TeaGull Send Message

Funny how my palate has grown since I’ve started tasting tea. What to me at the time was enjoyable, now seems denuded, poorly processed, and rough. Today, this tea really lacks sweetness for me, instead having a strong, dry earthen grip on the tongue. The pine smoke is there and strong, dominating the entirety of the flavor profile. A large mix of brown leaves yields a hollower, darker tea.

Well, this certainly is not as terrible as I thought it was when I first had it. In fact, this is a perfectly fine, if plain and simple, Menghai production. It’s got some nice fruit and straw tones to it, but it’s missing the sweetness, texture, and depth I want from good sheng. The qi is light and fleeting. With such tight compression and fine chop, it takes a more delicate hand to not produce a tough, bitter brew. Longer steeps up front to get the compression loose, and then shorter steeps to keep it clean. Has a minty finish and reasonable balance, but comes across dry to me. Menghai sure can create consistent teas, with an even leaf blend, and a need for age.

Tea: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_skua/5614491828/
Leaves: http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_skua/5613911591/

This tea is described as being composed of “first flush” material and it shows, as the leaves are covered in fuzzy white down. This youth shows in the flavor as a nutty, dry greenness. Brewing calibration yielded longer steeps early and a gentler touch through the middle to produce good balance. Notable aroma and flavors included that tomato-like orchid fragrance a la ’09 Yunnan Sourcing Wu Liang and a gentle warm honey, almond, cream mix. Less simple than the others, and durable, but again, lacking a striking character that seals the deal.

Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=424

Today, I’m finding a better mint quality, nicer clarity, and enjoyable bitterness coming out of this Mu Ye Chun 002 with longer initial steeps.

While the 001 was crisp, light, and tippy, the 002 is minty, rich, and more durable. I find it more to my liking. The session today was improved by brewing more to my palate, yielding a slightly stronger brew that showed off this tea’s savory fresh green vegetable character. Some of the season’s first Asparagus was around, either in the tea or planted by my anticipating mind. This tea also has a much more satisfying energy to it, with a really heavy, calming buzz, that feels like the hands of a masseuse on my forehead – peaceful and relaxing.

Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=416

Honestly, I am not sure if I have ever had a puerh that has claimed to be mostly tippy material, as this does. I am sure, however, that it has an impact on flavor and texture. Yesterday, this tea was plain, simple, a bit shallow, but solid and reasonable. Today, it comes across as slippery, mineral heavy, and metallic. It carries a green tea-like dryness and brightness to it, lacking thick, syrupy stickiness.

Aroma and flavor are middling, green, and lightly floral. The finish has poor grip. Unexciting would be one way to frame this tea. Another might be to say that it would be a good intro puerh for Chinese green tea devotees. I think I’m more of a big leaf man, myself. Regardless, I am excited to compare it to the Mu Ye Chun 002, which supposedly has a larger leaf composition. I’ll visit it later this week, coming to the tea table for two sessions, on two different days, with two different natures.

Here, I find a tea unlike much of the smaller producer tea I have been drinking of late. As evidenced by the photo of steeped leaves above, there is variability in production that leaves this tea a little simple. I appreciate its firm bitter grip, it’s opening sweetness, and pungent sun-dried character. However, I find it too heavy on the stemmy greenness familiar to plantation tea, oligosaccharides, and distant oxidized black or white tea notes. There is certainly not much wrong with this tea, I am just searching for a beckoning depth, and it’s not there.

Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=408

Finally finishing off my precious last bits of this sample. I liked this cake, and it’s still available on Yunnan Sourcing, but it has recently exceeded my price point.

I like this tea for it’s straw and mushroom, it’s balance of sweet and bitter, and both it’s challenge and easy of brewing. It’s one of those teas that can be seen very differently, dependent entirely on the lens you’re viewing it through on a particular day.

Under the cold, wet early clouds and rain of this March morning, it has those pungent grassy and umami flavors, all wrapped up with tongue-coating texture. I will miss this one.

Hacking away at the last dusty core bits of this sample, I’m expecting something different than all of the large leaf, boutique cakes I’ve been drinking lately. Sure, I’ve had this tea before and found it good, but what does factory tea from LBZ taste like?

With a little more murkiness in the soup, I’m reminded that small bits give a terser bitterness and more of that straw-like mushroom quality. It’s good, juicy and chewy. While it lacks the delicate high florals of larger-leafed tea, the sweetness and bitterness are fuller. It’s different than what I’ve been enjoying, and I appreciate that.

While the ’97 Menghai 8582 was heavy on the flavors imposed by the place of storage to the point that I felt they departed from the realm of natural tea flavors, this tea really holds onto the essence of earth and decay. With more natural humus-like, decaying leaf matter and old pine needle flavors, I found this more attuned to my palate. The nuanced and gentle mushroom, moss, and tree bark characters of young sheng puerh have aged gracefully and have descended the flavor profile of this tea from the tree tops into the sub-leaf-litter level, highlighting the natural warm embrace of a forest floor. Some of the basement notes are there in the form of talc, medicine, and ointment, but they’re not overbearing to the point of disgust.

What I struggled with in this tea, in the first three or four steeps, was its texture. Leaving me with a sensation that greasy, damp lotion had been smeared across my tongue, I found the palate initially murky, slightly sour, and hard to get past. I did not drink much of the first three steeps. Fortunately, this clamminess departed and revealed a thick, sweetness that made it intensely pleasurable to drink from the fifth steep on.

If this tea is supposedly somewhere been wet and dry storage, than I guess I’m more of a dry storage fan. This flavor profile was much more to my liking, and I’ve learned that the first few steeps of a tea such as this are not as meaningful as the middle steeps. This was a bit of lore I found early on in my readings on puerh and something that I did not experience with young sheng puerh, but is something that makes sense in light of an aged tea such as this.

Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=392

To me, the flavors depart from the realm of agriculture and nature. The flavors no longer taste like tea to me, they taste like the basement in which the tea was stored. Full of talc, basement, salt peter, attic, wet cardboard, old paper, medicine, and grandmothers, I feel as though these flavors lead me on one of my father’s genealogy expeditions or a trip into an historic copper mine shaft than through a sub-tropical forest or a farm of any kind. I do appreciate the woody, ginseng-like herbal qualities, but always end up vacillating between an appreciation of those flavors and a distaste for the damp, musty ones heralding a basement storage. I think I was a little too far gone to really focus on the flavors when I had the 1985 Menghai 8582 with Tim at The Mandarin’s Tea Room, but have a pouch of 1980s Menghai 79092 Loose Ripe which perplexes me in the same way for its super-heavy talc, grandmother, medicine and basement flavors.

Everyone has their own palate, suited to certain flavors and textures. Obviously, with aged sheng puerh being very popular, there are quite a few people for whom the flavor profile of this type of stored tea matches their palate. However, I think I am more attracted to the young, fresh, and fruit-like earth tones of teas such as young sheng puerh, certain oolongs, whites and dark green japanese teas. All that said, I’m still excited to try the other two examples in this tasting to see what variations in storage condition can elicit from the tea.

Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=387