Same Smelly Wet Pile, Different Year ( 2016 Treachery of Storytelling 2)

History repeats itself, and to find any progress I have to look darn close. I could subtitle the whole thing Mr. B, the Tree and oh yeah, the Tea. Storytelling is still Treacherous. I am completely re-experiencing a blog post from 2016, and not of my own free will.

To refresh the memory, Mr. B is a crazy friend of other crazy friends, and he's manic again. Oh yes, he's been in the blog before. He is again staying up at a rural car junkyard owned by David, car mechanic. Summer texts...

Then. (2016)

Me: "Have you talked to him, I am just trying to find out if his phone works!"

[Mr. B lost no fewer than 3 cell phones this summer.]

Ron: "B's called me at least 20 times in the last 24 hours! Just a bunch of crazy shit as usual! But no haven't talked to him! I really don't have anything to say at this point!"

---

Me: "Mr. B is doing ok, David checked on him. Lost his phone, I will try and go out Tuesday and maybe we can find it."

Greg: "Good 👍."

And,

Me: "Saw Mr. B. yesterday, jumped his battery, food/gas/beer. He tried to piss on my car. But he’s bathed, knows where phone is, motor home covered in porn so he seems fairly happy. Wants to come to Madison, I said you will visit “sometime soon.” Later in fall, eh? 😅🎄"

Greg: "🐸🦎🐰🦄🦙🐑🦊🧞‍♂️"

---

Me: "Hi, tell B. I dropped off his laundry, in white bucket, food in the bottom."

David: "He saw it, you can call him now we got him another phone. I forgot to give him your number. He was happy to see that and the food too."

Now. (2025)

Everyone is growing weary of his smelly, wet piles. Both Mr. B and my silver maple tree in the backyard are about the same age, and with them, what grows up eventually comes back down. The tree is not having a very good year. The storm that flooded out Milwaukee on August 10 went through my backyard across the state first, lightning ripping out two huge tree limbs. My son cut up one, and a raccoon ran out of it. The other huge, broken branch stayed stuck up in the tree. Time to call in Branches tree service. I photographed them back in 2016 when they cut my tree the last time.

Then. (2016 Instagram post)

Tree Guy: "Say...we were driving in here and suddenly remembered you. You gave us some tea, these hard disc things."

"Yeah, that sounds like me, all right. Did you like the tea?"

Tree Guy: "I don't exactly remember but the discs were cool."

"Oh, I can give you some more."

Tree Guy: "I wasn't asking, I didn't mean to--"

Me: "Oh it's ok, I have a tea blog and get sent lots of tea."

Tree Guy: "Yeah something about a blog."

I gave them a 2 gallon ziploc with Yunnan Sourcing's Drunk on Red, white2tea's A & P Red as well as a bag of 2017 raw white tea leaves which is probably stale, but never opened, ditto with a huge bag of Lapsang. I further foisted off a cigar-whiskey-scented 2016 Xiaguan raw tuo, no idea how I ended up with it. 

And a check. I paid them $1600 to take those teas. They left me the huge, smelly wet pile of leaves and mulch. Because I am supposed to like smelly wet piles and photographic evidence is king, pic and it happened. They thoughtfully added in pine needles from another job, because fresh-cut silver maple smells like throw up. 

To 100% complete the karmic revisit of the 2016 blog post, I must now try The Treachery of Storytelling 2, eh? 

Treachery...

Wasn't this like a $300 beeng? We don't discuss tea prices in my house. Only 200g. Class of tea unknown to market, yada yada. Of course my blog post is idiotic and didn't list the price. Because it doesn't matter. Stupid has no explanation, so why dress it up further with actual details. I remember thinking it is a nice tea. Nice enough that I decided to tin the beeng and not age it. Enough to keep it fragrant and alive. It's in with other non-agers, like the w2t 2015 Yiwu which was a really wet drinker tea anyway, and the 2015 Bosch which Marco G hotboxed, probably a good plan.

But what I really want to be able to do is age-budge a nasty compressed tuo, and not even pushing to visible mold affects them much. So why obliterate a nice floral tea unless it's just undrinkable and I'm not losing anything. Anyway. The Storytelling has browned some, just some oxidation on the surface. Smells nice and very green. Basically the tinning keeps it green. I popped off 5 grams. 

Still has the floral opening but a touch incense which is probably the Bosch affecting it. I drank just before dinner in an empty stomach, because why not, and paid in body heat and sugar crash. My son's father Mr. Passport Bro is back from Hangzhou, he drank steep #2 and passed out, which he denied after waking up. I drank Steep 3 at 176 F (75 C), and it was insanely bitter. I don't remember this bitterness, but steep #4 with boiling kettle was better, moving from the fruity floral to more vegetal tomato vine. 

Steep #4

Now I get the mid-steeps which is where this tea shines. I did #5 two days later and the leaves resumed beautifully with a powdered violet note, the way old cosmetics smell, like old Chanel blushes or your mom's Guerlain Meteorites.

But it's really, really green. Yeah I sorta screwed up. Brewing around the bitterness, I think how I should have put this in aging conditions. Only 200g, less now at least 10g, it was nice enough fresh so I didn't. It's not too late, but meh. I need to try and drink it. Body-wise, it's got the stomach heat and throat vapor, the brew is yiwu thick, it's like a Mansa. All the notes I like, floral veggies is what lingers. I can only reasonably do one brew a day, it really gives me jitters. Less is more when sick and old. 

Otherwise, I'm drinking up older stuff, and running out of old tea. Bought Houde's cheap $100/kilo 2005 Dayi brick tea and I've been drinking that all summer. Seems to work to regular-diet the cheap tea and do the pricey dessert on a weekend. At 5 steeps, the lower grade large leaf Dayi is cashed. Ten steeps in, Storytelling still just getting started. Big difference. Both teas worth what the vendors charged. 

Took me so many days to write this, that Son has completely dispatched the smelly wet pile of tree trimmings. My posts are slower now, but don't worry, it's just a different year. 

2021 Gas

I literally have it. Gas, I mean. This last month has sucked big fat bowels as I struggled to drink this tea and get this review done. I take some medications that are ripping me a new one and I waited far too long trying to tough it out. Finally I went to the doctor to say I just don't feel good, and she identified the medication culprit and switched me. Took three weeks to heal and I am not fully there yet, but I am on the mend. Still I wanted to get something out on this tea, but I am limited in the kinds of sessions I can do, and I will note these limitations. 

Over the summer my bland diet really got to me, and while shopping for a tea towel on white2tea I decided to toss in 2021 Gas to my purchase. I saw the description of the tea as having an "in your face bitter character" and all of a sudden everything in me craved a bitter green tea. They got to me at a moment of weakness with this one because I have plenty of bitter tea to choose from, just nothing fresh. In the hot muggy summer green tea just gets too appealing for me to resist. 

The tea towel, I have to say, is pretty but not what I was looking for. I have teaware in sufficient quantity to open a shop but I actually don't own any tea towels. I have cloth dish towels for drying dishes, but some of these are 30 years old and used only with water. I don't want to mess up my relics with tea stains. But the new towel is more like thin scarf fabric and I was expecting something thicker for $15 with a microfiber backing maybe. Just really a user error on my part not reading the listing carefully, perhaps, but since I don't own a tea towel per se and not knowing what to look for, I guess I should have looked around more or just bought a regular microfiber cloth. 

2021 Gas is a very green tea at the moment with big-ass leaves. I wanted to do a bunch of sessions with this thing and hoped to spend the entire month of August drinking it. So I started out doing Teforia brews to see how the tea performs just as a bitter green tea. The Teforia on the sheng setting brews just under boiling water temperature. I brewed several sessions of 2021 Gas through the machine which does 3 gongfu brews and expresses the tea with some force. I brewed 3-4g of tea at a time because that is about what the globe can hold. 

The tea did not perform as I expected in the Teforia due to the lower temp of the water. Let me say the tea is actually quite lovely brewed at sub-boiling, the profile is unexpectedly sweet and honey-like with green tea and hay notes. It's not what I wanted, but the takeaway here is that 2021 Gas can be controlled using water temps below boiling. The tea just won't get bitter if you brew it this way.

After recovering from my health mishap, I finally completed a true gongfu session using boiling temps. Well, completed a session with some caveats. I am still not about to tolerate the massive style session I prefer to have. I brewed 3g of tea in a Lin's porcelain pot with about 40 ml water and did 5 brews which is all I can tolerate. 

Happily, the tea lives up much more to its bitter promise with boiling water temps. No sweet introduction, the tea starts out bitter and kept right on through five steeps. It's a tongue-coating bitter. The brew has a greenish tinge, so we are really getting green tea from this at the moment. It has some of the honey vanilla note I found in the machine brews, but otherwise it's more green tea, mowed grass, some floral and a bit of apricot fruit. The tongue coat remains and is fairly slow to transition in the mouth to sweet, with the bitterness lingering for me up to about a half hour before changing over. I am not finding much here for throat and I am not getting much of a tea high, but I just don't think I will brewing this small of a session. 

White2tea prices tend to be relative to one another, so this 200g beeng is $45. At this price point, white2tea is providing a fairly basic tea and it will not have some of the spectacular mouth feels and body sensations their higher tier offerings do (or have done in the past, because I did not buy any other sheng this year from them to compare). 

On the plus side, the tea lacks any tobacco notes and no char or smoke. The spent tea has the large leaves, some stems and a few buds. I could imagine this batch of maocha used in blends with other better teas, or perhaps all this tea was purchased for is an offering for people who want a basic bitter profile at a budget price. Twodog asked me on IG how my health was doing, and I mentioned I wanted drink this tea, and he said "oh, you are going for the ultra bitter?" 

Well, ultra bitter for me is still the 2008 Haiwan LBZ from Wilson. That tea is still the standard for personal pain. No other tea I have had before or since caused me to violently fist punch my leather sofa. This tea is easily controlled with brew temps. It's what I wanted out of a bitter green tea, but I am probably going to pay for this session and it will not feel good later. If you have issues with too-green sheng for other reasons than medication, you might want to give this a pass. But anyone else wanting to avoid the smoky factory profile, and out-of-control factory prices these days, while still needing a bitter tea for aging, this one might be an option. I hope someone else who can drink it out will post a better review and photos for you.

Five Years On: white2tea's 72 Hours

Back in 2015 I made some excellent decisions about puerh tea. Mainly in buying as much as possible. Today the prices of puerh tea have risen dramatically beyond what I was able to afford just a few years ago. One of my purchases included 72 Hours by white2tea, a tea which has long sold out. I managed to find the original listing for it, however.

In this listing, the blend recipe is supposed to age rather early, and peak at around five years. Now that I have stored the tea for five years, I am taking the time to give it a try.

Originally I tried this tea in a session with TwoDog in the summer of 2015, he had pressed the tea in June and in July visited our home state of Wisconsin when I got to meet up with him. He didn't tell me the name of the tea, nor share much except that he mentioned he got the blend recipe from a tea friend. TwoDog had watched over a few beengs of this blend and noted they became sweeter and more complex within a short time.

The only tea I know of that ages this quickly is Xigui area tea, but I don't know much about blends and I'm sure there are other teas that mature more quickly as well. Xigui tea is supposedly in white2tea's 2015 Pin and 2014 Apple Scruffs, a tea I regret not buying at the time. But again, I can't be fully certain of this. What TwoDog has said is that he cannot make any of these teas nowadays at a price point that people will pay, great tea has simply risen in price well beyond what most of us can afford.

In my original session, we also drank a 1960s aged raw puerh which quickly eclipsed any first impressions I had of 72 Hours. I was given a small bit to take home, and enjoyed it for a couple more sessions. I still have maybe one more session of that sample. But I want to try a bit off the actual untouched beeng which I stored together with a few other white2teas in a canister, adding a bit of moisture here and there over the years.

I can see from the beeng that some oxidation has occurred as the leaf has darkened. My question is whether five years in dry storage is enough to move the tea along. I break off a hefty 12g since this is supposed to be a sweet tea. Brewing vessel is porcelain gaiwan.

First steeping after the rinse is bitter with notes of root beer, chicory or chocolate as well as a bit of hay. I also notice a note of traditional Chinese medicine, just in the first steep. This note may have been picked up from the other beengs in the canister. I notice a strong cooling sensation in the mouth and throat. The choco continues through to steep 5, along with the bitterness. I really leafed this strong. The cup smells much sweeter than the actual brew tastes, a strong floral and cotton candy scent I find in many pricey teas like my CYH samples.

Steep 2

Steeps five and six are the money steeps. Here I found a deeper base note of black pepper along with the bitterness and root beer and fruit. These steepings feel completely "round" to me, is the word I thought of, round like the nose on a fine perfume where you have top, middle and bottom notes. This tea has all three in steeps five and six. The bitterness changes to sweet in the mouth, though with less cooling than earlier. The full profile of flavors is remarkable compared to other teas I own.

Now I feel glad for buying tea that I aged myself. In these money steeps I don't need to brew or taste around anything unpleasant. No off storage notes, no processing issues like smoke or dirt. This is pure, as clean a tea as I can get. While I find tremendous benefit in buying semi-aged teas, particularly more traditional factory teas with some years of aging elsewhere, I have to taste around the problems in those teas like with processing and storage. The biggest reason to buy house teas from white2tea, the young and higher end stuff, is to get access to the leaf as close as possible to straight from the trees. What I can't find in the market nowadays is compensations in pricing for processing problems like burnt leaf tips or overly humid storage. Tea is just expensive based on how old it is more than any other factor.

Steep 7

I lose the pepper note in subsequent steeps but not the bitterness. I can attribute the bitterness in part to my heavy leafing. But no doubt this tea is not at a place I expected in year five which points to my storage. I believe that the original idea of this tea maturing in five years is based on storage in a more hot and humid climate. The tea was expected to mature, sweeten up and lose the top notes after that. My tea has not lost the bitterness and I still have the full profile of the tea. On the one hand, I am glad the tea is preserved and I haven't ruined the tea in any way. I felt a bit worried I might need to drink this up in one year, and I had hoped to keep it longer. Now I can see that the tea needs more time and honestly I would rather hang on to it. This is one of my better white2tea beengs.

We also discuss the problems of dry storage, and I don't have any acrid or sour notes which tells me I'm on the right track. We don't mention enough the benefits of dry storage, done right, which mainly is keeping the full profile of the tea intact. We talk about tea retaining its value, and value in older teas is mainly in preservation. It's fine to push teas for one's own benefit, but if you want your tea to hold value, the storage focus needs to be on preservation as well as aging. We need a balance between moving the tea along toward an aged profile while keeping the character of the leaf intact. I think it's fine to push a heavy factory tea but I don't intend to do that with teas that have such fine top notes. I know I wouldn't want to buy a heavily stored delicate tea, I will save that for more pungent examples.

Going forward, my 72 Hours beeng needs to continue to mature but I need to watch it carefully for that peak. I may or may not reach it, my tea could lose the top notes before the bitterness changes. I plan to re-sample a few of my blog teas this year and will share any changes I find. If you want a similar example to 72 Hours, consider picking up 2015 Pin, yet another tea that cannot be made at a low price point today.

You Ain't Going Nowhere

Over the past year I stopped buying tea, mainly because I am out of storage space and am happy with the teas I already own. Since purchasing white2tea’s Bamboo Shou back in January, I have not bought any other tea until I decided to hit cart on “Road2Nowhere.” I am a good girl in other ways, I spend less time looking at tea shopping in general. Not that my interest in tea diminishes, in fact I find I enjoy reading blogs and tea chat more. Vicariously I delight in the tea purchased by others. I am readdicted to tea videos and photos too, just not my own photos so much. Hence, I produce less tea content which has resulted in a few readers messaging me to get back to blogging. “Write anything,” they said. So here I am. Also, I wanted to support white2tea with a single purchase this year, and went for Road2Nowhere, a limited production of twenty-five cakes, not counting the five the company choose to keep. I probably know a third of the people who purchased this tea, and in a way this post is for tea friends.

The wrapper is blurry, not my photo

I will admit few of this year’s teas sparked much interest in me until this one. I suppose the limited run is part of it, also I like the description which suggested a bit of complexity in the profile and some “body feels.” The price too is mid-range for white2tea. Last year I went for the cheaper Splendid, but I also bought a couple of Arbor Red, so this single purchase is already less than I spent last year. This tea did not have a sample offered, and the tea sold out in a couple of hours. Normally I do not like to write about unavailable teas, but this is probably one of the few posts I will write this year on new tea.

The dark green of new tea

The wrapper and name of the tea are meaningless, as far as I am concerned, like most white2tea names the intentions behind the nomenclature go right past me. The name Road2Nowhere simply reminds of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” a song he wrote while recovering from a motorcycle accident and lent to The Byrds for their Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, which of course is the one Byrds album Gram Parsons had a hand in, as well as the still-missed guitar virtuoso Clarence White who died in a freak car accident a few years later. Gram is likewise missing from this performance (hence the lower register harmony is missing too), but you can see Clarence on his B-Bender Telecaster, an instrument owned today by Marty Stuart who claims he paid only $1000 for it. None of this is important except that it strikes me tea costs more now than that guitar did, although the guitar is worth far more, priceless really, but funny how really good tea is the price of a new Telecaster guitar. I used to play a Telecaster myself, but now the instrument is too heavy for me.

After I bought the tea, I kept watching this Byrds’ video. I find something mesmerizing in it even though Roger McGuinn messed up the lyrics. I see people dancing in a way people just don’t today. Do you see people dancing like this? Maybe I live in the wrong place. Everyone wants to be “woke” now, which translates into more self-conscious dancing and which ain’t dancing. People don’t dance like this anymore. They don’t even dance together. They stand and hold their phones to watch others, rather like I watch other people drinking tea. The Byrds video makes me feel a bit ill of today, or ill of myself today, though I suppose age is my excuse if I trot out any reasoning. People dancing without phones! Can we drink tea without photos? I like photos, and I like videos, a vicious cycle of consuming content and hating myself at the same time. Can I let go...

Road2Nowhere is a machine-pressed tea which is difficult to break into, I managed to get 3g off from two pick points. The “plus” here is the beeng won’t break up in storage so easily. I find the first few steepings somewhat gasoline-like which is common in some new teas for me, along with some fruity peach notes over a caramel base. The tea has a strong bitter and sweet mouthcoat and a mineral finish. The much-discussed “saline” note from the description on white2tea seems to me a finish from the cup I notice when slurping the cooler bottom, the mineral note is slightly saline-mineral at the last swallow from the cup where the tea is cooler. I don’t think the note is enough to bother about if you can’t find it.

Steep 4

As for the qi, my face turned to rubber after several cups of the tea, my eyes dried out. This effect lasted about fifteen minutes, but the mouthcoat lasted far longer and is still present a couple of hours later as I write now. I gave the tea six steepings and it seemed tired at that point, like I would have to really start pushing the tea. My cup retained a fruity aroma.

The leaves are small, like Naka-small, and chopped because of the difficulty I had chipping off some tea. My biggest plus I can find here is the leaves pass a finger rub test. I’m impressed with the durability of the leaves physically, yet at the same time the tea needs pushing. I only drank a 3g amount in about 40ml water, I expect a larger session of twice the tea leaf might give me at least ten steepings before the tea tires, but I don’t see the point in wasting so much leaf this early. The tea was pressed not much more than a month ago. I get the impression the small production of Road2Nowhere is perhaps the effort of a single farmer selling a small amount of tea to white2tea. The dots on the leaf in my photo suggest insect or weather effects, so I wonder if this is rather untended tea without much spraying or farm control.

A leaf I found that did not break when rubbed
between my fingers.

All this is about as positive as I can say about the tea. What I suppose is regrettable is the price for the tea, in that apart from the stoner effect, the tea is not terribly complex. I think we are paying a premium nowadays for untended tea, and to consider more complex tea the price goes up astronomically from here. In other words, I can think of much better teas I’ve purchased over the past six years but to get better tea now I need to go up in price tier. I tend to prefer white2tea’s more expensive price tier. I am not unhappy with this tea for the price, but I do like a bit thicker brew and more complex profile and thus my customer preference is gonna run me into the $200+ for 200g. This tea at $120 seems about in line with prices now, it’s actually less than the 2016 Mansa from Bitterleaf which cost $80/100g. The Mansa offers the same physical effect but with a much more explosive mouthfeel and that tea is from three years ago.

So what do we have? This tea is not as heavily farmed as a regular plantation tea, and the leaves are decent quality for the price. Road2Nowhere is a step up from basic puerh tea in leaf quality, mouthcoat and qi. You need to know where you are as a customer. How do you drink your puerh? Are you looking for a basic drink that tastes nice, is comfortable etc.? You can go much lower to get that, and perhaps if you prefer some age on your tea the $120 here is best put elsewhere into a Taiwan-stored factory tea. If you want premium puerh of any age, you need to spend more. Road2Nowhere is the undecided middle, it seems to me. This purchase for me was to support the efforts of the owner, and the purchase is the “undecided middle” me. Were I in need of excellent tea, I would have gone higher and picked up one of the pricier options, but I don’t need more tea.

2018 Bamboo Shou by white2tea

Last month I attended a tea tasting with white2tea at Macha Tea Company in Madison, where I had the opportunity to try this new bamboo-pressed shou puerh. If you have never attended a formal tasting, a session like this starts out with various sheng teas, and a shou puerh is served last to warm and balance the body. Sheng teas have a very cooling effect, and shou settles the tummy with warmth to counter bitterness and cold effect. I really enjoyed this shou tea and ordered it immediately when I got back home, and it took a month to arrive.

Many vendors carry bamboo tube teas, but often do not ship with the bamboo tube because the tea may be more likely to get stuck in customs as it may resemble contraband substances. The packaging is made for reusing, the tube has a sliding slat cut into it. One end is covered with cloth and held together with braided bamboo, and this is easy to put back on the tube. The tea is not as densely packed as might be expected, I can break off a piece using my fingers. For this session, however, I found some loose tea in the tube with a small chunk and decide it is enough to brew up.

This tea reminds me somewhat of the excellent Crimson Lotus Tea Nannuo shou mushrooms with a remarkable sweet character. While the CLT mushrooms have a strong vanilla note, this bamboo shou tastes like a Dr. Pepper crossed with shou, with notes of sarsaparilla, vanilla, and my mother's knitting basket (the bamboo). TwoDog stated he felt lucky back in November 2018 with this finished tea, as sometimes bamboo teas can turn out burnt or rough, and this one tastes so mellow. Bamboo pressing relies very heavily on the persons doing the work, and so the vendor has less control over the finished flavors than with a disk pressing.

I notice a fermentation flavor in the first couple of brews, along with a very clear liquor. The fermentation fades quickly into a more buttery vanilla, rather like the browned edges of a butter cookie. This character remains in subsequent brews while the bamboo note comes forward more. The leaves are small, and the chunk does not fall apart easily. If I had used more tea, the chunks might brew out longer than the eight to ten steeps I am getting today. This tea is a boiler, and would benefit from a pan boil on the stove after the session, but I do not have time to pan boil today.

This tea would pair exceptionally well with sweet bakery or even lunch, I could envision drinking this grandpa all day long. This is a nice tea for the office and for sharing with people who are not puerh drinkers. A weak cup can easily be taken to settle a stomach, it stays warm with me after a bout of shoveling snow.

Over the past year, I have had exceptional shou puerh teas from at least three western vendors. The idea of "waiting for shou to clear" seems more and more an idea from the past, from factory teas stored in dirty warehouse conditions. Western vendors still sell such teas, but I feel like their own house teas are superior to most factory high bulk productions. We don't need to settle for teas that need years and years to lose dirty flavors. 

Price-wise, this tea sells for $32 for a 200g tube. The bamboo packaging has pros and cons. The pro is that you don't need special storage, the tube can easily store in a desk drawer and the sliding slat is reusable. A pick can remove tea for brewing without too much fuss. One the other hand, the tube is long, about the size of a tennis racquet handle, and other than in a drawer I can't think of how else to store this. You could remove the tea from the bamboo, but then you lose the flavor benefits of the bamboo over time. Yet I cannot imagine most people storing this tea for long, 200g of yummy shou like this will go fast. Better hurry if you want one, TwoDog says they don't have many tubes left and his wife is drinking it all up on her own. 

Woof

I received a sample of white2tea's 2018 Lucky Puppy with one of my purchases over the summer. I count myself as lucky, and the Puppy no doubt refers to the Year of the Dog. This is one of white2tea's premium offerings this year, ringing in at a painful $228/200g, about $1/g. Understandably for a free sample, I got a beenghole along with some loose tea, and I pick out 3g of the loose tea to brew up in a tiny senchado pot. The dry leaf is dark green and likely has not settled down yet from pressing.

Early steeps have a sour note along with bitterness that is less apparent on the boil than at cooler temps. A vegetal profile confirms that the tea is still green tea, with cucumber rind and green pepper as the top notes. The star of this tea is the qi, as one might expect from white2tea, and qi is what we are paying for here. While the tea sticks to the mouth and tongue, the brew is on the thin side, although brewing only 3g is partly to blame, I expect the tea will thicken more eventually. Right now this is just so fresh, even after three months in the bag since arriving.

The qi is heady, with strong visual acuity, I literally get one eyeglass prescription better. Most of the time I notice I'm overdue for new glasses but all of a sudden the ones I am wearing are just swell. I can contrast this experience with 2018 Arbor Red tea, which has a more relaxing body feel for me.

My tea cashes out around twelve steeps. A regular session of more like 8g should go fifteen to twenty, I expect, but I don't want to waste the tea. I still notice a persistent sour note, although the later steepings give me a creeping huigan and hints of the sweetness that might take over in the future once this tea settles down. The processing is excellent with absolutely no oolonged leaves in my sample. Given the price point here, I think sampling is in order to make sure the purchase will satisfy anyone interested, the lucky puppy is a person who can detect a strong qi.

2018 Censers and 2018 Arbor Red white2tea

While I am not a frequent buyer of white teas, over the years I picked up a few cakes which promptly got lost and forgotten somewhere in my house. I cannot tell you where a single one is located at the moment, except to say I do not store them with my puerh. A few years ago, white2tea caused a stir amongst their tea club members with a sample of Aged Fuding white tea, and several of my tea friends have tried to find a similar tea ever since. I got that same club offering too. I opened the bag and thought hmmm, no…and closed it back up again. My bravery for trying aged white got lost after other sour and un-impressive examples left a rather bad taste in my mouth. I feel somewhat like I do not yet deserve to try a decent white tea, going into it with a bad bias. But because my new puerh teas are still rather wet, now is a good time to drink this new 2018 Censers white tea I got as a sample with my recent purchase from white2tea.

A lucky sample in my purchase box.

White tea offers instant gratification for a tea drinker, unlike puerh which must first sit and firm up, and then age for half a lifetime. In all its processing forms, white tea is very good new, and generally speaking a Bai Mu Dan is best in the first couple of years. However, this tea is a Bai Mu Dan grade pressed into a beeng intended for further aging. The popularity of white2tea’s pressed white cakes speaks for itself with ubiquitous sold-out signs every season. I believe that the company is definitely interested in producing with an aging focus, given the market prices for a decent aged white tea. A good aged white rewards the drinker with a wine-y mix of spices and florals, and the leaves turn into brown leather which you can boil in a pan to extract even more flavor.

The wrapper is a reference to the aromas white2tea finds in the tea, I don’t own the wrapper but it appears to be a Christianized imagination of a Jewish High Priest, from what looks like the choshen mishpat breastplate of twelve squares, but with a rather bishop-y looking hat instead of a wrapped cloth hat. Maybe this image is taken from a some old painting, I am not going to chase down where it is from. The incense idea is probably the take-away from the wrapper image.

You can see how green 2018 Censers tea is at the moment.

Very freshly pressed white tea.

By contrast, check out the Aged Fuding club tea I managed to dig up from a box of tea envelopes. This is probably the color goal some day.

A more autumnal color.

I decide to brew up just 3g in about 30 ml water. I have to say this is definitely one of the more complex white teas I have ever tried. I used water just off the boil and didn’t rinse the tea because new white tea does not need rinsing. The first three brews are bright, almost neon yellow, with a floral and spicy aroma. White tea processed this way seems to burn a little on the way down the throat like a white radish. The white tea florals are obvious notes to look for, but I got hints of green watermelon rind and dried fig rounding out the bottom. This is rather amazing for white tea which is normally somewhat a floral two-note tea for me.

Censers starts out bright yellow.

The tea darkens in yellow color on steeps 4-6, and thickens considerably, bringing out the fig and spice a bit more. I struggle a bit with steeping the next few, the brew remains thick but the money steeps seem to be the earlier ones. 

Pretty in the gaiwan.

The tea fades somewhat into a greenish floral at this point. The leaves are very leathery already, suggesting a boil might be in order.

Tea thickens and gets a little darker steeps 4-6.

When boiling the tea, I am rewarded with a much darker brown brew that tastes more like diet cola in melted ice water. 

Wow, quite a change from yellow to brown after boiling.

This tea definitely could be boiled more than once, but I think the best days for boiling are further down the road when the tea ages and the flavors gel together more. At that point I would expect deeper wine flavors, spicy fruitcake and the radish to show up more in later steepings than they are now.

Leftover leaf might have more to boil out.

This tea is not a caffeine bomb for me, but I can feel the spicy radish in my chest as I often do with white teas like this, and a mineral aftertaste which may change in character in a few months. I need to try this tea again sometime over the winter. Right now I am sweating from a combination of the weather and boiling water.

I am not the best judge of white teas, and I look forward to a more seasoned palate person taking this one on, such as OolongOwl. I am also not the best at brewing white tea. This is a very rewarding tea in the money steeps, however. Yet if I go for a white tea purchase, I might pony up for the just slightly more expensive 2018 Arbor White and get something with a bit more body feel.

With puerh prices so high this year, if I am budget-conscious I’d rather have a super nice white tea at this price point instead of buying a wet-stored mediocre drinker puerh just to find something easy to drink. For that matter, I would rather have a decent hongcha and did just that by purchasing the 2018 Arbor Red. I know for a fact I will drink up any and all hongcha that arrives in my house, and having consumed all the Big Red I purchased from white2tea a couple of years ago, I am well overdue for another hong purchase. With my Censers sampling out of the way, I feel warmed up for something more hard-hitting.

2018 Arbor Red

2018 Arbor Red comes sealed in a white envelope.

For the record, 2018 Arbor Red is not the most expensive hong I have bought from white2tea. I’d say white2tea’s Xigui hongcha ringing in at $1/g cost me more. I still have not opened that pricey tin, obviously I am hoarding for no good reason. That tea came with a buyer/seller “contract” in blood to gong-fu and not western steep. 

Very nice touch, the addition of a cloth-like inner wrapper.
Outer wrappers get wrecked so quickly...

This Arbor Red claims to contain old arbor large leaf puerh with serious-sounding effects in the description. At $0.43/g this is not cheap hongcha, but it’s not in the hoarding price range of the Xigui, so I am expecting some fun over the next year with this baby.

Does the neifei really say "fuck the fakes"?
I think so...

Arbor Red arrives in a sealed white envelope in the box for a reason. Opening it up, I am bombed with the strongest odor of hongcha I have ever smelled in my life. I also had a tong of puerh in the box, this Arbor Red would have tainted my tong for all time in shipping had it not been duly sequestered. The cake is really fresh which is probably why it is so strong-smelling right now, I am reminded of the day I steamed apart my 100g beeng of Drunk on Red, which was Feng Qing material and now, alas, completely consumed. I plan to hang on to the envelope to keep in the wonderfully intense aroma in this Arbor Red tea, and plastic bagging on top of that just for more insurance. (note to curly: I’m pretty sure your wife will not let this in the house.)

The tea is slightly greenish, with varying shades of brown.

The tea is strongly compressed and requires an ice pick to break some off. If this tightens up any more I might need a saw, but right now going in through the beenghole works. Thankfully someone sent me a stronger tea pick recently. I break off 3g and brew in 30ml of water, the first steepings need more time because of the compression, I start at 4 minutes, 3 minutes, then 2 and I can do 15 seconds after that, no strainer, I plan to pour back the stray bits. No wasting leaf…

The last somewhat nice photo of this post.

Okay. I am typing and deteriorating rapidly. The tea hits me with fresh tobacco, tannins, and heavy honnggg oak barrel. Drinking as hot as possible sears the throat like a shot of bourbon and Virginia cigar. Face melting after two steepings.  The tea sits in the throat and gut like hard likker, I know I won’t be drinking this in the morning with milk and meds. In fact, this could interact with meds in ways I might regret. However, the tea may calm down more over a year or so into a gentler sibling, but I can definitely tell this is puerh leaf. The empty cup smells mineral-ly like a screen porch after a rain or a wet tool box.

The remainders of a babbling fool.

I can drink this and never need to see people ever again. Arbor Red is a tea for the guy who doesn’t change his underwear until spring and roasts squirrel on a spit. Or the momma who hits fast pitch hard past third. Well, Arbor Red is for the type of person who won’t be buying Censers, I feel fairly certain about that.

After steep 8 or so I need to add much more time to get me a heavy brew, but now I am getting the sweeter aftertaste in the mouth, hints of dark chocolate. Yunnan leaf red teas usually have malty chocolate notes, although they usually don’t hit like a truck the way this tea does, making me think pancakes and bacon while laughing at my own internal dialogue.

I know I can get more out of this tea than the nine gong-fu steepings so far, but I want to move on to the boil. I add a lot of water to my 3g of leaf compared to the white tea I boiled earlier. 

I added a ridiculous amount of water here, filling the pot.

While I’m awaiting the pot to boil, I realize I am overdosed on the heavy body feel of this tea combined with the caffeine. The white tea earlier surely contributed a little, but five hours have passed since then.

After about 3 minutes of boiling pot likker.

(3:45 a.m. I go across the street and order a chicken sandwich with chips. While waiting for the cook, I see bottles of Gold Peak Unsweetened tea in the cooler, 10.5 ounces for $1.89. I feel smugly satisfied that my Arbor Red session at home cost $1.29, that full beer mug by itself in the kitchen is 12 oz. My leaves are not even done yet. I can boil them up again later.)

Fruit jar of fun.

Maybe down the road as this tea settles it will fade in the fresh tobacco notes and move the dessert chocolate forward, but I hope not. I don’t have another red tea with this profile, and I am not a huge fan of super sweet Yunnan dessert style teas. Arbor Red is a unique savory addition to my collection.

The best reason to do a red/white tea session side by side is to figure out which kind of drinker I am. (As if I don’t know that already). White2tea makes a white tea processed version of this same leaf. Forget that, I’m sure it’s just as good in its way but is better to leave that one to others who really dig the lighter and more subtle flavors. I can’t afford a whole tong of this, and that would be piggy of me. But I went ahead and bought one more for the long winter.