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2009 Hailanghao Laoman’e Wild Arbor

I have a large stash of 2009 puer to review, having stocked up heavily on the vintage to lay down and enjoy over the next few decades. Today I’ll start with one of the more serious teas: the 2009 Hailanghao Laoman’e Wild Arbor green puer. Sourced from Yunnan Sourcing, it is still available at $48 per cake; see product page for info on this (it is actually 2008 tea that was pressed and released in 2009).

Hailanghao is enjoying a fine reputation for their recent releases, especially their more ageworthy teas from selected villages. This is one of them. As aficionados will know Laoman’e is a village in the Bulang district that produces very structured and austere tea similar in style to the Laobanzhang, and increasingly being proposed as a model of the long-term puer genre when Laobanzhang is falling victim to the puer hype and mindlessly downgrades its own production (see interesting article about this here).

This 2009 HLH release is precisely that. It is an extremely powerful tea. And a very good one at that. The leaves are finely processed, very loosely pressed (separating a sample is done within seconds with no damage whatsoever), and – important for long-term ageing – very well dried too. The smokey, meaty, almost gamey aroma is a good indication of what is to come.

In short, this tea is overpoweringly bitter and structured, no matter how brief you keep the infusions. In my case, with a standard dosage of 5g / 120ml, even 10 seconds for the first and 7 seconds subsequently resulted in a nearly undrinkable brew.

The colour is darker than expected, peachy, almost beige, far from a young-tea yellow, which together with the meaty aroma suggests a bit of slow oxidation to the base tea (no doubt a result of one year of ageing before pressing). The lid and tea aroma is subdued, a little generic, faintly sweet. While chunky and powerful, the first infusion is actually only mildly bitter, leathery and woody in taste, with very impressive intensity and persistence. Surely there is little ‘fruit’ and the whole is austere but the balance is there. Subsequent brews are increasingly challenging as the bitter decomposed wood dryness dominates the aftertaste. Leather and meat too, and there’s a mildly disturbing mushroomey note developing, robbing the tea of some cleanliness. As the tea cools down there is a pleasant sweetish yun sensation adding to the strong bitterness.

This Laoman’e is true to its reputation, and is one for the hardcore puer fanatic. I can’t see this tea appealing to a novice: the strong bitterness and idiosyncratic profile would surely turn most people off. I feel more respectful and admirative about it than sensually attracted, but there’s no question it’s a balanced tea that has all the necessary elements to age tremendously well even over 15 or 20 years. I just feel a little stupid drinking it today. Like a strong red wine from, say, Madiran or Montefalco, it just needs considerable time to settle. (At least 6–7 years would be my guess here).

Whether it’s worth the asking price of $48 depends on your bias towards single-cru tea: you can have four cakes of the Menghai #7542 for the money but they won’t be so distinctive. I’m glad to have both.

Source of tea: free sample thrown in by Yunnan Sourcing to my order.

2006 12 Gents Dabaihao

Time for more puer today. Here’s the 2006 Dabaihao cake from the 12 Gentlemen company, available through NadaCha for £28 / cake.

I reviewed four teas from 12 Gents back in March 2009 (see links below and archive link on the left). I have a weakness for their productions: they process some impressive leaves and have a very elegant, subdued, sweet style I enjoy very much. That being said, these are pricey teas, and brewing this sample from Nada made me realise they more often than not lack a bit of expression and oomph.

The dry leaves look very similar to the 2006 12 Gents Yiwu, and quite different from the 2007 Yiwu and Menghai: while the latter have small leaves and tight compression, both 2006 cakes are loosely pressed and consist of impressively intact, large, healthy leaves that have a glorious sweet tobacco & vanilla smell. Contact with the uninfused sample couldn’t really be better.

I’ve had several sessions with tea, both in porcelain gaiwan and in yixing clay pot (the latter surely more successful, with more body and juiciness). No matter how high you dose (I’ve reached 7g / 140ml which is about as much as I can put into my pot without squeezing the leaves) this tea is fairly unintense and light-bodied. The initial infusions are particularly puzzling, very simple, light-coloured, low on fruit, dominated by a beany profile, with a smokey hint on the finish the only real point of interest. Yet there is also notable patience in the xiangbei [aroma cup] which is one of the lovelier I’ve encountered of late, starting with sweet tobacco and evolving lengthily into caramel and candies; it’s really a very ‘long’ smell.

You have to push this tea quite a bit, with a high dosage and brewing times as long as 1 minute by infusion #4 to coax any intensity and character from it. A bone-dry tea, broad-shouldered, architectural, mineral, smokey, never too bitter though with more than a hint of dryness at end (emphasised not the lack of much flavour at mid-palate); notes of mushrooms, a bit of wood, white beans throughout the sessions, a mere hint of smoke.

I really wanted to like this tea in order to keep my positive feelings about the 12 Gents production. But in all honesty, as much as I was looking throughout the session for the tea to finally reach a satisfying extraction, it never happened. It just lacks content; it’s thin and vague. On the positive side it’s clean and noble in aroma, and both the dry and infused leaves are a joy to look at. But it’s just not enough to justify a £28 cake.

Source of tea: own purchase.

1990 Menghai #9062 Brick

Overbuying tea is commonest of vices. Tea is cheap (mostly), vendors carry a large range of potentially interesting stuff, and then tea comes from far away where shipment often makes up a large portion of your payment (so it’s sensible to buy a bit more than you would from a shop next door).

I ordered a dozen samples of aged puer from Nadacha in the summer, hoping to go through them in a few weeks and perhaps make some buying decisions. But soon afterwards I had four orders of 2009 Darjeelings, then a large batch of Taiwanese teas from Teamasters, and now I’ve just bought two dozen 2009 puer cakes from Yunnan Sourcing. And so the time to taste through the Nadacha samples has been very little!

I must make it a commitment for 2010 to buy less tea and be more systematic in my tasting. I’m toasting to this ambitious undertaking with this 1990 Menghai #9062 Brick (see Nada’s product description). At £78 it’s a fairly inexpensive tea for its age and producer; this is because the brick itself is a mixture of sheng [‘green’ puer] and shu [‘ripe’, or artificially fermented, puer], lacking the dimension and complexity of a true sheng.

Let’s look at the leaves. They are fairly dark, with minor amount of white ‘frosting’ of age, and have a faint smell: cavernous shicang [‘wet storage’, fermentative aromas] and decomposed wood. The spent leaves are interesting to look at: you can clearly see the mixture of sheng (the larger, dark brown leaves that unfold completely) and shu (darker, almost black leaves that remain rolled). Both components look like a reasonably high grade, with large, good quality leaves of which many are still intact; the shu leaves are not the usual non-descript mulch. The mix is quite rustic, however, including a generous helping of twigs and stems.

I’ve brewed this tea several times with different techniques, and can say it’s quite unsatisfactory with long steepings. Anything beyond 30 seconds for your first brewing will result in a very wet storage-dominated profile with a vegetal decomposed-wood bitterness on end I’ve found unpleasant.

The best approach to this tea is a classic gongfu series of short brewings in clay pot (I’ve dosed exactly 5.2g of leaf for 120ml of boiling water, rinsing once and brewing 15s, 15s, 25s, 30s, 30s, 40s, 3m). It’s hefty, powerful tea, delivering quite a bit of colour from the beginning, and a good intensity of wet storage-driven, stoney, mineral, woody taste. The first brewing also provided a nice warm mealy, fat textural touch, but afterwards the tea failed to deliver this promise and showed rather one-dimensional.

First infusion (15 seconds) in yixing teapot.

It is quite unaromatic, and even using an ‘aroma cup’ that usually helps to magnify the bouquet only resulted in an interesting first progression from shicang through toasted grain to caramelised sweetness; subsequent infusions were pale and uncomplex.

This tea is not very patient, as soon as the 7th infusion it’s become quite unintense and losing interest. Even though short steeps help control the vegetal bitterness on the finish, it’s still there in varying proportions, and is my greatest criticism about this tea. Although quite aged, it still has power left, and the sheng and shu elements are by now nicely fused, but there is no complexity or structure and essentially the tea has little to offer beyond its chunky shu-driven power.

It’s an interesting opportunity to taste a mature tea from a leading producer but I feel no need to go beyond my 15g sample.

Disclaimer
Source of tea: own purchase

Tasting tea blind

‘Blind’ tasting lies at the centre of wine assessment. Nowadays, whenever you taste a wine to give a judgment and profess about its merits (or lack thereof), you’re expected to do so ‘blind’ – meaning you don’t know what you are tasting. At least put a series of bottles into brown bags (in Poland, we use black socks), though real blind tasting should be ‘double-blind’: you’re not even supposed to have the vaguest clue about what wine types are possible. (This requires a full-time secretary with a wine degree to organise the tasting for you).

I dislike blind tasting. Profoundly so, in fact. Not only because on several occasions, I made a fool of myself by voting a Banfi Brunello as wine of the tasting (no joke). I dislike blind tasting because to an extent, all wine tasters make fool of themselves by accepting to reduce the wine to its ‘objective’ characteristics. Limpidity (who cares? But it’s a standard criterion on wine competitions), cleanliness of aromas, balance of tannins, ‘persistence’: as if, for example, the L’Inattendu white from Languedoc I blogged on recently could be fairly assessed through a set of technical parameters. I have experienced dozens of occasions where excellent bottles tasted bland and hollow when put in a series of twenty similar wines. Blind tasting is awfully reductive and its only theoretical advantage – that you assess a wine free of any bias – turns out to be an illusion: one bias (the label) is replaced by another (we are influences by elements we like, like a dark colour or a flowery bouquet).

In my book, the only real usefulness of blind tasting is to develop your own palate and tasting mind by making educated guesses. Tasting a single wine blind, you are forced to concentrate really hard on all its aspects: you have no reference points to assist you in your interpretation.

My palate for tea is that of a beginner, and I find blind tasting a truly useful exercise. It was an exciting perspective, therefore, to receive two unlabelled tea samples from fellow US tea drinker, Kimble22 (a.k.a. Shibumi – check out his blog here). I tasted them as analytically as possible (these were no pleasure sessions) and come up with approximate conclusions. Perhaps, looking at the photos and reading my descriptions, you’ll have better ideas: let me know as I’ll hold on posting the teas’ real identity (which I still don’t know) for a few more days.

Mystery sample ‘A’

It comes as a generous chunk of compressed tea: this is obviously sheng [‘raw’] puer. Leaf size is average, with a proportion of tips. Compression is medium. A good-looking sample, showing some age: there’s little green to the colour, and a minor amount of dusty frosting on the consistently brownish leaves. Aroma leaf is very subdued: dominated by soft wet wood, with a bit of tobacco. Tobacco notes are reinforced when leaves are put in warm cup, but it’s a very low-key aroma. The dry leaf hints at a tea anything between 5 and 15 years of age I guess.

Colour of 5-minute competition brewing.

I brewed this tea twice: the first time ‘competition style’ (2g of leaf for 100ml boiling water, single 5-minute steep), the second time in 120ml yixing clay teapot where I’ve used 8g of leaf. It’s my personal record of dosage for this teapot, and it was clearly a bit too much (leaves had no room to fully unfold). The former session brought a subdued, sweet-fruity, not very powerful puer. A darker colour than expected, light brown (not orange or amber). Aroma has a high-pitched woody richness with hints of dried fruits and tobacco, hinting at its moderate age. Tannic power is moderate, and this seems almost completely resolved and mature. I like the balance here, and it’s definitely dry-stored: there’s not the merest hint of fermentative shicang. A harmonious and qualitative tea, and look at the spent leaves on the photo below. Really good quality, little fragmentations, larges leaves with a consistent medium brown colour. The easiest thing to guess here is the age: I reckon this is 8–10 years old, making it a tea from 1999 through 2001. To guess the origin takes a more experienced palate than mine but there’s an elegance and spiciness that reminds me of the Yiwu mountain teas. This tea doesn’t look like a large factory production.

2 grams of leaf after 5 minutes of steeping.

The high-dosage yixing teapot session yielded no less than 15 satisfying infusions (25s, 10s, 7s, 10s, 30s, 50s, 1m, 2m30s and then at will). In summary, the tea showed a lot more power and reserve than suggested by the single long brewing. Through the initial brewings there’s a strong beany character dominating the profile, and a solid core of clean bitterness on end. Good length too, and the lack of fruit notes is interesting. Very good concentration (befits an 8g dosage), this is quite chewy. It is with brewings #4–5 that bone-dry beaniness is replaced with sweeter tobacco, and some sweet huigan making its appearance. Later brewings are consistently good, if perhaps never emotional. All in all this session shows a tea with a lot of stuffing (‘wild tree’? Perhaps) and still some way to go in terms of ageing. It might be younger than I initially thought: a 2001–2003?

Mystery sample ‘B’

Visually this is quite different from ‘A’. Small leaves, very tight compression; there’s a pattern on the surface of the sample like those that are pressed onto bricks, not cakes. A one-dimensional but very intense smokey aroma to the leaves.

As dark as this tea gets: colour after 5 minutes of infusion.

The ‘competition style’ brewing reveals a tea that’s obviously younger than ‘A’. Everything from the wet leaf (‘lid’) aroma through the colour of the brew down to the dryness of taste indicates a tea in that unsympathetic ‘middle age’: 3 to 7 years perhaps. Smoke, white beans, tannic grip, mint, strong young puer energy; this verges on an alkaliney, mildly animal aroma that for a lack of better descriptor, I call ‘sweaty’. It’s a tea with some power but really not very flattering at this stage.

Chopped leaves, smokey aroma: Xiaguan?

A session in yixing teapot (‘dahongpao’ clay) brings a consistent tea. It is very smokey throughout, and looking at the spent leaves, it reminds me obviously of the Xiaguan Tea Factory production: these leaves have gone through every possible torture and dismembration before being tightly pressed. Deep beige colours of mid-age, oily texture, a chewy mouthfeel and a kicking qi energy (courtesy of the high leaf fragmentation, too). This needs to age further to gain more complexity and anything like charm. A good tea. My educated guess: a Xiaguan brick (they’re more known for their tuocha but occasionally make some bricks too) from 2002–2006.

Read another interesting exercise in blind tasting on the Half-Dipper blog (this and following posts). Please do leave comments here on what you think the above-described teas are. I’ll reveal their identity in 3 days’ time.

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Update 6th October 2009:

Kimble22 / Shibumi has now kindly revealed the identity of the above teas.

Tea ‘A’ is the 2003 Jinzhu Mountain. I have little information about this alleged ‘wild tree’ tea other than it’s reviewed here.

Tea ‘B’ is the 1999 Xiaguan Traditional Characters. It’s with the vintage of this that I missed the mark by the widest margin. I can be justified by the fact that the rock-hard compression of this tea makes for a much slower ageing than a standard puer cake: 2–3 years by decade is often the perceptive gap between actual and apparent age.

1980s Loose Daye

Autumn is slowly arriving here to the Polish lowlands. We’re having a delightful Indian summer with afternoons in the mid-25Cs and no rain, a very positive weather for the Polish grape harvest. But the evenings are fairly chilly and mists are rising steadily at 8pm. It’s the sort of weather that makes my go down to the cellar for two things: sweet Tokaj wine and a bing of ageing puer tea.

Let’s start with the latter. After a summer busy with drinking Japanese green teas it’s a welcome change to move into the world of earthy, mushroomey, spicy puer. I have a number of samples to delve into this autumn and today, I went for the simplest of them all.

This 1980s Daye Loose-Leaf is from NadaCha, and costs the incredibly modic (in the context of its age) sum of £11 per 100g. Nada explains this is made of the largest tea leaves that in the production of ‘proper’ puer, are usually sorted out (though you can see more than a fair amount within the lower-end cake blends, in my experience). Due to their size and position lower down the tea branch they usually have less aroma and less than the young leaves and buds.

This tea is interesting in being so old: you don’t often see a daye [large-leaf] of this age. In its youth it’s a cheap and simple tea for quick consumption. Here we have a variation on the theme.

These leaves live up to their name: they are really large! The colour is a consistent dark brown (not black), with quite some evolution: some leaves are looking almost powdery. They are uniformly thin and look rather fragile. They have a low, subdued aroma with some nice walnutty notes; a moderately pungent shicang [wet-storage] character comes up when the leaves are warmed in the gaiwan.

Competition-style brewing: 2g of leaf / 100ml water / 5 minutes.

The colour of the brew is only a medium brown. This is a surprising tea, showing little wet storage and an interestingly fruity, approachable character. Attack shows that unmistakeable old puer umami fatness, followed by echoes of the nose notes: walnuts, dried fruits (dates perhaps) in a sweet context. Length or huigan are not special but this is a very moreish tea, unchallenging, comfortable, balanced and clean. A really good start to the new puer season! And at this price it’s really recommended.

These leaves are not worthy of very intricate brewing strategies. A couple of attempts in yixing pot brought little extra interest. Now I just put a small amount in a gaiwan and brew almost at will: 2, 5, 8 minutes depending on how many e-mails I’m reading through. There’s no bitterness and the wet storage notes are low so overbrewing is not a problem.

Tea and chocolate

An exercise matching tea and chocolate. Can this work at all? Isn’t chocolate too powerful to have with tea? I try some artisanal chocolate pralines with green, oolong, black and puer tea.

2008 Fengqing Fengshan Yihao

Cheap and cheerful

This plain-looking cake of green puer can be had from Yunnan Sourcing for the miserable sum of $9. I think it’s the equivalent of two filter coffees from Starbucks (in Poland, four). We’re not talking about a cup of tea but a 357g cake, which if you apply my liberal dosage, will suffice for 59 sessions of 8 cups each. So much for the puer ‘bubble’ which reputedly inflated tea prices beyond reason.

It might have done so for some upper-bracket brands but the large tea factory of Fengqing (a.k.a. Dianhong Group, hinting at their main activity as a black tea producer) has remained more than reasonable in its pricing. If you browse the internet for opinions about their puer teas, it’s usually dismissive: they’re cheap, basic and uninspiring. Perhaps I’ve been in a forgiving mood of late but I found this utterly satisfying for the price (and better than many $15–20 cakes). One thing it needs is a generous dosage. In fact my initial attempts at 2–3 grams or competition style produced an unaromatic, content-less and anonymous tea. Much better with double that amount of leaf.

Brewed in: dahongpao pot
Dosage: 6g / 130ml
Dry leaf: Compression is rather loose, and the leaves are very easily separated into a clean and intact collection. Reasonable leaf size, minor amount of tips – nothing special here but the quality is good. Wet leaf is quit thin and clearly plantation-grown but mostly wholish and intact, adding to the good overall impression.

Brewing #1 (30 seconds in clay pot)

Tasting notes:
20s: Fairly enjoyable: it is obviously a rather generic pu but at this dosage nicely intense, with medium pale (but not the palest yellow) colour and sweet tobacco dominating in the aroma cup.
30s: As tasty as brewing #1 but a bit less alive, slowly receding into a generic bean-like chewiness and sweetness. Quite some bitterness appearing, but it is of the clean, energetic, positive kind.
40s: More beany character but there are also hints of apricot and almost flowers replacing tobacco in the aroma cup. Some citrusy bitterness on end. Not massively structured but better than expected for the price. Dosage is the key to satisfaction here.
40s, 70s, 60s. Slowly becoming a little generic-candy but still satisfyingly intense. Brewings #5–6 still very good indeed: good huigan.
3m: Surely quite light in flavour but there is still enough bean, mushroom and sweet candy for interest. Long live high dosage. This delivers another half-dozen of gradually fading infusions (provided you keep the times short).

Overall this has all the characteristics of a basic but well-made sheng: tobacco, old wood, beans, some citrus, some invigorating bitterness, reasonable patience. It takes a lot of leaf in the pot to show content and texture, but at this price I don’t mind it at all. This tea will not sparkle a romance with puer if you’re still to be converted, but is really a smart choice if you need (who doesn’t?) an inexpensive tea for various mundane uses. I’m happy I bought it.

Two inexpensive 2008 cakes

Value for money

It’s funny how the so-called credit crunch can influence even such sophisticated areas of intellectual activity as your tea buying. Suddenly we forget about those hyped Xizhihao productions or low-volume antique offerings from www.suchandsuch.com and start packing as much tea into the $ as possible. Tea is reputed to be a very inexpensive luxury, and surely this is true when you are paying little more than $10 for 400 grams of compressed tea that will last you a good few years of brewing. Here I look at two such widely available, long-time favourites.

Menghai Tea Factory Peacock of Menghai 2008
Merchant: Yunnan Sourcing
Price: $14 / 357g cake
Brewed: competition style + subsidiary notes in dahongpao pot (5g / 120ml)
Leaf: A faint tobacco smell with some (artificial?) age. The leaf composition is not unimpressive: composed of mostly whole leaves, looking green, healthy and inviting. Very good consistent grade here.

Tasting notes:
Medium deep orange-peach colour. Aroma is simple but extremely typical: broad, chewy, tobaccoish, semi-aged; when brewed gongfu style, a white bean (almost flageolet) aroma dominates. Quite some bitterness to this, but not unintegrated (this is very controlled bitterness, nothing too wild at heart clearly). Sweetness is more hidden than often with Menghai productions. Good length, texture and flavour dominated by an alkaline, low-acid, bean-like flavour. Solid, clean and dependable if hardly a lot of personality here.

This tea is one of the main productions from one of the main tea factories, and has been widely discussed on the internet (see e.g. here). I would perhaps have liked more content and density but for what is essentially a village-level tea at an affordable price, this is really well-composed with some depth and some grip to this safe, commercial, unintense style.

Mengku Old Tree 2008
Merchant: Dragon Tea House
Price: $12 / 400g cake
Brewed: competition style + subsidiary notes in dahongpao pot (5g / 120ml)

Leaf: A good-looking cake (well, a bit dressed-up admittedly with some tips on the surface – see photo above) with medium loose compression. Leaves rather large, with what appears to be very little breakage. No aromatic surprises here, but quite some pleasantness: leafy tobacco, wet forest floor, some sweetness. Spent leaves are rather small but, for the most, intact (see photo below) and show various shades of green – including a very light one that could substantiate the ‘spring picking’ declaration.

Tasting notes:
Medium pale orange colour. A degree of agreeable sweetness and wet tobacco, no complexity (predictably for a 2008). Entry on palate is vigorous with some peppery energy, then come sweetness and vegetabley breadth (cauliflower coming to mind) but this is never bland. Finish is rather gently bitterish for a long competition brewing, with a metallic tinge, but followed by a positive huigan. Interesting how this would show equally tannic-bitter in both the 5-minute competition-style brewing and in a 40-second gongfu infusion. Pretty good tea: not masses of personality but a solid medium-bodied performance, and more than satisfying for the price. Its packs in a bit more punch than the Menghai Peacock (and is better value).

1989 Jiang Cheng Brick

Tea as memory

Amidst the merry celebrations of last Thursday, there was no way to forget the other June 4th. While Europe rejoiced in a regained freedom and prosperity for the following two decades, the people of China were negated political freedom, and the country continues to be ruled as a dictatorship.

Yesterday night, in memory of those who perished on the Square of Heavenly Peace two decades ago, I brewed a very special Chinese tea in a commemorative tea ceremony. A full-blown chaxi (tea setup), such as I never prepare. I slowly brought the best Polish mineral water to a boil in my earthenware kettle, put dry leaves of the 1989 Jiang Cheng Wild Tree Brick in my dahongpao yixing clay pot, and let it infuse slowly. The tea was brewed in silence and no tasting notes were taken.

This outstanding tea, produced a few weeks before the mournful event, is full of unabated elemental force and seemed a more than appropriate homage to the departed. What follows is an account of an earlier tasting session with photographs from today, as I finished off the leaves from yesterday’s session.

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Sourced from Tea Masters, this expensive (140€ at the time of purchase) yet special brick is comprehensively described on their website.

Brewed in: gaiwan and dahongpao clay pot (5g / 130ml)
Dry leaf: While Stéphane Erler on several occasions describes the compression as loose, I found it rather difficult to flake off leaves, and used a largish whole chunk of the tea brick instead. (Consequently, I made a quick rinse with boiling water – something I never do normally – before the first infusion to soften the leaves). It is a very dry brick with a lot of evolution to the dark brown, through-fermented leaves.

Infusions no. 1 (40 seconds), 4 (after a total of 3:30′)
and 7 (total 22 minutes – no mistake!).

Tasting notes:
40s: While the brewing time for this dosage is longish (I was deliberately seeking to extract a lot of power), I was surprised by the very deep brown-burgundy colour, especially given the initial rinse. There is instantly a blissful aromatic moment in the aroma cup, with a warm fleshy softness and sweetness; later notes are of old wood and earth. While this tea is obviously aged, little wet storage is evident. This is a far more concentrated and intense brewing than expected for a #1, although there is relatively little dryness. We are in for a treat.
25s: Still extremely dark. Quite a different balance now, less aromatic without the soft notes of the above, quite earthy and chewy, and on the palate this is dominated by a vegetal, almost tree bark-like bitterness and earthy tannic dryness. Lots of power in this tea! A challenging infusion, not so very much pleasant to drink. This looks like it could continue to age and improve for many years.
35s: More in the style of the first than second infusion. The aroma is sweetish, soft, if less fleshy, and taking on an almost wafery or baked-cakey sweetness. Flavour is still earthy, old-leafy, vegetal. A more balanced finish now, firm but with a bit of sweet huigan. A balanced qi, not very assertive, building up rather slowly.
Instead of continuing with short analytic infusions I let this loose, and brewed almost at will. For several more minutes this shows a very deep colour, but aroma and flavour are lighter (though not light). Still chewy-earthy on finish, but without the intensity and complexity on the palate of the former brews.

This is an extraordinary creature of a tea. Looking at the expired leaf (see photo above and below), there are still lots of intact whole leaves after 20 years! Really thick with very developed veins. This tea abounds in rough, elemental power, making it easy to believe the declared ‘wild tree’ provenance (how many modern puer can you say this about?). In purely drinking terms, it may lack the elegance (or ready-to-drinkness?) of the 1999 Menghai #7532 but shows an unadulterated old style of sheng puer when no concessions were made for the modern yuppie public and teas were made to last decades. I wouldn’t have liked to be near these leaves in 1989. A majestic tea of authority and austerity. And right for the occasion, I would say.

1970s Loose Pu

35 years on…

This is the second of four samples kindly sent by Tea Masters (see here for the first). As usually the Tea Masters website has a comprehensive review and background for this tea.

As the leaves were just enough for a single serving (2.8g) I decided against a competition-style single brewing and opted against for a full-length gongfu session in dahongpao clay pot. As the best Polish mineral water is slowly brought to a boil in my earthenware kettle, I sit down to this session with a sense of humility and alertness.

Early 1970s Loose Puer
Leaf: A relatively light to medium brown colour to these reasonably large leaves. Almost no aroma to the cool leaf (due to sample size?). When put in warmed pot, this smells very aged and earthy with a decomposed vegetal / forest floor character, however no shicang (wet storage) pungency.

Brewing no. 1 (15 seconds), 2 (20 seconds)
and 7 (11 minutes total).

Tasting notes:
15s: A medium brown colour no more. Aroma is very calm with distant echoes of generic aged ‘tea’ and no wet storage in sight (always a positive aspect for me, as I find shicang robs many teas of clarity and depth). Beany, boiled-vegetabley, earthy, perhaps woody. The tea enters the mouth with some peppery spice, and that earthy textural grain is present throughout. Not very high in flavour, made of one block; sedate, calm, aged. Rather clean, although due to that above-mentioned texture, it lacks the crystalline character of teas such as the 1984 shu coin from Tea Masters. This tea is in harmony with itself, more so than the analyst perhaps.
20s: Extraction is now boosted: a considerably darker brown colour (if without the pruney purple hues of some other aged puer). Similar register to the first brewing but more of everything. Earthy, mealy, cerealy, all fused into a single aromatic note. On the palate this now even shows a bit of tannic grip: it must have been a monster in its youth. (Many 2006 puers already have less bite than this at 35 years of age). By now this tea is fully active on the palate, making one salivate and feed on the dense mealy character.
20s: Very similar to brewing #2, with two changes: less mealiness and intensity, and the appearance of a firm, stoney (‘mineral’) character. For its age this is really impressive through its power and intensity. Showing why aged puer enjoys the status it does: no other tea can approach this dimension.
20s: Darker than expected. But with a less extracted flavour, the mineral-cellary notes are more subdued now (though not absent), and there is a bit of sweet-textured huigan for the first time. Very active, almost digestive qi.
5m: Pushing to see how much power can be extracted. Colour however stays a medium dark brown similar to brewing #2 perhaps. A masculine if rather simple aroma of earth and wood. Really similar to the previous brewing. Very good length, balance of sweet and earthy elements, still some power but clearly little more has been (can be?) extracted from these leaves. Though far from pale, of course.
90s: Colour and register are considerably paler with the flavour now simplified, but there is an attractive oiliness of texture at mid-palate.
3m: This is now really light in colour and I think going down. One aromatic note: recognisable, enjoyable, cellar floor-dirty agedness.

This is a special tea, and I surely have no competence to assess it fully. I obviously killed it with that overenthusiastic fifth brewing, and would probably have reached ten comfortable infusions with shorter steeping times (though I honestly expected more patience here). But there’s no denying its excellent vigour and cleanliness. It gives the impression of having the potential to improve further with age. Hats off to Stéphane for (literally) unearthing this brilliantly cellared tea.