjoying my selection of samples, thanks so much for the guidance so far.
I have a question. I recently received a 357 gram cake of older sheng 2002) to split with a friend. I put it on my scale and it weighed 340 grams. Is this normal? I mean I can understand that over time as it ages it might lose moisture and I assume it’s normal, but I wanted to ask. Thanks in advance pu-heads.
I’ve seen this weight loss on older cakes advertised on some sites. You are the first person I’ve heard about it from. My guess is as yours – normal, but I will defer to more experienced folks for a more definitive answer.
I don’t usually weigh my cakes, but since I was splitting it with someone and it was EXPENSIVE, I wanted to be sure I got it split equally. To make sure it wasn’t my scale I weighed a 2014 cake I have that says 250 grams and it was exactly 250 grams. I assume it’s normal and it makes sense that cakes would lose moisture as they age (if they weren’t stored in a more wet environment) and I actually prefer dry stored cakes, but I wanted to ask about everyone else’s experience.
The angel’s share, haha!
I’ve never actually measured a bing myself, and always just assumed they weigh what the wrapper says. In any case, it has never been that far off that I’ve noticed!
It seems reasonable, though. Before pressing, maocha has to be made supple and loose through steaming. A cake will loose a lot of moisture, and thus weight.
Now I assume maocha is weighed and sorted in to bing sized quantities prior to steaming, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the weight of the leaf changed somewhat throughout the whole process, and producers have to estimate a bit.
During further aging, it’s moisture content may also change from the day it was pressed, and bits may crumble a bit during the handling.
In it’s 12 years your cake may have moved across quite a few shelves!
I’m hoping someone who has actually been to tea factories drops by and can shed some light on this.
It can lose a lot of moisture over the years depending on storage. When that cake was pressed they weighed the maocha too 357grams. Then they steamed it and compressed it. After that cakes can fluctuate ~10% in either direction. I always worry that people will think we’re scamming them, so I break up the cakes that are underweight for samples, and keep the overweight cakes to sell.
Agreed, the cakes will lose weight as they age. For the most part they are steamed to soften before pressing so evaporation would probably have them lose some weight. BezoomnyChaiVeck you hit the “nail” on the head. Angels share. One day I hope to be one of them getting that share.
So I started my day with the 2011 Star of Menghai. I managed to get samples from a fellow Steepsterite of this product for each of the years 2009 through 2013. This tea is supposed to be one of the higher quality shus from Dayi. I loved the 2009 tea, it was superb. But now quite expensive. So I was hoping the later versions were as good so I could buy some and age it.
I found the 2011 version not nearly as good. It was deep, but composty and a little fishy. Was this difference due to it being younger or because 2011 was not as good a year’s cake? I will try the other versions and let you know what I think based on how those taste. Should be an interesting experiment.
Give it another year and it will evolve I am pretty sure. I try to give these about 4 years to age. Hopefully in another year we will be around to go another whirl on this. I agree the 2009 is really good now.
Next up today, I dug into my drawer at work for some afternoon energy. I spotted a sample of the 2012 Qiu Yun from Yunnan Sourcing. I had tried this a few weeks ago and forgot what I thought of it. I figured if I had really liked it I would have ordered a cake last week when I did a YS order.
Yum, it was really good. Almost a perfect young sheng. Floral, a little sweet, nice huigan, a little bitterness, and very easy to drink. So I think, yeah, I must order a cake. I go to the YS site and find it – wow, $17? A steal! Only it’s sold out. Damn! That’s why I never ordered it. Lucky you’s who own this.
I drank a downright unusual puerh tea tonight, the 2007 Witches Brew Sheng Puerh from The Pleasures of Tea. It is loose raw puerh but it is in the form of long single leaves with a fair amount of stems. It was actually pretty good although not the very best. It had an aged flavor in the first steep that quickly dissipated after the second steep. After that it was pretty smooth.
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