Tasty Penny: ’07 Hideout Puerh Cake
The ’07 Hideout Puerh Cake is a tasty penny. It has a serious minerality that boldly takes the next step to metallic. We’ve all tasted the metallic puerhs before. They’re mostly unpleasant and a mark of youth or poor quality. Rare is the instance where metallic puerh is noteworthy, but Hideout such a treasure.
Cashed.
The Hideout is one of three LME productions that I have for that year. They do a good job of crafting distinctive puerh productions, with an underlying Zen quality that could mark the house style. The cakes from this year universally are tightly pressed, which necessitates much longer brewing times than usual lest one confuse bland for Zen.
Camphor, bright camphor, is the puerh tea prize. The Hideout has a bright camphor note that sits atop serious root beer and slight dried chrysanthemum taste. There’s some bitterness in there too. Flower taste is more pronounced in their Spring offering and camphor root beer theme reaches a higher expression in Imperial Roots, which is just a year younger but stored here in LA since summer of ’16.
Let’s go back to the penny. Here we want to visit the subject of puerh broth colour. By all accounts most puerh cakes won’t express this level of copper being only 13 yrs old in Kunming conditions. This is particularly the case given such tight compression. Perhaps many are just at the cusp. Tight compression, dictating longer infusion times, means in the case of Hideout that until the liquor is the colour of a new penny it hasn’t been soak sufficiently. The tea will taste thin and cheap.
I cannot say that LME productions excel at thickness. They’re not given to particularly sexy wrappers either; but their craftsmanship and material quality is generally better than Kunming TF. The puerh cakes are sweeter with more interesting layers. KMTF is Zen like water; LME’s Zen isn’t water. It hews the jagged edges into a Zen garden that you might begin to conceive of crafting for yourself.
Even though the taste is dynamic and shows considerable transformation potential, I do not sense that amidst the changing attributes that qi will be among them. It’s a great drinker now and will continue expressing itself in a camphory, moon pie, vanilla fashion. I expect the camphor to progress to a devilishly high pitch.
