pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou
I need guidance pu oracles. I have acquired a bunch of cakes now and storage is becoming an issue. I need to store them and I need to store them properly. I know I need a pumidor, but until then, I have them in drawers in a bedroom. My question is whether or not I should be running a humidifier in the room just to keep things from drying out too much until I make them a happier home. Would this even be helpful or is it a total waste of time and money? Assuming it would be helpful, but should I leave the drawers open? TIA
MzPriss you can ask me anything about this. JUST KEEP SMOKY SHENGS AWAY FROM THE OTHERS! Sorry I just learned a lesson on this myself and I am trying to “recover” a few from this. I think moisture is needed and a stable temp. Both are necessary in my humble opinion.
I have a buddy who lives in HK who has a cigar-collector friend, who stores his cigars in food-grade plastic containers to good effect. My friend was gifted a cigar and it met his standards. You may give this a try.
What is your average temperature / relative humidity currently? If you don’t know then you should pick up some small hygrometers and test different storage places. If you don’t know what you have already you won’t know whether you need to fix it. Also if you get a humidifier you’ll need to know when it is too humid.
A lot of very decent tea has been stored in cooler, dryer climates like Kunming. As long as it’s not so cold and dry as to kill the tea I believe you will be fine. Foul odors would do more damage in the short term than humidity would.
I appreciate this y’all. The average temp in my house is around 71-72. It varies as to whether or not I have heat on due to Texas weather. The Winter temps here are all over the place. It can be 75 out one day and then drop down to the 30s and I have to turn on the heat and then I have to turn it off. When the heat is on the air is of course, very dry. I have the cakes in wooden drawers in a dresser. Although now I’m out of drawer room and they are stacked on top of the dresser. They are in a back bedroom away from kitchen odors.
I don’t think it will ever get too cold but I am worried about the dry business. I will for sure get some wee hygrometers and check out the humidity level.
And mr mo – I will be asking lots of stuff. Thank y’all very much.
Yang-chu – are the cigars sealed in the containers with lids? Does he take the lids off and let air in sometimes or just leave them covered? Thanks.
I have been using unglazed pots for the past 4-5 years and they have been great. Though, you have to keep in mind they also lower the temps a bit, so if it gets too cold around them, the cakes are going to be colder. And take mrmopar’s advice to heart, you will regret mixing smoky with non-smoky, in fact if you have areas that have very particular scents, I would separate those too (I’m looking at you Zhu/Bamboo Scented and fruit stored ones).
Is there a numerical value for too dry? I live in New England and even though I run humidifiers pretty much all winter, the humidity inside the house never reaches 50%. 45% is pretty typical. I’m starting to think about keeping my pu-erh in the plastic bags it was shipped in.
Dr Jim – Thats a very debatable topic, especially since it depends on what kind of storage you prefer, but personally for me I don’t mind much until I see it drop below 30% for more than a day or two then I take action. The reality is that unless the cakes were in warehouses all their lives they had their share of some VERY dry days and very wet ones, and most well aged cakes (20+) years have only been in fully conditioned warehouses in the later years anyway.
Kunming can often get below 40%RH and still works for storing puerh. Will it age the same way as in Guangdong? No. Will the puerh be dead? No.
MzPriss keeping the tea in self contained containers that are breathable; odor free cardboard or unglazed pots will go far for maintaining a stable humid microclimate. I have some yixing storage pots just sitting in my living room and they stay reliably around 55%RH inside while the room fluctuates.
He seals the cigars with the lids but perhaps every two weeks takes off the lid. He refills the little humidity boxes of florist “sponge”, then steals it back up.
So would big terracotta planter type pots work for unglazed pots? with maybe the saucer turned upside down on top as a lid? Do they need a lid at all?
I’ve heard of others using the terracotte planters, but I haven’t tried it myself. You would need a lid.
When you mentioned about the terracotta planters I went looking in my garden stuff and found one I bought from the Dollar Store. It looked the perfect size! But it wasn’t! :-( The big cakes were just a teeny tiny bit too big to fit in.
They come really big though and I’m thinking it might work with the saucer on top. I’m gonna try and also put some of that flower foam in and wet it from time to time and see how it goes until mr mo talks me through making a pumidor – which I won’t even have time for til June.
I like your idea and will see if I can find something similar. I don’t even want to get into buying a pumidor. I will just end up buying way too much pu-erh if I have one of those.
Don’t worry.the storage of puerh tea is not very particular in general, as long as from direct sunlight and rain, environmental sanitation, ventilation, no other miscellaneous taste and odor.
But too humid environment can lead to rapid changes of tea, but this change is often “moldy” so can not drink tea.
too dry environment will help to slow the aging of tea, so there must be some moisture. I have a method: to store tea placed beside a small cup of water, so that the air humidity increases slightly.
Today I drank the 2010 Chen Sheng Yi Hao from Teaurchin. A good tea friend gave me a sample of this delicious tea. This was perhaps the sweetest sheng puerh I have ever drank. I did something I rarely do and drank it totally without sugar. I couldn’t find any unpleasant flavors in this tea. It had what I would call a potent qi. It had quite an effect on me although it did not make me tea drunk. This tea is good.
1990’s Hong Kong Style Storage Raw Puer by White 2 Tea
Aged sheng appears to be growing on me! That or I’m starting to find styles I actually enjoy.
I stole this sample from Marzipan when I went to her house a few weeks back… Ok I didn’t steal it, she was very generous and willing to split some of her White2Tea samples with me!
Still having trouble describing aged flavors. This one is sweeter and “cleaner” tasting than some of the others I’ve had. I guess some aged sheng tastes like raw, green lumber to me and this woody taste is more of a ripe, almost fruity wood with a more complex taste. Like the difference between the smell of a cheap piece of plywood and a fancy piece of apple or cherry wood maybe? I’m getting a little abstract here, sorry!
Drank 1998 CNNP 7542 Qingbing Liming from white2tea. I’ve has two samples of this now. It is sold by the gram and I think worth a try only because it is a bit of history, when CNNP made better tea than today. Spicy notes on the first few cups, pretty aged out, really nowhere to go with this aging-wise. I’m lucky to have got so many good aged teas lately, makes the cold winter more bearable for sure!
I’m starting the morning with the same tea I started yesterday morning with a 2003 Changtai Memorial sheng puerh. This tea has so much to give I could probably start tomorrow morning with it too! It’s got a real nice mellow vibe.
2005 Xiaguan Ripe Tuo from Yunnan Sourcing (.us). It’s a very nice aged shu, of the dry powdery variety, only really works when gongfu’d and using a ton of leaves though, otherwise it’s just weak and thin. I didn’t like this at first as I normally prefer strong sweet shus but after figuring out how it likes to be brewed it’s really growing on me, good price too (this is the $7.50 plain tuos, not the pricier french box ones).
Enjoying Mandala’s Special Dark today. I don’t drink the ripe pu’erh teas enough but this is a good one.
Love this one. I drink it nearly every day with breakfast. Sometimes alone, but most often it’s blended with a black tea, a la MzPriss. I hope Mandala never runs out, though I realize that’s unlikely. :)
Me too!!! I drink this pretty much every day. Whatever else I have in the morning I almost always have a cup of Dark Beauty. A big cup. It makes me happy.
It was MzPriss’ idea to blend the Special Dark with Mandala’s Black Beauty. She calls it Dark Beauty and it’s awesome. I started blending the Special Dark with WP’s Golden Orchid, which I cleverly call Dark Orchid. lol
Today I drank the 2013 Mengku Wild Arbor King and in abundance. Today was my day for the aging experiment. Three identical bings were stored under different conditions, one in the pumidor wrapped in plastic, one in the pumidor loose, and one outside the pumidor, stored in a cardboard box inside a paper bag with an unsealed plastic bag over it. I drank all three, side by side in gaiwans with 5.2g tea leaf and 4 oz water at 200 degrees. These teas are for now going under the names A, B, and C. I put these teas through eight steeps, giving each tea identical times. I felt that there was a clear winner, but I won’t mention it until MrMopar and Boychic give there opinions. They drank the three identical teas too. Now I just have to wait for the other participants to chime in before I reveal which tea known to everyone but me as A, B,, and C, is which. As to the tea itself, it was a tasty tea with a mixture of notes, a good but not spectacular tea. There were three participants in this experiment, me, Mr Mopar, and BoychiK. No one else actually participated during the testing.
There are results but I won’t spill the beans. A definite difference between the three.
This sounds fun! I made something similar a while ago, one exposed and one in a cardboard box for a bit over a year. Due to DC weather cardboard box was the clear winner.
This is an awesome experiment (have I ever mentioned that little terri loves experiments of all kinds?). Anyway, I’m very excited to read the results! I’d love to see more of this kind of thing here :)
Ok. A was stored and the pumidor and wrapped in plastic, B was stored loose in the pumidor, and C was dry stored in a cardboard box. There were three participants in this, me, Mr Mopar and Boychic. All of us picked B as the smoothest although I personally thought that A had the most flavor. A was definitely the most aged in the appearance of the cake, it was noticeably darker in color.
Did A have any plastic taste to it? Did C taste like cardboard? What are the settings to your pumidor?
B had orangish tint from the very beginning. It was smoother, more aged flavor. C was the weakest in color and almost tasteless. I ran the test in all identical glass gongfu pots. Cups were identical as well.
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I haven’t noticed any plastic or cardboard flavor.
I thought C was the smoothest! Lol. B had a sharper flavor to me and seemed a bit more bitter.
The pumidor is holding at about 67% humidity and temperature is the ambient temperature around my kitchen, probably about 70 degrees most days.
I took many pics of the thing.
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My page is private because of rude people on the internet, if you request to follow me I will approve it and you can view the links.
this just really makes me want to have a proper place in the house where i can set something up to store my teas…build a pumidor..something. I know they’re suffering :(
Storage has been a concern for me too now that I have a few cakes and I know my place is way too dry. I don’t want to buy a pumidor, but reading the results of those tests makes it more urgent that I do something soon.
Mandala Wild Monk 2012 sheng, sample from the lovely Ubacat! So yum, very tea, delicious.
Today I pulled out a sheng I quite enjoy but apparently have never written a tea note. 2005 Jinuo Shan You Le "Red Sun Drum”
This is not terribly complex but it is very easy to drink. Rather powerful, smooth, fruity (peach and pineapple) with a moderate sweetness. Beautiful whole leaves with very few bits and pieces mixed in. Fairly light colored tea liquor which is very clean. No smoky or fermentation undertones in the taste or smell. The aroma is sweet and a bit like a field in spring. Aftertaste is long and very warm, with just a hint of astringency. Quiet, calming qi. Decent number of resteeps – I’ve done six so far. All in all, a solid sheng with decent age and IMHO worth owning. I picked this up at Yunnan Sourcing a few months ago but it is now out of stock. However, I have seen a few JinuoShan cakes at Cha Wang Shop but not this particular year.
A chinese song of drinking tea.
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