I thought I’d written a note about this but it appears I haven’t.
Before my hiatus, I had gotten up the courage to try cold brewing a pu-erh and I picked this one because I had metric ton of it compared to what I have of other pu-erhs.
I recently repeated that experiment and it was pretty interesting. I was worried that this one in particular might be a bad candidate for cold brewing because in the tin it has that rather fishy smell that some shus can have. But it actually worked out nicely as a cold brew. There’s a bit of saltiness, a leathery note, and some earthiness to the taste, but underneath that there’s a sort of thick black tea iced tea taste. It was surprisingly thirst quenching when I came in from running the other day.
Today I decided to try some in my little yixing that had sat neglected for so long after seasoning. The first infusion had the salty/leathery note I remembered from the cold version and was a sort of light mahogany in color. The second infusion was much darker, a sort of dark chocolate. At first I thought it had less flavor than the first infusion because the salt/leather was pretty much gone and the flavor was mellow and round. But mellow and round what, exactly, I’m not sure. Because there wasn’t a heck of a lot of flavor there. The third and fourth infusions went lighter again, back to the mahogany color, and back to a lesser version of the salt/leather with some round nothing thrown in.
It wasn’t unpleasant, it just wasn’t very interesting. I am thinking that my yixing, which has not been fully broken in, sucked whatever flavor out that might have substituted for the salt/leather. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a difference when I try it in the gaiwan.
