Puerh Junky Visits Yiwu Gratitude

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Yang-chu

20 May

Puerh Junky Visits Yiwu Gratitude should be a a tidy communique about just how tasty this offering is. It is very, very good. It tastes very, very good. The storage on it is spectacular, really the epitome of ideal storage. It comes from a preferred vendor, whence many of the offerings constituting the Puerh Royals sampler hail, who has a keen sense for storage.

Storage of this sort might be characterized as juicy. There’s plenty of humidity and heat but neither excessive, so the underlying character of the puerh is in no way tainted. It only brings out the best that each production has to offer. Storage of this type would understandably be classified as dry because dry storage has no humid notes. However, the range of dry storage is wide. Besides variations in humidity there are variations in temperature. Cool and dry storage obviously transforms quite slowly. Dry and hot storage transforms quickly but at the expense of aroma. Hot and dry storage also accentuates a perfumy-dryer-sheet-type expression that would otherwise transform into wicked camphor explosiveness.

Different cakes under the same conditions may also transform quite differently depending on product compression. There’s also air flow. Juicy storage checks all the boxes in terms of having everything necessary to be perfect. The second even a hint of humidity is detected, it’s no longer juicy but humid, no matter how light that humidity might be. Humidity is clearly a matter of preference with similar gradations. The point here is to just distinguish juicy from humid.

Yiwu Gratitude has juicy storage. It allows for maximum appreciation of what Gratitude TF is throwing down, and what they’re throwing down is every bit as good as the cake looks.

The Yiwu Gratitude Factory opened their doors in 2004. They primarily craft raw cakes from wild material, using traditional of sun drying and stone pressing procedures. The Puerh Junky’s Yiwu Gratitude features a wrapper that’s a cross between two productions listed in the 2007 Pu-erh Yearbook.

This is the exact same production being offered from the following year. Instead of the title including qiaomu as with the PJ offering, it’s included in the the green strip to the right. The block lettering at the bottom is identical to the YWG. The flanking blocks, the right stating raw puerh and the left ten great tea mountains are identical with both cakes.

This ’07 Banwei includes mingqian springtips in green lettering to the far right, whereas this data is included in the green strip with the PJ listing. The Banwei and the YWG have the same neifei, whereas the Yiwu from ’07 is more generic.

Here’s the PJ’s Yiwu Gratitude for comparison’s sake.

The use of traditional to describe their way of doing things, goes beyond just the pressing. They wrap their tong traditionally as well.

The super traditional tong are branded with the name at the top. They don’t go that far, as you can see:

At the bottom of this sticker, the phrase mingqian springtips is included. As mentioned in the original listing, wispy Yiwu effect notwithstanding this is legitimately “springy.” It’s one of the most floral Yiwu productions I’ve tasted. There’s more “spring” to it than the Dragon, which is comparable in terms of the type of floral expression. It could be described as having an apricot cum grapefruit nature. It isn’t lilac, honeysuckle, jasmine or any of those other really loud perfumy florals, which at fifteen years of age aren’t that bad anyway.

But wait! There’s more. That more is the hallowed root beer, which to be honest is much more cream soda here, as there’s no spice to emerge just yet. This type of offering usually doesn’t go the spice route. That’s fine. The creaminess and richness is good enough.

Yiwu Gratitude is sweet and durable. All of the attributes that are evident from the outset last throughout the life of the tea session. That includes the sweetness.

Puerh Junky’s Lincang Lament

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Yang-chu

26 Feb

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.

Big Leaf Sancha Puerh

Posted on February 11, 2021February 11, 2021 by Yang-chu

A few years back I picked up some big leaf sancha advertised as wet stored. Sancha is also maocha, i.e., loose leaf. Although there was some wet-stored quality to it, the overriding sense was that it was too vegetal and just not very tasty. Sunday 7 Feb 2021, I thought I would give it a try. What a difference.

This ripe sancha is no longer vegetal. Sancha (散茶）shouldn’t be confused with the Japanese sencha (煎茶）; the former references how the production looks at market, whereas the former references a processing method particular to green tea.

This particular Wild Big Leaf sancha purported to be from ’03. Maybe. Items of this sort, however hard to find, I can’t imagine being the ages they purport. It’s often hard to tell given storage conditions but even so, I’d say that many are as off as many as seven years but usually 3-5. This “offness” in years makes it difficult to determine how good the production actually is either at the time of tasting or in the future.

The blackness of the leaves here are indicative of a shou. The taste and colour are more deceptive. Furthermore, there is zero humidity or old taste, a la newspaper, to tip the hand one way or another. This is a faint cinnamon, however, suggesting aged raw and a superior ripe accomplishment.

The overriding expression of berry, reminiscent of some raw and ripe productions in the ’99 to ’07 range is exhilarating. At the same time, the light cinnamon note makes it extraordinary.

It brews crystal clear. There is nothing murky or dank or “ripe” about it. This is mandarin ripe, not a coffee substitute. It doesn’t angle toward coffee but toward old raws, the way real ripes should.