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| "Outlaw" Banzhangy-Yiwu-ey--I ain't what I claim to be tea. |
Hard
to believe this blog is now in a fifth year, though as I predicted at the very
beginning, health and medications take a toll on my tea drinking. Today I am
glad for the chugging years, all too often now puerh gets replaced by hongcha
in my daily cup, yet on the bright side I have some hongs that are worth
getting up for. Poor old Lu Yu, he knows that the greatest pleasure on earth is
tea drinking, he has no need of it now, but if he has any remaining
consciousness I am certain he misses it. Looking back on my older posts, I
decided to revisit one of the teas I wrote about very early on. Let’s see how
it is doing.
My
intention when buying this beeng on eBay was to try and find the worst possible
tea, to acquire a bad tea for my collection because everything else I own is so
good that surely I am missing out. I failed miserably on this attempt to buy a
bad beengcha, others have acquitted themselves admirably in the same task.
After my August 2014 blog post on this “Overlord Drunk” tea, I tossed this tea into crock
storage not long after spending some time in a pumidor I had then. The problem
with this tea is the double wrappers were made of rather inexpensive paper
which did not stay wrapped up, as rag paper will. Very quickly the wrappers got
messed and started shredding, and loose tea began to flake off the stone
pressed disk. On top of this, I noticed a somewhat smoky quality to the
processing and decided to try and work this out by breaking up the tea into a
crock. Thus, this tea made of probably autumn material from 2008-2011 or
thereabouts spent about 4 years in a Haeger stoneware “cookie jar.” I tried to
get some photos.
Somebody
did not want to move, and hard to blame him given the last few warm summer days
when I took these photos (mid-September).
Okay
one more for the too-cute factor.
Winston is my 2 ½ year old orphan kitten who
still wants me to hand feed him on occasion. Despite that, he is quite the
hunter with some astonishing kills on his CV. He doesn’t like petting beyond a
head scritch or two, so I think the very occasional hand feeding is his way of
getting some emotional interaction with me.
Here
is the original photo of the beeng hole side back from 2014.
Today,
the tea looks like this.
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| Broken up beeng from stoneware jar. |
The
first thing I notice is the oxidation or browning that has occurred during
crock storage, especially on the buds which were silvery white before. This is a stage that happens with any tea stored well. Basically the tea
begins to lose color just as fall leaves do, although this is not really
much “change,” the chlorophyll simply dies out. Fully oxidized tea is of
course hongcha. The cell walls of the tea are loosening up some on this Outlaw tea,
which admittedly did have some oxidized leaves on the edges of the beeng to
begin with. This explains somewhat the orange color the of the brew back in 2014, and
now.
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| A chunk from the pile, starting to turn brown. |
People
sometimes confuse oxidation with solid state fermentation, equating the two.
Oxidation is a stage that happens most visibly in the first few years in both
wet and dry storage. Oxidation is also a problem prior to retail if the tea sat too long before chaqing, or the chaqing was under done (and of course the tea will be sold anyway). But solid state fermentation of puerh tea takes two
decades, unless one wets down the tea and quick-ferments into shou. A year, or
even four years of storage, no matter how you store the tea is just an
oxidation phase, with the tea slowly loosening its walls. The actual
fermentation of yeasts and much later the conversion of juices from bitter to
sweet are very slow after that. The browning on my cake is really just the start of
fifteen more years to go.
Another
reason I chose to revisit this tea now is because the origins are similar, in
my mind, to the Dark Forest and Yiwu Spotlight which I reviewed in the previous
post. The flavor profile is virtually identical, and the color of the brew too.
But the eBay tea is much less powerful than the others, a weaker sibling. I
brewed this tea in Yixing to duplicate how I brewed it for the older post.
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| Second steeping, rather orange like the Yiwu-region teas from previous post. |
Far
from a “bad” tea, I notice how much more thick the brew is now, motor oil thick
with fuzzies in the strainer from the buds. The profile is a bit monotonous,
lightly bitter and the oiliness settles the bitterness firmly onto the tongue
which takes fifteen minutes to resolve into sweetness. Pleasant enough light
apricot yogurt. I have to push the tea from the start to get what I consider a
nice strong cup, at least 20-30 seconds. I went six steepings and you can see
from the leaves they are nowhere near unfurled yet.
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| Sixth steep, this tea has nice thickness, but not a whole lot else. |
Maybe I am unfair, but like
before this guy just doesn’t have what it takes to satisfy me. The tea is
basically an experiment and nothing I hope to turn into anything.
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| Steeped leaves in 2014. |
I cannot fail
to note that while the leaves may be less powerful than I would like, the leaf
quality is such that the tea would cost far more now. The tea is still
available in sample bags, the beengcha have sold out. Of course the price is
higher too, but not ridiculous.
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Steeped leaves from today, my sunny window
surely washes out the color a little. |
Perhaps I will check this one again someday. In the summer it gets the heat and humidity my three-season porch provides, and I remove the lid on hot days, and replace it for any cold or rainy weather. In winter, I wipe the inner lid with a damp paper towel to add a bit of moisture. In the past few years we have had hot, humid summers and humid autumn and spring too, so I have not added moisture quite as much. My teas are still holding quite a bit of moisture through the winter. Fingers crossed, as always.
