Tag Archives: lincang

Found: Tinned Pig

Posted on by Yang-chu
08 Sep

Found: Tinned Pig casts a glimmer of light upon the travails of the Puerh Junky, a foundering soul amidst a sea of puerh containers, wrappers, boxes, struts and frets.  As we zoom in, the camera has a retro filter.  We see the Puerh Junky in the cave on the Sunday before Labour Day 2022.  Hair amiss and sweat pouring from his brow and neck, he’s looking for his Gedeng dragon pearls.

Some moody Philip Glass music, monotonous and foreboding, sounds in the background.  A rudderless skiff at night fades in and out between shots of PJ searching.  A thought as to the whereabouts of the missing Pig pops to his mind.  The narrator vanishes and we see him in an interview with a reporter from the world-famous Puerh Storage News. . .

Piggy Went Home

I’m estimating that ’07 Pig sat in its secret location in the cave since May ’22, as that’s around the last time I appear to have last written about it.  At the time, I recall a measure of consternation because it was starting to taste metallic.  Immediately lay to rest the idea that the Puerh Junky listens to this type of music. (note: even in interviews he has this bad habit of referring to himself in third person)  It’s just a serendipitous funny occasioned by the word, and Mariano Rivera’s walk-up tune.  Fact is, I wouldn’t even it know the tune but for Rivera.

For four months it had sat cooking with the lid.  Immediately, I removed the lid and placed in the raw side of the fridge.  It sat there for two days and was sampled on the third.  The results?  Forget you Philip Glass!

Pig Unfocused

This is the sweetest and thickest the Pig has been, but what jumps out immediately is the pallor.  This is consistently the colour the brew throughout.  Where is the aged colour?  I mentioned something about this conundrum when looking at leaves.  May have even gone into the colour deception.

I’ve had the Pig since ’15.  In another post, I discussed the pleasing changes of the Zhongcha Pig, acquired around the same time.  Now, the 6FTM Pig cannot be said to not have transformed, because it has.  All of the edginess, the piercing attributes of a young tippy production have vanished.  There is notable drying astringency as well that takes hold for a spell before releasing the mouth watering.  The floral has transformed to fruity and it resides in the mouth for a pleasant duration.

’07 Pig, 6FTM Cashed

Everything about the taste matches its colour but the age.  I would easily guess that this is a puerh at least ten years younger, except that it doesn’t infuse to a layer where the sweetness dissipates.  I would also identify it as a Lincang, but from the Bingdao side not Fengqing.

Anyway, as far as the ongoing tinning experiment, it appears when the tin is outside the fridge that the lid does not affect the taste.  Inside the fridge, the tin starts to bleed into the taste.  Again, this goes back to the matter of air flow.  The Pig is now happily resting in the fridge without its lid.   Pig isn’t for sale, but a sample of the quite similar Fohai is avail in Sampler U, along with samples of the Lunar Ox and Monkey.

 

 

Puerh Junky Reform School

Posted on by Yang-chu
28 Apr

Puerh Junky Reform School is a post that is sure to leave many a puerh enthusiast crestfallen.  No. It’s not about reforming tattoo and piercing hipsters from the notion that that oolong-processed “gu-shu” from ’19 is puerh;  rather it’s about how the Puerh’s Junky continues to get schooled by some real late bloomers.  The reader is left crestfallen because his junkiness deigns to make out like his irascibility has been earned by developing a reservior of knowledge, while it becomes ever clearer that it is simply his posturing.

Those ’07s Turn 15

First of all we should start with those much disparaged Zhongcha ’07s, which turn 15 this year ’22.  Whereas treasures like the Thick Zen and Water Blue Mark blossomed two or three years ago, the same could not be said about the likes of the Pig, the Blue Mark Iron Cake, HK Returns Iron Cake, or Beijing Olympics.  Among these, certainly the the Pig continued to beg the question:  “Why or how could it be possible for the makers to produce such a crappy tea”?

Against my better judgement, I opened the Pig up a few weeks ago.  What a difference!  There’s no need to go into the gory details.  The takeaway is what’s important: that is many flat, boring, or crappy productions are simply not what you think they are and only time will reveal their secrets.  This boils down to processing, a subject that many including myself have discoursed upon a great deal.

’07 Pig, ZC

Whether the the old-school processing methods are better than the new-school ones is going to boil down to preference, intention. . . and disregard for the the time variable.  If one intends to store the newly processed ones, then it’s anyone’s guess what the results will be, compounded by the complexities of storage conditions.

Pig 2016

Pig 2022

I nearly destroyed my silver needle storing it among the raws, and similarly catastrophic results developed with a couple tasty Nahan, Lincang cakes.  It is clear that those puppies require a great deal more air than traditionally processed puerh.  Any fears that air will cause the treasure to lose its aromatic intensity and pizazz should be laid to rest.  The opposite is true.

’18 Nahan

Nahan 2018 Shot

The pinkishness to the hue of that pic is obvious.  Evidently, this is supposed to mean “glory.”  The material is no doubt good, but creatures of this sort are raised in the same pen as the Pig.

As market demand has driven demand for more puerh that can be drunk now increases, it appears that some of the newer methods have creeped into even how Zhongcha is making some of the older productions.  If the Lunar Series serves as any indication, we see that compression at the very least is one of the differences.  This in itself may be sufficient for allowing quicker transformation, but there’s more.

For example, there’s a huge difference in appearance between the of the ’07 Pig and the ’14 Horse.  Wholeness and choppness is going to impact the final result.  Ostensibly the Pig and Horse recipes are the same, comprised of primarily Lincang material with some Menghai thrown in.  However, the sweetness has already started to emerge with the Horse despite being seven years younger than the Pig.  They’ve both been stored here in Los Angeles for about the same amount of time.  It seems unlikely that this difference could be chalked up exclusively to compression, though it is imaginable that both required somewhere around the same amount of storage time under Los Angeles conditions to blossom, seven years.  Still, the Puerh Junky’s hunch is that there’s changes in processing that are driven by the market.

Pig w/ neifei and neipiao modesty

Horse brazenly immodest

The Lincang villages not including Mengku and Fengqing specialize in fruity expressions that are sweet very early.  This is due to processing.  However, old-school Zhongcha productions comprised of Lincang material are no more expressive at a young age than those from Yiwu.  The differences depend not in terroir but upon the ones processing the maocha, just how much they feel they can reasonably cook the tea without losing the intrinsic character.  Obviously, some have assumed a devil-may-care attitude knowing that the drinker hasn’t any inclination to store the production, so they cook the hell out of it. . . or is that into it?

Wrap-up

This confession has gone long enough.  I can think of at least three different productions that have been stored since before ’16 from the ’07ish time period that didn’t blossom till this year, all from different factories with varying measures of market cache.  Some of these productions are still not ready but do benefit from a good deal of cooking.  My experience with some of the Lincangs that have specialized in sweet processing longer than other regions is that they require different care from the old-school productions.  Even here, however, it seems that the craft tends toward more conservative processing the more special the production.  That is to say, real Xigui and Bingdao won’t get the fire of less recognized villages and even they will require some wait of a year or two.  That’s another reform school lesson for another time.  By the way, have you paid your tuition?

 

 

 

Puerh Junky’s Lincang Lament

Posted on 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.