Three Days

Summer of Sheng

On these hot days I'm sleeping out on my three season porch with my tea, while my ex mother-in-law enjoys the comforts of my air conditioned bedroom. Aside from the hot weather effects on myself, no complaints on sleeping with my pu. After all, you never know when some local enterprising meth head might learn something about puerh and decide to raid my stash. I like to keep the porch door open too, to welcome more air circulation through the screened door.

Wisconsin has three months of weather in the summer time with the potential to mimic Hong Kong storage. Unfortunately for my tea, not every single day is hot and muggy. Some summers we do get incredibly hot and muggy weather, but this year we've had a wet summer with cooler temps, and now we have smog from Canadian wildfires drifting over our region, leaving the sun in a haze. Canadian breezes also provide relief from the heat on occasion when a high pressure gradient slips down bringing more glacial air, and this year the smog too. Other US states get humid weather daily, but Wisconsin isn't Virginia or Mississippi or even Missouri.

Breathe.

People tell me constantly, "I can't be bothered with crock storage, it takes too much time." But when my climate has so few really muggy and hot days, crock storage is a way to make the most of the best tea fermentation weather. Opening up the crocks takes less time than watering a vegetable garden. If I use one big crock, I only need a few seconds to open the lid. And I'm getting too old to bend down and mess with an unplugged fridge. My crocks sitting on a table are more like the clay flower pots that normal people have.

My Pu sure loves the warm, muggy days, tuos and bricks start to loosen up and release their fragrance. I can use baskets or unglazed vessels to take advantage of the humid air. And when the weather dries up again for a cool day, I can close up the tea to let the moisture from previous days soak on in. This is the time of year when I want to see how all my teas are coming along. Hopefully you've already purchased your fresh sheng for the year too, because hot summer days call for a cuppa the raw, and the fresher, the better. Shou is for winter warmth.

Sheng, on the other hand, is cooling on the body. I take a number of pills which cause a side effect of fluid retention, and then another pill to rid me of excess water. Still, the hot weather rules over the efforts of my pills, and I retain a massive amount of water. Some days this gets a bit much, and I feel tired from it and take a nap which helps my body loosen some of the excess. Sheng helps a great deal with the rest. Yin people look for warmth everywhere and probably drink shou in the summer time, but I'm constantly chasing the cold. Even my mother-in-law complains about the heat.

"I'll never move to Florida like other old people," she says, referring pointedly to her brother, and my siblings too. "I like the cold since I don't have to go out in it."

That last part is key. When you stay in the house all day and never go out if you can possibly help it, who cares what the weather is?

For my condition, I find that fresh sheng works the best. Any problems I get from sheng puerh stem from drinking in the middle of fermentation, so anything between 2-10 years old tends to give me issues. I have no problem with fresh tea when the leaf is excellent quality, and no problem with aged teas. Since this year's fresh teas are coming in a bit higher in water content, I can just drink more.

And I should be drinking more. Originally I started increasing my green tea consumption back in the late 1990s to help prevent a non-stop cycle of kidney infections that increasingly grew resistant to antibiotics. The infections tended to hit following days of extreme weather, high heat and humidity in the summer, or extreme subzero temps in the winter. Several days of these extremes and driving in my car for work and so on, my kidneys couldn't take it. When I started to run through antibiotics, I realized I needed to make lifestyle changes, among them spending less time in my car. I also greatly increased my consumption of green tea and started buying better quality tea leaves, eventually progressing to shou and then sheng puerh starting in 2009. I have felt lucky that I haven't had an infection for about 8 years.

However, the combination of high heat, sleeping on the porch, cleaning up the bathroom after my mother-in-law and sometimes avoiding the bathroom altogether when she had recently used it, this all added up on me a few weeks ago. I drank a small cup of sheng in the evenings but the weather felt too hot for more. Three days of all these factors and I got hit with a bladder infection. Luckily I called the doctor and nipped the infection with only three days of Cipro, the only antibiotic left short of an injection that works. Eight years is a long time and now these infections are far more exhausting than before. And I needed to rest to make sure it didn't spread to the kidneys as it has so often in years past.

"Three days that I dread to see arrive," wrote Faron Young before he shot himself, words in a song Willie Nelson later recorded in a favor returned for "Hello Walls." "And it does no good to wish these days would end, 'cause the same three days start over again."

Hot Stuff Faron Young eyes a Drake.  

Dammit. I thought I was past it, over a sort of crucial hurdle. But no, I'm three days away at any time. Enough physical stress and too little tea, and back in the cooker I go. I have the emotional constitution of a rhino, but physically I'm a worm. So no more thinking that a single 100 ml cup will do, I need to be at the 1-2 litres of tea daily. And I've found that I really need the green sheng in the hot weather, black tea doesn't seem to have the same effects. And decades back I went through the whole juice and cranberry extracts regime that does not work and led to even more stubborn infections. Puerh is stronger by far to cranberries.

All this has led me to pay even deeper attention to my sheng puerh. Reaching for the cure when my legs and ankles swell and I feel tired. Much of this would improve if I stopped the nifedipine which produces some of the edema. But I can't do that right now.

72 Hours by white2tea (my photo)

Instead, I reach for the sample of new puerh, the 72 Hours cake from white2tea, the bit I have in a bag as a gift from TwoDog. It's handy at the moment, and effective. This is very fresh leaf with mild bitterness, a slight body relaxation after the first two, nothing terribly heavy. Very thick stems indicate a lot of age in those limbs. I pump three small cups of this, maybe 100 ml each, and put my feet up. Maybe doze off a little to help my body out.

I can literally feel my body cooling down after about twenty minutes or so, despite the hot tea. Stiffness leaving my ankles as I begin to shed the excess fluid. The tea is slightly astringent for me but nothing mouth-puckering, with honey notes and a strong honey scent to the cup afterward. Once I'm past the half litre mark I feel rather transformed from overheated, bloated and sluggish.  I lose the excess water, and my sharp faculties return so I can once again focus on reading or writing.

Somewheres past 10 steeps.

72 Hours is also Three Days, "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow." This tea is apparently one that is lightly bitter the first year, but sweetens up rather rapidly within the first five years, according to TwoDog. So to get the best from it, a person must plan to store the cake for 1-5 years. I had every intention of saving this sample in a small crock to see what happens. But I can't stop drinking this stuff. Now I call it Three Days tea, it's the time I have without tea before my body will break down.

What I've learned this summer is I can't stop with sheng, and I can't skimp. I must drink the quantities and I need to buy the best leaf available to me. This isn't about collecting or storage, it's also about what I can actually drink right now. For me this means top quality sheng, or at least the best I can buy, and my shopping list must have tea less than a year old, or it must be older than ten years. Sheng does not bother my stomach if it is fresh and high quality, or it must be well-fermented. That middle fermentation stage is where the trouble lies, just as no one would eat partially fermented sauerkraut, we must wait until the microbes have done their job. Or we eat the cabbage fresh. Milk too is perfectly fine when very fresh, or it needs to be properly fermented into yogurt. Partially fermented milk is only edible in baked goods, such as a sourdough starter or muffins. Fresh or fully fermented. This isn't true for everyone, alas. One of my friends on Steepster got a tummy ache just today from a very mild, fresh sheng. I'm glad I can drink sheng because it is literally keeping my kidneys afloat. If there is a tea jaundice, I surely have it because when I don't drink tea I'm in trouble.

Hopefully by now you've got your own collection of 2015 fresh tea if you are able to take fresh tea. Or you have a decent stash of fully aged or fermented tea like shou or liu bao if that is what you need. I've got my eye on a few more fresh and aged teas yet this summer, so stay tuned for more reviews. I'll keep doing them as long as I can hold out! But now everyone best get out of my way on a beeline to the WC.

Requiescat in Pace.

A Clover Experiment

Nothing like summer in Cow Country to get inspired on tea fermentation. This time, I've been duly influenced by my recent get-together with white2tea. I needed to get my storage evaluated and so I brought along a few cakes purchased from TwoDog so he'd have his own reference points on those same teas from selling them. I just asked him to please sniff, and his general initial remarks were "sweeter," and "you worked out the smokiness." Now the stored teas had either been kept in a pumidor, crocks or both for at least one year. Although we didn't taste those teas, at least I got some feedback on the positive side and of course I've sent samples of my teas around to a number of people, but most of them have been tea drunks like me who will drink anything, in other words a rather skewed group.

TwoDog shared a few other impressions he has of tea storage, and says he can identify at least a half dozen different storage locations in Asia by taste alone. I didn't ask more about this because that information could involve tricks of the trade with tea buying that perhaps he wants to keep to himself. I hope he chooses to write more about regional storages someday. But one other bit of information piqued my interest. He talked about the effects of storage beyond simple metrics like temperature and humidity, such as air particles of particular places like pollens and plants. I mentioned that my tea in crocks can be completely in a microclimate apart from the outside air as is the case in winter, but in the summer I do indeed open them up to the outside air to benefit from additional heat and humidity. TwoDog said he hoped to describe Wisconsin storage someday and actually taste the qualities associated with this terroir, as he can do with teas stored in Asia.

Now this crosses my area of interest, since I've been trying to find methods that work here in Wisconsin. From my own results, I'm absolutely convinced that crock storage is viable and in fact more humid and just plain better than pumidor storage, avoiding the dry air of winter with simple controls. But pollen brings up local plants, flowers and trees, all of which permeate the air here, especially now in the summertime. This is very interesting and I began to think about the types of plants and pollens in Wisconsin. I wonder whether a bad ragweed year will mean sneezing when I drink my tea. Even more thought-provoking is the idea of taking advantage of local pollens to see how they affect tea.

Two major plants come to my mind with Wisconsin. One of the big reasons our state makes such excellent dairy products at the volume that we do is because of what the cows eat. Cows eat a diet of alfalfa and forage, along with other supplements, various feeds and grass hay. Farmers improve cow guts and milk by fermenting silage, a product composed of corn, grass, alfalfa and often red clover as well as other ingredients. Our cheese and milk products are viewed as particularly sweet due to local red clover which grows wild all over the place, and cultivated alfalfa, a high protein plant. Farmers grow this in fields all around this area along with corn and soybeans. Cows get their red clover as forage, eating out in the pasture during the growing season, and clover makes its way into alfalfa fields too. Some cheeses, such as Edam are best when the cows are fed a diet high in red clover. Seems to me red clover is as good a plant as any to work with in an experiment with tea.

The fermentation of red clover has been thoroughly studied, and generally posts a rather acidic pH during the fermenting process, the upper fours like 4.6 or 4.7. You can read about the composition of acids in fermenting clover in studies by the University of Wisconsin here. But I'm not really planning on fermenting the clover, seems like I can just take advantage of the pollen and moisture from the flowers, along with the fragrance and see what happens.

So I dropped TwoDog an email about a red clover experiment and off I went to get me some red clover. Fortunately I found a bunch growing down the street in an abandoned lot. Quite a bit of clover in fact, and a smart rabbit had found the same spot and dug himself a nice house in the dirt there. Saw the stash while I was on my way to the Senior Center anyway to return a shower bar I'd borrowed for my ex-mother-in-law to use during her visit. Luckily nobody important seemed to notice my shirt pocket stuffed to the bursting with red clover blossoms. When I got home, I washed the flowers and sterilized the crock.

I count myself lucky to have found the clover now, because some blossoms are already turning brown. We've had a lot of rain this year and weeds and plants are just going crazy and so the clover headed out much earlier than usual. Some of the plants had a few small buds left so I can check back again. I'll need a bit more to last me until next July. My plan is to use a single blossom as a moisture source in the crock rather than clay shards or pouch buttons. As drier weather approaches in autumn and winter, I'll take out a blossom from the freezer and throw it in with the tea.

Haeger pot with white2tea 2015 mushroom sheng

For the tea, I figure a Menghai profile tea is easily recognizable for its scent and flavor of acrid apricots. As it happens, the Super Mario mushroom in the latest white2tea club box has just this profile. Perhaps this tea is a bit strong and might overpower the blossoms, but I can keep up the blossoms and see if the pollen has any effect at all. One thing's for sure, this tea is freshly pressed and this year is a wet one. I'll need to watch the tea like a hawk until it dries so it doesn't compost out.

I can taste the money.

Yeah. I know what you're thinking. Crazier than usual. Maybe the experiment will come to nothing. Or maybe it's Genius and this tea will sell for Thousands someday. After all, most people have this same thought about the Dayi they buy every year, isn't that more crazy than what I'm doing? Okay equally crazy. At best. Then too I'm probably a zombie for my favorite Tea Pimp. He did drug me with tea.

If you're reading this, just promise me one thing. Don't write the County. I got enough problems.

Don't you wish you'd thought of it?

Requiescat in Pace.

I Shaved my Face for This

Tuesday's Tea with TwoDog

When an old Tea Whore like me catches up with a Tea Pimp, I get a bit of old tyme religion. For a whole day in advance I take a personal inventory of all the bad tea I've been drinking, along with nursing a desire to confess. Then I need to get my storage checked, and administer any needed remedies to the dry climate of Wisconsin. But mostly, how lucky I am to sit down with TwoDog of white2tea and Companion for an afternoon of amazing tea.

When I got word that TwoDog is hosting two tea tastings in Madison this week, and that he could be in town early for a tea session with Old Cwyn, what do you think I'm gonna do? Not difficult to guess.

Of course, I had to offer the trip to my mother-in-law who is looking rather antsy lately about getting out of my house and back home in the MadCity. So when I suggested to her we might take a trip to meet up with TwoDog back at her house, and she could thereby get home 6 days early, why she was so positively happy to be rid of the likes of me she actually drank a cup of my own celebratory sheng last night.

Stove by Mirka Randova

So today we hosted tea on the back deck at her house, and I brought along my kettle warmer and teaware. You all won't see a photo of TwoDog here, and some might say "pic or it didn't happen," but we are all notoriously shy of selfies, because someplace in Wisconsin a beatdown surely exists for souls oversharing on social media. Nevertheless, I have a photo to offer of a teacake that isn't out yet on white2tea.com.

As yet unreleased 2015, white2tea.com

We start with this yet-unannounced new 2015 tea. This tea has a citrus top note, and long huigan, very strong in the mouth. We all get a decent tea drunk on and mostly steep out the tea, I lost count but at least 8-10 steeps. I really don't think it is steeped out yet, and I got to save the leaves which I plan to brew again tomorrow. This tea is apparently one to put away for just a few years because it will sweeten up in a short time. I got a lucky bit to take home in addition to the steeped leaves. We can all watch for it to appear on the site.

From there we move on to Lao Ban Zhang leaf, which smelled rather like incense, and TwoDog thought maybe "baby powder." He had stored the tea is this teapot for two years in Wisconsin. Bring it on and I get even drunker.

TwoDog's Pot with Lao Ban Zhang

Finally the big treat, an aged puerh that is almost as old as Old Cwyn. At this point my ex MIL makes an appearance to deliver her remarks on drinking teabags. This just now as we've been drinking LBZ and about to drink what TwoDog refers to as "mortgage puerh." He very patiently talks to my MIL about fannings and pesticides, a delightful effort which I can see will go nowhere with her. He invites her to taste the mortgage puerh and she turns him down, thankfully. I would have bit back an objection to aged pu on a teabag lady when Old Cwyn isn't on the ground yet.

Full spread

The aged tea produces a profound silence with three people staring off into the trees. I'm definitely wasted now. But never done. What a relaxing afternoon in the cooler weather we have!

Blessings on TwoDog and friend for safe travels...

Left, white2tea cake, in Jian Shui aged, old Pu

And finally, I confess I drank up the rinse after you left. All two inches of it in the tea table.



Requiescat in Pace.

2013 Jing Gu Old Arbor Yunnan Sourcing

Are you being served?

Recently I received this sample of Yunnan Sourcing's 2013 Jing Gu Old Arbor along with a purchase of other teas. Today I'm digging it out and when I check to see if the cake is still available, holy cow it is $59 already but luckily the cake itself rings in at a large 400g. This is a varietal called Camellia Taliensis, and is reportedly from a village cooperative tea garden with trees ranging from 60-350 years. According to Yunnan Sourcing, when the garden was affected by drought in recent years then the villagers water the bushes by hand. 

Which brings up a point to consider when buying this year's teas. Early reports are that puerh regions got quite a bit of rain in April this year which hasn't been the case over the past few years. What I'm seeing with tea cakes already is that the later picking dates are more wet this year than last year. The drier years seem to produce a stronger tea, so I'm looking at 2013-2014 teas with new eyes now.  

Photo Yunnan Sourcing

Camellia taliensis is more silvery in appearance when dry, like white tea. Scott at YS notes that the leaf is used in making white tea, and is often blended with Yiwu leaf to add thickness and a more attractive surface to the cake. Some researchers have found more catechins in the wild leaf than can be found in plantation Camellia assamica (see Gao, et. al 2008 for example, cited below), though that study compared plantation Lincang so maybe that mutes the results somewhat. I guess I got the luck of the draw in getting a sample of this with a purchase, because the sample is 25g or so. I pry off about 8 grams per 100 ml.

Initial nose is vegetal, hay, nothing special, but the base note is a light white peony that I associate with white teas. However, this is merely a note, as if the white peony got an invite to the garden party. What I mean is the tea is definitely leafy, not something like silver needle or processed white tea pressed into a cake form. But you can see it in the color of the tea, that darker yellow brew that white tea usually produces. I should stop saying white tea because it isn't Assamica, yet if you are someone who enjoys white tea and wish silver needle cakes had more punch, this is a tea to consider. 

Photo Yunnan Sourcing

The tea has a light bitterness and astringency and early steeps are noticeable in the throat, these can be minimized by going a bit lighter on the temps a few steeps in. Brew turns to a sugary sweetness around the lips. Thickness surprisingly throughout, I can definitely understand the reasoning behind using this leaf as a base blend to thicken up a tea. 

Fifth Steeping

Effects are a calming qi, not as much caffeine as I usually go for, but at least I'm not yelling at the neighbors. When I was younger, I liked to wear straight A-Line linen shift tunics down to the ankle and tied in the back. Every week I religiously ironed and starched those dresses and wore them all summer long. I still have a few of those tunics, but they are too small now. They are hard to let go of and I think of them sitting in the closet when drinking this tea. Back then, this tea would have fit all my poetics and I'd be all over this tea like a bumblebee. Now this old battleaxe needs a kick-start in the transmission. 

The tea is still going after ten steeps and I'm only doing about 20 seconds in the gaiwan. Light peony flavor is constant throughout. Quite a pleasant steeper. More importantly, Jing Gu is a page in the puerh compendium of knowledge so as to recognize the presence of this silvery leaf and its thick brew in puerh cakes. The cake appears to be all small leaf and buds, suggesting a single origin which is getting harder to find these days. 

Even better, these 400g cakes are only $59 currently, sitting among other Yunnan Sourcing house teas from 2013 priced over $100, making this Jing Gu cake quite the bargain. Surprisingly fresh still with not much dry storage to taste, just a tad at the beginning. Definitely worth picking up a 25g sample for $6 if you don't feel like springing for the entire cake. Either way, the tea with a touch of white peony is a rather different experience from the usual grape or apricot notes and every puerh fiend should try Camellia taliensis at least once. Yunnan Sourcing recently moved from Portland to Bend, Oregon. Let's hope the dry air of Bend isn't too harsh for the puerh stocks.

Requiescat in Pace.

Citation

Gao, D., Zhang, Y., Yang, C., Chen, K. & Jiang, H. (2008). "Phenolic antioxidants from green tea produced in Camellia taliensis. Journal of Food and Agricultural Chemistry, 56(16): 7517-21.

Tea Head World Lines

the Back-Up Plan

Sejak, left; hwangcha, right.

Might surprise a few of you that I do drink tea other than puerh. Every pu head needs to have a back up plan for those occasions when drinking puerh just isn't possible. For example, they don't allow puerh knives in prison. In my case, I'm heading for the nursing home where no laws are supposed to apply, but those people cut your meat in advance, and I'll be lucky if I can keep my Xbox, to say nothing of piling up bamboo tongs in my room. No, I expect that unless I want to file a court case I'd best identify some other teas I'm willing to drink before I'm unable to do much more than mutter over the tea bags in the community room. Actually, I'm quite partial to Korean tea so the decision of what else to drink is easy. But finding it? Not so much.

Korean teas have a delicate leaf that reminds me of saffron fronds, and that leaf resembles no other teas in the world, in my opinion. During the hot weather of summer that we're having right now, I like me a nice salty Sejak. The only problem is, a good Sejak is difficult to find. When you do find any Korean green teas, they are expensive, and sell out fast. And once gone, you won't get another opportunity until the following year. The new teas tend to appear in the west in late summer or early autumn. I've been out of sejak for almost a year now, and so when recently clicking on the Sale button over at puerh-sk, I was surprised to see a Junkro Sejak and hit the Back button real quick. I couldn't believe the price which came in at about $14 for 50g.

First steep.

This high mountain sejak doesn't disappoint. I'm mainly looking for the salt in the first steeping which is a bit of that misty ocean air. You can taste it all around your lips and for me it mitigates the beany-umami flavor. I find teas with an overwhelming umami flavor to be a bit too sweet for my liking, and so I'm particular about the sencha I drink for this reason. I gong fu brew sejak, and I don't measure the leaf. Because the leaves are very delicate, they tend to lift up in a clump and I don't want to disturb them too much. A rinse is unnecessary for me, this ain't warehouse pu. And I can forgo a strainer and waste bowl for once, any stray leaves at the bottom of the cup can go right back into the gaiwan. I use 10 second steeps for the most part. The second steeping is darker still, but the real action is that first cup, in my opinion. I usually get a good 6 steeps or so out of sejak. In the summer, the thought of that salty steep just makes my mouth water, especially on hot, muggy days when I've been sweating away.

I suppose I will suggest you pick some of this Sejak up, but I'd rather you left it there in case I need it. Actually it was an excuse to also pick up some pu and naturally a teapot too. I wouldn't have done all that but for my friends on Instagram constantly taunting me with teaware, and puerh-sk is the place to go to hoard both tea and teaware in one big shopping spree. So really it isn't my fault I now have this Sejak.

by Jeong Jae Yeun

Another Korean tea I'm very partial to is Jeong Jae Yeun's high mountain "hwangcha." Jeong Jae Yeun dedicates herself to creating this one tea only, organically grown wild and semi-wild tea trees literally at the highest altitude, much past which tea won't grow. This type of processing is most similar to Chinese yellow teas, but not the same, so really this Balhyocha is a tea unlike any other. This past year, What-Cha carried this tea but they are now sold out. Before that, the only vendor I'm aware of is Arthur Park at Morning Crane tea, and he usually does a group order in late August or early September. Sometimes he has left over packages and you can drop him an email if you're interested.

This tea, aside from puerh, is what I can recommend as the best tea. Full stop. My initial curiosity with this tea came from the story Arthur Park tells on his blog about how a Buddhist nun tasted this tea at Jeong's home and then stopped later at an artisan pottery workshop and shared her experience of drinking the best tea she'd ever had. I wanted to try and discover what a Buddhist nun might see in this particular tea, and the answer was easy to discover.

Using about a tablespoon of tea, try the first steep in your gaiwan at 150F/65C. I know that Buddhist nuns, especially those on the road, tend to fast more as a rule than western nuns. When breaking a fast, one doesn't want to put boiling hot water into one's stomach. Either use a cooler brew, or you let the tea cool a bit. Now I've done my share of fasting, and what happens is every one of your senses becomes more sharp. The first steep of this tea at a cool temp is a burst of chocolate, and I think the nun must have wept in delight.

Second steep.

Earlier this year I served this tea to my sister along with a light snack of grapes, goat cheese and crackers. She stopped mid-sentence while drinking the tea to say, "I think this is the best tea I've ever had in my life." My sister is the most beautiful person I know, and so I mailed her my extra package of this tea. She is the only person on the planet for whom I would part with my stock of this favorite tea.

Author's lovely sister, in Jordan, 2014

In any case, this tea calls for a cooler temp and a light hand on the gaiwan, and is gorgeous back-to-back with the Sejak, from salty to sweet. In later steeps an oolong plumminess is at the forefront. I think this tea goes very well with light summer fruits, veggies and rice but of course it is so lovely I drink it on its own. I could go on more about this tea but you can find an excellent tasting video from the guys over at TeaDB.

So now you know my Back-up Plan, in case drinking pu just isn't possible.

Requiescat in Pace.

2015 Last Thoughts and Bitter Things

There's bitter feelings, bitter thoughts of you.
Oh, bitter things in life that have come true,
With never ending heartaches, never ending tears,
Bitter feelings and bitter thoughts of you.

"Bitter Feelings," Larry Lee Phillipson, 1959. On Cinch Records 3858 and on
No Welcome Home, Live at Green Bay, Wisconsin May 24, 2010 NLT Records

2014 Last Thoughts is the tea I discussed on the very opening post of this blog. The tea fit with the theme of this tea drinker at the end of her life, drinking her way to the grave. I wonder if I'm tempting fate just a little bit by drinking the new 2015 Last Thoughts and then writing about it again this year. But then I thought no, the tea doesn't have to be entirely about me, only a little bit, and in truth the tea isn't about anyone except maybe clues in the writing by a madman on the wrapper. This is the top tier effort by white2tea and that madman who sent me a sample. Readers have been searching my blog already for a review so I should write about the tea.

Pretty baggie.

I think understanding the tea tier is important. This tier of tea is not something which can be picked fresh upon request. It isn't sold by the roadside along with a bottle of water. You can't get it from the farmer or anyone else by asking. In fact, you can't even buy it. At all. The tea is acquired, as opposed to simply purchased. God only knows what Twodog or any other vendor these days goes through in order to acquire this tier of tea, because really all of it has been essentially spoken for and locked down by other investors for years now. So what happens is a little bit gets held somewhere, by someone, and you have to not only find it, but convince the person holding to part with it and pay the premium. And I'm certain the price is more than money, but about something else, and we won't be told. Tweets during the time period stamped on the neifei are a bit about relationships, single malt scotch and bourbon, but these hints are vague at best. Bitter things, no doubt.

Photo white2tea.com

My point here is that when approaching the tea, you'll notice some browning already which suggests that the date on the neifei is the pressing date and the picking date is unknown. This tier of tea is harvested and then hidden away, as opposed to picked fresh the day of sale. Maybe it changed hands already a couple times. And word of mouth saying "I know someone who knows someone who has got what you're looking for." Information is a premium, and you pay a big price for bitter thoughts too.

A sniff session is a must.

So you're darned right I'm gonna spend an entire evening just sniffing the tea in my cha he. In fact I'm not ready to drink it until I'm sure I've got rid of the people in the house, and the cat and everything demanding my attention. If you own this tea, you've paid a premium yourself with hard work, hard-earned pay  and the full treat is to sit down and enjoy without interruption. All these little bits are how I tune into this tier of tea, and I must have snorted when sniffing the cha he because a few bits fly out onto the floor and I quickly scramble to pick them up. So I'm probably brewing cat hair anyway. More bitter things.

First steep on boiling water over about 5 grams. And I drank the rinses, or should I say, I skipped the rinse. A bit of dry storage in the rinses, the tea appears to be a mix of fresher buds and some stored tea. Last year was all gushu, and this year seems to be a blend of gushu with something else far older and more sinister. TwoDog seems to flavor blended gushu more and more from what I read by him on forums, and I have to agree. For I can pick up a fresh gushu like Chawangpu's fruity Hekai and call it a day, but for top tier I want a bit more of an unknown experience.

After getting down the two rinses plus what would normally be a first steeping for me, I broke out in a sweat. I noticed some heart palpitations going on which I haven't experienced on a tea since Camellia Sinensis' Hong Jing Tian shou with the rhodiola herb in it. Need to slow down a little. 200 ml or less and I'm easing back already, this tea has a kick of something going, caffeine plus...? dunno yet but I need a lie-down.

First steep after I drank two rinses.

Two hours later I have some yogurt and nuts and I'm back at it. Two more cups, about 175-200 ml total together. And again, the increased heart rate, sweating and something foggy about my head. I feel the tea in my stomach. The huigan is a real creeper, 10 minutes after the cups I am tasting nothing in particular but then a flower opens in my mouth of sweetness. I am looking around the room to try and find explanations for the sensations, ruling out things like food or meds. But I feel like how my cat looks after I give him wild catnip, he sniffs and starts playing with it and then he stops and stares with a wide-eyed look, as if he is not himself and suddenly realizes it. I feel a bit like I've taken half a tab of hydrocodone, which for some of you might be paracetamol with codeine and an aspirin in there too. And I feel it in my head, my throat and my stomach.

I keep thinking this cannot be possible, that I'm feeling like a lightweight with this tea. I know I haven't had as much time to drink tea lately, but I'm still drinking things like Korean sejak and black tea, and keeping up the caffeine with diet colas on hotter days too, and coffee in the morning. In fact, I drink caffeine all day. And it's only been five days since I finished off that Poundcake, a total of more than 10,000 ml in a 3 or 4 day session. I drank two of those Bonjour 920 ml pitchers back to back. Twice. There is no way tea should be affecting me like this. Listen, 200 ml should not be more than a slurp to Old Cwyn.

On Steepster, I see one of my Friends has tried the 2015 Last Thoughts, and I ask about parameters because this person has a rather short note with no mention of any particular effects. Turns out a rather healthy amount of tea was consumed. So maybe it is just me. But I need another lie-down.

Two hours later I have a protein shake with fresh fruit and veggies blended in. And then two more cups. 10 minutes later those two cups hit me again like a truck as before, the same symptoms. And the creeper huigan, no taste in my mouth and then the explosion of fruit and flowers. My head is disconnected and my heart rate up. I'm going into herbalist mode, thinking not of parameters but of dosages. This is Chinese medicine somehow. I usually need less medicine than most people because the effects of all medicines are strong, and my parameter on this tea means a smaller dosage here. I'm thinking 3g/100 ml for me rather than 5g/75ml. Regardless, I'm gonna push it on myself just a bit more and go for two more cups just 20 minutes after the last two.

At about 10 steepings.

This isn't the post I had planned. I was going to talk about the profile, the thick motor oil etc. etc. based on last year's Last Thoughts. I get the Yiwu top note, and hints of a Menghai flavor base just like last year, but I also get deeper flavors like aspirin and apple vinegar, what I mean is medicine. The tea isn't as thick as last year's, the buds are here but some other leaf has been blended this time. Huigan has that delay but is explosive. I just cannot understand how I can drink all that Poundcake and this Last Thoughts is now kicking my ass, like Dong Quai in vodka. I'm gonna grow a stubby nub sixth finger at the base of my pinkies and turn into Anne Boleyn and she was one bitter thang.

Next morning I start up again, two, well three cups this time. Same effects, I'm zombie-fied. Flavor now is stone fruits, still decent astringency and hot chili oil into the gullet. The tea is staring me down, saying "you're the girl who drank all that Poundcake, now we're gonna give you the what-for."

I might be hallucinating, but I think I see a cross.

The truth is, as an herbalist I focused more on tonics and a few womanly herbs, but I'm out of my depth with the effects this tea has. It would take a real Chinese medicine doctor to sort this one out, and anyone who is a doctor needs to order this tea for their patients...in tongs. Nevertheless I'm determined to steep this one out and hoard the rest. Of course the leaves are still going after 15 steeps. I just can't believe it, I don't remember last year's cake doing this to me. 3g/100ml is probably the ideal dose for me, and not a smidgen more. The tea that knocks out even Old Cwyn.

Around 15 steeps.

Naturally a few more cups in the afternoon at tea time. Ten minutes later of course I'm back to a wild-eyed stare and my mother-in-law asks what's wrong with me. I tell her about high-end, old arbor tea.

"Do you tell your doctor about this tea you're drinking?" she asks.

"If I did that she'd fire me as a patient."

"You should drink tea bags from the grocery store."

And there we have it. See, this here is why I started out with the photo of Larry Lee Phillipson. Phillipson is an old-timer Wisconsin rockabilly lead singer who lives in my home town. Like TwoDog, Phillipson spent his youth jumping on the back of trains and hopping off at farms looking for work. In between that, Larry pressed his musical vinyl discs, just as today when TwoDog presses musical tea discs. You can rely on one thing from your family here in Wisconsin when you come home with Achievements, like Larry from Nashville with "Bitter Feelings" and Twodog from Yunnan with "Last Thoughts." You can count on "No Welcome Home" and someone always acknowledging greatness with "yah okay, now sit down and eat yer peas."

train tracks...oh, bitter things and bitter thoughts of you.

Note: the video poster spelled the name wrong. And the song is original.