Puerh Junky’s Glee
No, Puerh Junky’s Glee is not about schadenfreude nor is it about how well the Ox performed this morning. It’s about Yangpinhao’s 200g raw tuo entitled Glee. This offering was purchased in early ’16 or late ’15 back when I kept lousy records, records that I’ll have you know are probably just as lousy but which I’d like to think are far improved.
A perusal through the annals of the Puerh Junky’s Log will reveal a few meditations on this monstrosity. Yes. It’s become a monstrosity, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s first give a tale of the tape.
Glee is a tuo that came onto the market in ’15, when it was pressed from ’05 material. In contrast to the tuo that YPH released in ’05, Glee has visually always been much darker. It has also been much more Zen and astringent. As late as ’18, it was still powerfully Zen while at the same time powerfully astringent, wickedly so. None of the YPH offerings in the Puerh Junky’s stash or collection exhibited such overbearing and uncharacteristic astringency.
Glee‘s Zen was prototypically YPH but it didn’t seem to come with much else, till ’19 when incipient signs of root beer started to emerge. Glee seemed to be fronting as one of those luxury productions in name only, a challenger that you drink and just tell yourself, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
It’s not you; it’s me.
Fast forward to the present, mid-May 2021. The bad news is that Glee never turned into root beer. The good news is that the astringency has all but vanished. However, there’s even better news– it’s stfu noteworthy. Not in the least Zen anymore, it’s inconceivable how material that had very little pizazz could morph into such a complex and deeply petrolated creation.
The name Glee evokes a sense of playful and fruity puerh, a ha-ha school-kid charm, easily forgotten. That’s not where it is now by a long shot. There’s not an ounce of joy to it now. It’s a grizzled old mechanic with snaggled teeth in greasy gray overalls.
