Bing Dao Breeze: The Puerh Junky Muses Over the 210 Bing Dao by Yapu Ancient Arbor Co

Bing Dao Breeze: The Puerh Junky Muses Over the 210 Bing Dao by Yapu Ancient Arbor Co

Gotta say, this is a perfectly production, epitomizing, I believe, the Bing Dao terrior.  Fruity aroma… but I’m getting ahead of myself.  A pleasure it is to break into a cake with such fantabulous pressing, neither too tight nor too loose, just enough to allow for transformation to transpire as it should.  Whole leaves containing a smattering of stem.  Decidedly dry-stored.

Telemetry?  Tea chemistry.  Sounds good.  Eight grams in the 150ml porcelain gaiwan.  “Sugarcane, makes me feel fine, quaffing down the Bing Dao ain’t a criiiime.”  Third time tasting.  Developing nicely.  The hot summer and humidity has helped it along.  Green bean action in the huigan suffused with a predominating high-note camphor.  There’s that breeze, you were expecting.

Not even a hint of astringency in the progressively floral nectar, but it comes on in the throat cutting phlegm.  It occurs to me that it has that Neil Young virtue, burning out fast, yet ever the while so gentle, needing just the right measure of tepidity to be thick and sweet, a gentility that the mandarin lass (read: the wife) never fails to swoon over.  My, my.

Third time’s a charm.  Takes some navigating around the isles of Ho and Hum.  It’s called “delicate.”  Experience under the ole belt, I take to tweaking infusion times upwards after every two rounds.  Familiarity breeds contempt and this icy bard is getting cheekier by the cup.  That’s my mastoids drooling after round nine.  It’s been three hours and I’m hungry.  This zephyr should be able to carry me onto one of the 14 Banna villages by noon.  Besides, the waters round Bing Dao have been duly charted.