Puerh Junky’s Lincang Lament
The Puerh Junky’s Lincang Lament may arouse giggles, perhaps even guffaws among readers. Don’t. No giggles or guffaws allowed. The Puerh Junky in me needs your commiseration. Regard (that’s French for “check it”)! The perils of hanky-panky processing have proliferated and no region is more guilty of such crimes than Lincang.
“Oh, you’re just a strung out Puerh Junky,” retorts the skeptic in you. Perhaps, but that has nill to do with hanky-panky processing (HPP). By this I mean the so-called “new processing.” This sleight-of-hand affords vendors and farmers to sell “gushu” to enthusiastic buyers many with no intention of storing long term. Still, some do think they can take their sugary prizes and store them for some later date.
What sugar cereal is this?
This won’t happen. They’re not “gushu.” They’re oolong processed. They’re that sugary breakfast cereal that you can eat a box of, only filling up on the milk. They are a scourge to the real puerh drinker. That’s right, I have drawn that line in the sand between the real and the faux puerh drinker, and more than a handful fall into the latter category.
But we’re talking about Lincang. . . There are two types of Lincang roughly speaking, western which is floral and eastern which is fruity. It’s the eastern, with names like Qianjiazhai, Bingdao, and Bangdong being some of the frequently listed offerings. Oh, let’s not forget Xigui!
Come to think of it, many Kunming TF’s productions are western Lincang blends. Thing is they can never be accused of HPP, certainly not before ’15, when I stopped buying them because their prices started exploding. I got burned once by a very high-end vendor in ’15, whom I surmise were themselves burned; they’ve never offered from that village since. Around the same time, I found another Lincang vendor that went belly up last in 2020, as far as I can tell. I’ll have to collaborate more closely with my buyer with this one if there’s any hope, as they have a Bingdao Huangpian that after two years settling is spot on.
However, there’s still one of their Dahuzhai available in the shop. I’ll admit I went through a stint of serious anxiety around that offering. Still another caused even greater angst and turmoil because it was from the same village that had burned el-fancy vendor. In this last week of Feb of 2021, your trusty Puerh Junky is happy to announce that although that little treasure did go through some adjustment period where it started to fall off, it has entered a phase where it is picking up. More importantly, it can be drunk through.
What is drinking through? It’s that your puerh never starts to taste of sencha after two or three infusions. Excessive sweetness with a back end of sencha is a dead giveaway that you’re drinking an HPP offering. A flat taste isn’t the clearest giveaway because that could just as easily be poor storage. I had started to suspect the worse, as this sparkling cake started to express some bitterness, not astringency but bitterness. The progression struck me as strange, but each offering has its own personality that’s going to evolve. Throughout its brief life, however, it has never EVER expressed sencha notes. Any of these sweet productions that leave that sencha impression (ahem), are gross offenders.
So, sometime before the cake of non-mention (because none are available anymore) took its turn, I picked up that vendor’s Xigui, a Lincang village that I’ve followed probably more than any other. That one was about twice the price of the other village. Well, it is Xigui. What could I expect?
What a dud it was. I started to reflect upon my furtive readings of discussion boards about so-and-so’s one or two year production being “so delicious”, utterly amazed by people’s ability to score such fantastic productions at such young ages. Had I been foundering in a puerh-addled Chinese factory hell? And what with all this talk about good for aging? I mean a puerh that doesn’t age isn’t a puerh, right? RIGHT?!! Where had I gone wrong? Whom should I blame: politicians? parenting? that English teacher in 10th-grade? Clearly, I was loosing my mooring, and there was only Lincang to blame.
Btw, you ever had a real Bingdao? But, I digress. I was talking about that dud of a Xigui, which has actually turned out to be fantastic. That vendor, which I suspect was a maker of sorts, is now defunct, as I said. I fear I won’t find another like it given the prevalence of HPP these days. Such are the travails of the Puerh Junky. I’m going to talk to my buyer, maybe he can help a Junky out.
