In my first couple years of drinking pu’erh I sampled heavily. Many vendors and many different teas. While I originally did not go into it with a goal of trying specifically young pu’erh, this ended up making a pretty strong majority of pu’erh that I sampled. This is due to a few factors. One is that there’s a predictable vendor drop with the harvest, sometime in late Spring/early summer or in mid-Autumn. This generates demand and buzz amongst the tea community. The second is that young pu’erh makes up the vast majority of raw pu’erh being sold to the west. If you put together a list of the five most popular western pu’erh-centric vendors and listed all of the teas they’ve released in the past year and randomly picked 10, you’d likely end up with ~8 or so being young pu’erh. You actually need to be pretty intentional about not picking young pu’erh if you want to try a different category of raw pu’erh..
(more…)Category: Raw Pu’erh
-
2009 Yongde Daxueshan Raw Pu’erh & Storage Progress Report [Inbetweenisode 217]
This episode I drink a tea I originally featured about 5 years ago on the show, the 2009 Yongde Daxueshan. Now that tea is 11 years old and it is an interesting revisit to test both the tea and my storage.
Rating: 6.5
2020 Progress Report: https://teadb.org/2020-tea-progress-report/
Original Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwrAhUfg4gk&feature=emb_title
-
Storage is Wicked. Long & Short Feedback Loops. Innovation in Pu’erh Storage
David Epstein’s book Range makes the case for generalization in a world that has become increasingly specialized. One of the ways the book categorizes areas of interest are as wicked and kind environments. Kind environments are where information and feedback is very available, patterns repeat, and situations are more constrained. Examples of mostly kind learning environments are golf or classical music. Wicked environments are inherently trickier, noisier and typically involve situations where not all information is available. Conditions are dynamic and involve other people and judgement where feedback is not automatic. And when feedback is given it may be partial or inaccurate.
(more…) -
2019 Tea-Encounter Bangdong Raw Pu’erh [Episode 354]
This episode, we drink a fresh, sweet, robust raw pu’erh from Tea-Encounter. The tea is from the Bangdong area within Lincang.
-
2020 Tea Progress Report
I’ve stored tea for around six years now in Seattle and while I’ve fussed a bit over a few small things, the methodology has been overall consistent. The pu’erh has been stored in an enclosed container with Boveda packs to ramp up the humidity to around 65RH. Airflow is low. Most people would call this a pumidor. Every year I look at my spreadsheet and decide on pulling a few teas to retry.
(more…) -
2017 W2T Happy Anniversary Baby Raw Pu’erh [Episode 352]
This episode Denny and I drink a W2T production from 3 years ago. The tea is rumored to be an Yiwu and is decently punchy but with a good aftertaste and overall structure. Sent in by Atlas. Thank you!
https://white2tea.com/ -
Five Things I Like & Dislike 12. Measuring Pu’erh Conditions, Steaming Iron Cakes, Anonymous Vendors
Five More Things I like & Dislike.
Measuring Pu’erh Conditions (Relative Humidity Generated)
One smart thing that I believe Marco was the first to do was measure the condition/relative humidity generated by cakes (see conditioning experiment). This isn’t difficult and only requires storing the tea for a few days with a mylar and hygrometer. It’s a useful way to think about short-term storage and the condition a cake may be currently at.
(more…) -
Marco Hotbox Experiment (Bosch) Comparison
The most interesting storage experiment in the west is a heated cooler filled with mylar bags of pu’erh in Toronto. This is of course Marco’s hotbox experiment where cakes are conditioned to generate 63-69RH and then stored at fixed temperatures. I was lucky enough to get two five gram samples of tea from Marco that were stored in the box for two years. One was stored at both 23C (~73-74F) and the other at 32C (~89-90F) sent by Marco.
(more…) -
2019 Tea Encounter Baiyingshan Raw Pu’erh [Episode 349]
This episode, Denny and I drink an aromatic approachable young sheng from Tea Encounter. This is part of Tea Encounter’s inaugural set of productions. Congrats to Tiago!
-
2019 Tea & TeaDB Reflections
2019 may be one of the more boring years from TeaDB to write about. I drank tea, bought a little, Denny and I continued our episode per week pace, and I wrote a bit. My habits are more settled, a steady trend at this point. I know what I like and tend to follow predictable patterns.
(more…)