Puerh Eternal: Green Mark
Puerh Eternal: Green Mark– The Quest Continues
This week had the Puerh Junky embarking on a recovery mission. If you haven’t been brought up to speed about Puerh Storage Horrors, you need to. One of the cakes that I’m endeavoring to revive is an ’02 Green Mark (A), GPE. It was one of the most expensive and deadly productions that I’d ever had when first sampled in April of 2020. By August of the same year it had tamed considerably, but I hadn’t put two-and-two together to identify the cardboard box as the culprit for than a less favourable turn.
This February 2021 marks the one-year mark of having that cake. Since it was so damn expensive, I put it in cardboard thinking that I was giving it the best of love, only to be slowly suffocating it. What a contrast to ze Marquis du Green Mark, whom I stuffed in the Zhongcha box where he has not missed a beat.
Since the ’02 Green Mark (A), GPE had only been stored for a year in the box, it was not as drained of blood as some of the other top-shelf victims. The others, even after day two of drinking, were quite boring and it may be the case that it’ll take a full year for them to revive, for my poor ’03 7542, DQZ even longer. On the other hand, the GPE may only need only as few as three months.
I couldn’t bring myself to throw out this tea. I gave it several long infusions the next day and then let it soak overnight, a doing that has prompted this post. Tremendous. A sweetness, depth, and incense that does not remotely disappoint.
One of the most confusing aspects of puerh is how one production or recipe can have so many different makers and how the same maker can go through so many different versions of presenting the same production. In the case of GPE the answer in part has to do with the era in which it emerged. This was the decade of transition, basically ’97-’06. Factories would generally follow the prevailing marketing trend and often paid some type of fee to use the Zhongcha label. Sometimes there were outright collaborations. It’s hard to say, but the neifei gives NO indication that it is a GPE production. This is where you just have to defer to the vendor, who’s not steered me wrong yet.
