Category Archives: The Junky’s Log

Full Frontal Floral Puerh

Posted on by Yang-chu
30 May

Full Frontal Floral Puerh references the Lunar Series of our puerh cakes offered by the Six Famous Mountains Tea Factory (6FTM).  Here, we are visiting the ’09 Ox.  This raw puerh’s storage differs from all the other productions in the series.  Let’s start with the storage then.

Slow Elusion First Infusion

All of the 6FTM lunar series productions until acquisition have been Kunming stored.  Additionally, up until 2009, cakes were pressed tightly.  The Ox then marks a change in terms of compression density and processing.  I’ve tried the Ox from two different vendors four years apart but the storage was identical, suggesting inputs by the factory and not just storage conditions alone.  This input involves heat and humidity.

These stressed conditions give the impression of Guandong storage.  Its tonality is lower than the Rat or the Pig, one and two years older respectively.  The warmer storage mutes some of the aggressiveness while still full frontal floral.

Just yesterday I sat with six grams in my designated floral production pot, 150ml.  The experience was surprisingly thin.  Today, I added .5g and the experience was considerably richer and fuller.  After the fourth infusion the roundness thins out and a mineral taste vies for attention with the flowers.  There is a measure of bitterness throughout and considerable astringency.

The aftertaste in the Ox is sweet and floral in the initial infusions but quickly fades compared to productions from other years.  Consistent with all from this series, the qi is formidable.   You can feel this in the stomach, chest, and eyes.

The 6FTM floral does not seem to develop into root beer.  In this regard it is similar to YPH productions.  However, whereas the lunar series possesses an aggressive nature possibly approaching Zen, the YPH trademark is universally Zen at every stage.  By contrast, the Tiger MK is macho floral and root beer, but is not part of a bona fide series as with 6FTM.

Awkward Teenage Puerh

Posted on by Yang-chu
30 May

Awkward Teenage Puerh dampens any puerh tea session.  This morning such was my misfortune with the ’08 Dali Tuo, XG.  On a high note, at room temperature this production tastes perfectly pleasant, spicy sweet.  On a low note, at warmer temperatures it struck me as being thin.

I used close to a nine gram chunk for my eggplant pot, 150ml.  I gave the first two infusions generous amounts of time and the richness of colour had me expecting an experience with a much fuller mouthfeel.  Having this tuo on the heels of the ’06 Peacock Brick earlier in the week brings the contrast in mouthfeel between the two into sharp relief.

First Infusion

Interestingly, my experience drinking the Dali Tuo was like none I can recall having with puerh.  The colour, taste, and texture reminded me of the sugary peppermint tea that N. Africans favour.  Often, that will get spiked with Gun Powder tea.

Then comes this sourness that reminds me of an earlier stage with the Tippy Tuo.  In the case of Tippy Tuo, the sourness was even stronger but a couple years thereafter it blossomed into something remarkable.  My experience with Xiaguan’s transformation under LA conditions has been positive.  The ’10 Nanzhao tuo was positively wretched before maturing into an intensely camphorous, dark, and sweet medicine. That tuo never exhibited any sourness, rather there was an awful dank-like taste that I’ve detected among many Xiaguan offerings.  This points to fermentation and additional processing methods at the factory and not storage through its numerous vendors.

First Infusion II

This recent turn with the Dali Tuo comes just on the heels of better than two years tracking a vendor this March 2020.  The first purchase was made better than four years ago after running into this article.

As I mentioned, I used close to a nine gram chunk.  After about the third pot I started getting that existential anoui from drinking on an empty stomach.  Higher leafage raises gut-busting potential considerably most puerhs.  This is definitely the case with the Dali Tuo.

Heavy Handed On Cherry Blossom

Posted on by Yang-chu
30 May

Heavy Handed on Cherry Blossom is all on account of my sister, who likes her raw puerh with a kick.  I added an extra gram to my normal six for my trusty eggplant pot, 150ml.  The tea crumbles from the cake indecorously but gives off tremendously inviting aroma even dry.

The first and second infusions are the best, the most intensely spicy and numbing.  The aftertaste is sugary cinnamon like Red Hots, also big qi.  But that all wears off by the 4th infusion into a fairly tame experience.

The intensity of the first few infusions is frankly nothing short of spectacular.  It reminded me of a recent acquisition that I found to be among Tulin’s best of what is already very good.

250g Tulin Raw

As the cake continues to develop, Cherry Blossom should likely provide longer interesting sessions.  The raw material from Wuliang Mt seems on part with the Tippy and noticeably better than the AMT or the 07 Tippy, a name I need to desperately change.

Cherry Blossom raw puerh cake is dreadfully tasty on a consistent basis.  The taste pops whether subjected to a light or heavy hand.

Ripe Puerh Double Take

Posted on by Yang-chu
28 May

I’m indulging you in a Ripe Puerh Double Take.  These are the notes I wrote today for the Sweet Silt Puerh Brick.  I though it wasn’t listed.  It’s spooky how similar these notes resemble the initial listing.

Sweet Silt Puerh Brick is a 2015 commission by the Macau brand I follow for ripes.  This 250g brick is absent any wet-pile taste or aroma.  A ineffable sweetness is the overriding theme: perhaps dry sweet hay with the slightest dash of alphalpha.  Whereas some light fermentation styles come with a measure of tannins, Sweet Silt is round Zen without the hint of tannins.  No black tea cross over here.

In fact, Sweet Silt has no woodiness, no camphor, no thickness, no fruit, no forest, no earthiness, no humidity, just a hint of vanilla.  It yields few infusions with longer than normal infusion times.

May 2020

Silt refers to the mouthfeel and the baby powder essence characterizing this ripe puerh experience.  This effect is most evident in the aftertaste.  The brew’s nature resembles hojicha, with less roast, but with a sweet stem quality and no fermentation notes.

Sweet Silt can be brewed to oblivion and it maintains its crystal clarity.

Tasty Penny: ’07 Hideout Puerh Cake

Posted on by Yang-chu
27 May

The ’07 Hideout Puerh Cake is a tasty penny.  It has a serious minerality that boldly takes the next step to metallic.  We’ve all tasted the metallic puerhs before.  They’re mostly unpleasant and a mark of youth or poor quality.  Rare is the instance where metallic puerh is noteworthy, but Hideout such a treasure.

Cashed.

The Hideout is one of three LME productions that I have for that year.  They do a good job of crafting distinctive puerh productions, with an underlying Zen quality that could mark the house style.  The cakes from this year universally are tightly pressed, which necessitates much longer brewing times than usual lest one confuse bland for Zen.

Camphor, bright camphor, is the puerh tea prize.  The Hideout has a bright camphor note that sits atop serious root beer and slight dried chrysanthemum taste.  There’s some bitterness in there too.  Flower taste is more pronounced in their Spring offering and camphor root beer theme reaches a higher expression in Imperial Roots, which is just a year younger but stored here in LA since summer of ’16.

Let’s go back to the penny.  Here we want to visit the subject of puerh broth colour.  By all accounts most puerh cakes won’t express this level of copper being only 13 yrs old in Kunming conditions.  This is particularly the case given such tight compression.   Perhaps many are just at the cusp.  Tight compression, dictating longer infusion times, means in the case of Hideout that until the liquor is the colour of a new penny it hasn’t been soak sufficiently.  The tea will taste thin and cheap.

I cannot say that LME productions excel at thickness.  They’re not given to particularly sexy wrappers either; but their craftsmanship and material quality is generally better than Kunming TF.  The puerh cakes are sweeter with more interesting layers.  KMTF is Zen like water; LME’s Zen isn’t water.  It hews the jagged edges into a Zen garden that you might begin to conceive of crafting for yourself.

Even though the taste is dynamic and shows considerable transformation potential, I do not sense that amidst the changing attributes that qi will be among them.  It’s a great drinker now and will continue expressing itself in a camphory, moon pie, vanilla fashion.  I expect the camphor to progress to a devilishly high pitch.

 

Peacock Puerh Brick Tasting

Posted on by Yang-chu
26 May

In my previous missive reference was made to the Liming TF, which prompted my tasting of their ’06 Peacock Puerh Brick.  It has a classic lemon, smoke, and petrol aroma. . . not necessarily in that order.  Whereas many tuo and brick require bionic strength to extract the right amount, the Peacock Brick is pressed in a manner that would please even Goldilocks.

What I had mentioned was that Liming bricks contrast greatly from the general personae of their cakes.  The latter is aggressively floral, and even as they age the flowers still punch you in the face.  The bricks, on the other hand, possess a deep tonality that is of a wider in range: vanilla, citrus, petrol, tobacco.

The Peacock Puerh Brick is a tobacco class production, I suppose, but compares more favourably to dark spirits like spiced rum or brandy.  It’s too sweet for whiskey but has that smoky quality.  The petrol taste here is more interesting than in other puerhs I’ve tasted, in part due to the sweetness of the material.  Also, the absence of any bitterness with an assuring measure of astringency makes for a rounded drinking experience.

Infusion Three 20s

The quality of Liming puerh material tends to be very good and this brick is no exception.  This is evident in the richness of taste, without any jaggedness that requires future storage.  At the same time, as it stores its shining attributes continue to develop.  One of these is its qi.

The qi of the Peacock comes on in the mouth with smooth roundness before a rush enters the chest.  Then an overall calming extends from the chest out to the limbs.  Without the ensuing calming, this production would be too abrasive, not in terms of taste, which is perfect, but in terms of excessive excitement of the nervous system.  Still, I wouldn’t have this after 3 pm.

Just a final comment about bricks. . . They’re kinda neglected.  Recent trend has been to produce smaller cakes than to offer bricks.  Maybe this is aesthetics.  The smaller-sided productions naturally age at a faster rate than larger cakes– all things being equal.  A 250g brick from ’07 for example, is older than a 357g cake from ’05– all things being equal.  This often means that bricks offer a unique aged-puerh experience without much of the fanfare directed to cakes.  The Peacock presents well beyond a standard usually confined to bricks.

House Mark Puerhs

Posted on by Yang-chu
21 May

Today I drank the ’07 HK Returns 100g tuo and got to thinking about House Mark Puerhs.  It’s a hard thing to get one’s finger on it, but it exists, so why don’t I explain through the HK tuo.

The year 2007 marked the production of many Zhongcha series.  I just recently learned the English is simply “China Tea,” as so clearly present on many wrappers, I suppose.  I’ve not noticed to be honest, though maybe so on products from the past year or two.

Many of the ’07s I’ve tasted are offered.  I continue to gather them.  Some of them are exceptional, but over all what stands out is the consistency from one production to the next.  The HK Returns tuo embodies the Zhong Cha raw taste, which surprisingly enough is soft and fuzzy.  Presumably that taste is the presence of Lincang material.

This taste can range from pencil shavings and wax to peach fuzz.  It is not harsh or abrasive.  There’s fruitiness.  They can be drunk young but by all accounts even at 13 years, most of them still strike me as being quite young.  I’ve personally been storing this tuo since ’16 and were it served to me blind I’d guess this production in the ’12-14 range.

2018 Shot

7th Infusion May 2020

I felt by the seventh infusion that the production was starting to bottom out, flatness astringency.  The two prior were sweet and playful, more so than is typical of the Kunming Tea Factory (aka KMTF, zhongcha).  At the same time there is some citrus reminiscent of the ’14 Jade Mark.  There’s no tobacco, fire, roast, smoke, leather, chicken as with Xiaguan.

Overall, the Zhongcha profile is quite Zen, raw or ripe.  There’s wood vanilla Zen, wax Zen, playful Zen, like the HK Returns tuo, or the why-the-fk-you-serve-me-water Zen.  There’s an ’07 HK Returns iron cake that is bursting with the taste and aroma of black grapes, very much an outlier even within a series comprised of a tuo, 100g square, 250g brick, a raw and ripe 357g cake.  I’ve sampled a few and it’s hard to believe that each shape consists of the same material and the factory and those who know aren’t saying or don’t think it bears mentioning.

It makes sense that some houses would vary style based on production shape.  I’ve seen this to be a clearer objective with Liming than any other factory.

06 Tippy Tuo Puerh II

Posted on by Yang-chu
17 May

Exactly one year ago I received the 06 Tippy Tuo Puerh II.  Part two because it is the second order since April of ’15.  I presently have three storage variations of this production: 1) the original, 2) TTII, and 3) Bangkok stored 33 mth original.  I thought I’d introduce TTII by contrasting it with the original.

The Original can be reviewed here.  It’s important to note that this is a dynamic puerh.  It has gone through several phases, some of which were not so pleasant.  In particular, the early years in my possession sometimes produced sessions of considerable orange juice aftertaste.  Presumably, the TTI has already gone through this stage.  It has overall been dryer stored than the Original.  The original has been subjected to fairly high fluctuations in temperature and relatively high humidity since ’15.  One of the reasons was to cook that orange juice taste out.

Simultaneously, the Original expressed camphor menthol dank forest attributes and a punishing qi.  By contrast, TTI has no detectable camphor, not the minty kind anyway.  It is much softer with vanilla and baby power notes, thick perfumy , none of the aggression generally associated with it.  It has a personality generally expected from tippy material without any of the edges.

4th Infusion

The color of the liquor suggests a considerably younger production year than ’06.  The variability imparted by storage conditions essentially makes for an entirely different production.  Here is a considerably drier-stored phenomenon that may have played a role in the absence of sour and preservation of perfume.

The Original has entered a root beer phase.  Whether the TTII enters a root beer phase remains to be seen.  The Original always possessed a measure of astringency that gave it a real macho presence, while the TTII has a noticeably thick and round mouthfeel with an essence considerably more feminine.

 

Puerh Battle: Auspicious Dragon vs Fruit Monster

Posted on by Yang-chu
16 May

In this Tobacco Puerh Side-by-Side we’ll be comparing the ’11 Fruit Monster with ’07 Auspicious Dragon, WD.  The two fell into the tobacco class of puerh tastes and were similarly associated in terms of one another.  Hear they are:

’07 Auspicious Dragon

11 Fruit Monster, GPE

Both item have a tobacco nature that could easily be associated with Xiaguan.  The Fruit Monster comes from the Simao region.  The Auspicious Dragon hails from Jinggu, a region more renowned for its black and white teas.

Both items have been stored better than two years here in Los Angles.  I brewed the Auspicious Dragon in my workhorse clay pot and the Fruit Monster in porcelain, adjusting for the age difference.  The mouthfeel of the Fruit Monster was considerably thicker.  I think some of that thickness must be attributed to brewing in porcelain.  When pushed, it bottoms out into unpleasant bitterness and astringency that scorches the tongue.  Otherwise, its a wholly pleasant fruit and spice type that is far less smoky as when first acquired.

Auspicious Dragon Front Fruit Monster Back, different infusions.

Auspicious Dragon is getting fruitier than when first arriving.  The petrol and tobacco and starting to fade into allspice, black pepper and slightly petrol soaked jackfruit with a citron overtones.  Despite being four years older than the Monster, it’s still sharp in some places.  Both are moderately dry stored.

The Auspicious Dragon seems to be in it for the long haul as far as storage goes.  The Fruit Monster is in for considerably easier drinking with nice vanilla notes for enjoying now.

 

 

Smoke, Sugar, and Stone: Puerh Vessels Cont.

Posted on by Yang-chu
07 Apr

Smoke, sugar, and stone, that’s the tastes I pick up drinking Cherry Blossom from my cracked-ice celedon cup.  The yellow clay cup gives a considerably rounder effect.  Welcome to puerh vessel comparison continued.  In this foray, we’re taking a closer look at ’12 Cherry Blossom puerh cake with the following cast of characters:

My new clay pot 150cc– the fanciest of my acquisitions so far.  I’m calling it UFO.

Next is this cup, probably my fav, in a shot taken barely over a year ago.


Finally there’s a yellow clay cup, for which I have neither picture nor recollection of how it entered my possession.

The religious reader of these most-episodic posts may be scratching his head, as only in my very last post I had established that productions younger than 10 years old are best in a gaiwan.  I’ve had Cherry Blossom in both even quite recently.  It is a unique raw that I can imagine enjoying any which way.

The UFO pot has a fast pour rate.  This is ideal for taking advantage of the clay chemistry while preventing over brewing.   In the initial infusions, the glazed cup imparts a bit more ashy bite at the end.  By the fifth infusion, the tea must soak for at least 10s and the difference between the two becomes less discernible.  It seems that the celedon cup begins to be just as round but with greater evidence of tobacco and smoke, though I could be making that up.  What I don’t feel I’m making us is how thicker and rounder the experience is with the clay cup.  At a lower temp, vanilla notes are more apparent from it.

From the seventh infusion, brewing time needed to be increased to about 30 s.  At this stage of its development, the Cherry Blossom name seems wholly fitting, as the cherry notes really gain steam especially in the aftertaste.  With longer brewing times at cool temps, some bitterness comes through but not bottoming out bitterness.

Somehow, I feel that the experience with the glazed cup is better because the notes come through purer than with clay.  The tea itself is impressive on many levels from  complexity of taste to durability to its salivation production.

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