Aged puerh has let me down in the past by being overly wet stored, i.e. being incredibly musty and moldy tasting many many infusions into the session, almost so much that it is unpalatable. Most of these being aged puerh offerings I got in my early years of drinking Aged Puerh, where I thought mold and must were the key points of aged puerh. I have since moved on to a bit of a middle ground, where I look for more than a damp musty basement.
It has been said and while I do not proclaim to be any puerh or puerh storage expert, but the aged puerh Hou De usually offers is usually on the drier side in terms of storage. So keeping that in mind for my personal tastes I should look for closer to 20 years or older, rather than 10 years or so. But what I had today begs the question, could puerh go into dormant times, even beyond the 7-10 year old mark, or perhaps is due to the dryer storage could this one still be in a "sick" period. The reason I brought this up is I drank a sample I bought many months ago from a 1998 Sheng cake supposedly fashioned after 8582 (one of my favorite recipes) and I found it incredibly flat after the first few infusions. It did not have the staying power puerh is known for, and while the taste has definitely matured, it seemed so incredibly tame for its age compared to young items, and lacking complexity that it should have acquired through age.
Now I do not know who to blame for that, and while I thought I might have gone slightly light on the leaf the wet leaf basically filled the entire gaiwan which is what I usually aim for with my aged puerh. This though might explain why on a gram by gram base this puerh came with double the number of grams compared to similarly priced offerings form other years.
4 comments:
When you say "fallacy" do you mean the idea that all aged pus are good?
I'm guessing this tea is just inferior in some ways -- perhaps starting with the raw materials.
Marshal,
I guess two fallacies, that aged puerh is always outstanding, and that age puerh can always give many many good infusions (this one I hardly got more than 5 that were anything special).
I feel this might be a good thing for people to realize, that just because puerh is being sold and it is "old" does not mean it is really anything special.
I probably know less about Pu-erh than you do, but my experience has been that you cannot generalize about the quality of Pu-erh, even if you know the particular batch. Unless you aged it yourself, you don't know how it was aged.
But even if you do, and even if you're a Pu-erh expert, you can't know all the individual batches, and even if you tend to like a particular recipe, it might just not be the way you expect one year.
When I read the journals of really die-hard Pu-erh enthusiasts, like Jason of bearsblog, it really reinforces this perspective.
Perhaps this is why people get so into Pu-erh...it's a bit unpredictable, which makes it more interesting.
We must be on a similar schedule I drank the last little chunk of that sample last Saturday. I didn't have enough for my pot, so I added in some loose 80s tea. Blended, the tea was quite nice, better than I remember it being the first time around.
I remember the first time I had it--by itself, unblended--I thought it was pretty uninteresting and as you describe: flat after about five infusions. It's clearly aged, but dull.
Blending it on Saturday made it become a part of something more interesting, making me realize the wisdom of the HK tea and dim sum houses that MarshalN has described as blending aged pu'er.
I have only tried a few such blends from two tea shops in HK and one here, and they were blended traditionally stored loose leaf and probably mostly border tea. These blends are decent, even slightly better than the much more expensive 1998 cake on its own, and certainly a better value.
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