Two Puerh Flavor Giants
For the past three days, I’ve been imbibing of two puerh flavor giants imminently appropriate for the winter season:
- ’11 Bamboo 100g, 9 Dragon Mt
- ’07 Mincemeat 357g cake, Fuhai
The Bamboo puerh possesses a highly distinctive taste: dry-roasted rice or barley and strawberry, evocative of Franken Berry or some other fake strawberry-flavoured breakfast cereal.
Most puerhs aren’t very roasty. Usually, there are variants of smoke and ash. Here, the roast is like genmaicha. Strawberry is also a rare encounter. On every tasting of this production, I’ve had since ’13, the strawberry just shine through. The two tastes meld together nicely, with a fait bit of flowers on the top, finished with a great deal of astringency. It’s a bit of a gut buster, at least on this third day. Over all, an infusion or two is more than sufficient, as it is filling and easily spills over into the “just too much” terrain.
The ’07 Mincemeat is a puerh that I’ve been waiting for till this time of year. It still strikes meas being very mincemeaty. Perahps, it’s not as warm and spicy as previously noted, but there’s still a dash of clove in there. Now, there seems to be a very noticeable taste of fresh bay laurel, if not bay laurel then distinctly evocative of a Christmas aerosol my mom had back in the day. It has some resonance with one of my favs, the ’07 Wuliang Rhyme, a now long gone production. The leaf material of the Mincemeat is of decent quality, and it’s a reasonably famous production that stands to age well.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the bamboo on hand and it isn’t available anymore. The Mincemeat is a recurring formulation, coming out maybe every other year. Productions older than ’07 start to get up there in price, and I surmise that in a year or two the same will apply for the ’07. I still have a few on hand.
