Update II: 07 Peacock Puerh Cake
Alas, it seems only a month ago I reviewed the ’07 Peacock, ZC. I wanted to see how it was doing after the span of the the summer. You can gander the review here. The root beer notes that I mentioned have intensified. This taste isn’t for the initial infusions anymore either. Root beer has permeated the taste.
Zen Puerhs
The ’07 Peacock puerh used to be a Zen production. The taste used to be gentle, soft, and evocative of misty clouds with a bit of Wheaties. It is hard to conceive of how such a taste can transform into what it is now. There isn’t much astringency. Even beyond the root beer tastes of roots and vanilla is some bitterness. There are are even pronounced floral notes which could easily be mistaken for being in the original profile– which couldn’t be further from the truth. The zing of “puerions” on the tongue indicates top quality material.
Such night-and-day transformation of the raw material usually points to productions hailing from the Yiwu region. That would be my best guess for the Peacock. Yiwu puerhs are known to get better with age, a truism that I took to be more folklore than fact. It is still quite difficult to get my head around how something ever so subtle in taste could change so remarkably only through aging.
Not all Zen puerhs, it should be noted, make this type of transformation. Not all Yiwu offerings will transform into a zingy, rooty, vanilla melange of sweet with a splash of bitter nectar. Some rather old YPH productions, for example, only begin to taste old or clean-old. They never exhibit that particular zing. One exception is the Glee. I do not know if this is attributable to processing or terroir. Others that do not transform is due to less than ideal quality. This points to both soil quality and tree age. Older trees have a more extensive root system drawing more minerals from the soil.
Peacock Puerh Photos
Autumn ’19 Infusion 6 and 7
Different Angle of Peacock Puerh
A couple times people have asked a question that suggests that they believe that “Peacock” is a particular puerh type. It isn’t. Peacocks are just an icon popular among the puerh producing tribes of Yunnan.
