Plastics Errs and Oops

You have seen this before.

Right, so let us see the tea writer starting off the new year on a wrong foot. I killed a tea. Not much tea, but still, some, and cannot be replaced. Like all the mistakes I regularly make, I try to learn something even if doomed to repeat. 

So what happened? We have had winter and -25C temperatures for several weeks now, and I ventured onto my unheated porch to find I left a tea out there since last summer. Nothing important, readers will recognize this last bit of 2012 CNNP Fuzhuan brick tea I bought from Jay in Hong Kong. This is what's left of the 1 kilo brick after taking a year to drink most of it in 2021. I stopped with a small piece left to serve as a reference for other teas in the future. Last summer we had a warm, humid season after two droughty summers when I didn't porch store my tea. So when we finally got a good tea fermenting summer, I set out only my Fu bricks and also Houde's drinker bricks just to acclimatize. I brought in my other teas, but overlooked this bit of brick sitting atop a file cabinet.

Adding a damp square
of paper towelling.

I keep dreaming of Fu Zhuan covered with crusty, zesty yellow flowers. But my tea shows how dry my climate really is outside of a few summer months. The bit of tea was stored in a loose plastic wrap. You can see how the erotium crystatum fungi is just little powdery bits now. After months and months untended on a now dry and freezing cold porch, the tea itself has more problems. I decided to try and revive it by adding a damp bit of toweling paper into a stainless steel container and put the whole thing in a warm place.

The flowers have sprouted back, which shows that the fungi survives in dry spore form and with dehydration and warmth will return. Fu brick is not strong like puerh tea, and once browned with age the broth is soothing rather than harsh. But this tea is just flat with hardly any flavor. 

Better?

I have seen bags of dried eurotium crystatum for sale on various websites. If I had a really humid climate, I could feel confident in ordering dried spores, knowing they revive easily. I could add them to my tea steeping, and probably with more flavorful results than trying to "grow" them. Kinda cool to know that. 

But now this tea is basically flavorless, so I can toss it or drink it. The life of the tea was 4 years in Hong Kong, and then 10 years with me. The tea initially was green, I think the fully browned tea here reflects a realistic purchase of tea which gets a good start in a humid place before importing it to store. 

Browned and brewed.

To store, as in, not on your porch during winter. 

Another thought that emerged from the incident was the plastic wrap I had around the tea. More and more articles are emerging with the dangers microplastics may have to our bodies over time. How do I feel about storing in plastic? 

Not sure I have a firm thought. First, one must honor our Yunnan (and elsewhere) tea producers who have stored tea wrapped mainly in bamboo and paper materials. These are ideal and most healthy materials for aging in warm, moist climates. But in cold, dry climates, we need other options. My solution has been the type of ceramic farm crocks that my family has used for generations to ferment cabbage. 

Plastic is a stabilizing material that can prevent interactions with the environment, and slow or altogether stop aging. Heating plastic is said to release more micro particles than cold plastic. Older vintage plastics apparently are more "shedded" than newer plastics. 

The written articles on microplastics are everywhere, but they aren't fully definitive. I myself have recommended wrapping in plastic to preserve tea that needs no further aging. Puerh teas are often sold in shrink wrap over the paper wrapper in part to keep them from absorbing scents in tea shops. Plastic wrap may be a strategy for online selling, to keep the tea looking as close to the photos as possible. Some tea writers prefer to store in plastic. 

I am still a little ambivalent on plastic. After all, I'm drinking a tea that might contain far worse chemicals, in some cases. Consensus seems to emerge on most things puerh, the small observations and mistakes still matter for everyone. I like to hear about these observations more than all the debates. I need some alternatives to plastic wrap. Tins are ok, but they are drying, and containers will still need controls with so much air. 

Happy New Year! 🐎

How Dry I Am

Here is a truth to let sink in. Your entire puerh tea collection is 10 days to 3 weeks away from being entirely fermented and done. 

This is all the time it takes to break down the cell walls of our tea leaves, release the juices and convert the sugars with bacteria and fungi. This is what we call composting, by adding heat and humidity in sufficient proportion to begin to rot the tea just enough to break down the cellulose. 

Quick fermentation. The question is, why aren't you breaking up your collection and doing it? 

The question I am asking is of those folks who claim to be unhappy with their tea because their outdoors climate is too dry and to blame for their undrinkable tea. Because what they want is dark, inky, and basement tasting. I can understand people liking this profile as a daily drinker. What I don't get is why people will pay a lot of money to order warehoused tea from overseas, instead of composting their bitter tuos and resting a couple years into something drinkable for them. 

With the costs of tariffs and shipping overseas now, seems even more silly to contemplate ordering warehoused tea when you can get cheap beengcha from someplace like Yunnan Sourcing, break them up into a crock, and wet warehouse them yourself. 

Well, then it's shou. Firstly, there is no microbial difference between shou and a sheng of the same exact tea aged to the same point as the shou. We "assume" the sheng has more "nuances" but that may really depend on the leaves more than how they were fermented. They may in fact taste the same either way, especially if the base material isn't complicated to begin with. And that is indeed the case with factory tea, especially the bitter tuos nobody wants to drink unaged. They don't magically gain complexity they lacked young, no, we need more in the base material to begin with. 

The lover of quick warehoused tea is already giving up nuance just by warehousing, in favor of a mustiness covering it all. At this point, the "integrity" of the base material hardly matters because it was originally bitter, smoky or just one note, and priced under 10 cents a gram when new, for all those reasons. It is cheap plantation and you like it, except not when new. 

Nothing wrong with any of that, but why are you complaining about your storage while spending big bucks to import it already-warehoused? Why are you blaming the air outside your house when you can't bring yourself to get the fermentation done? Your "undrinkable" tea needs to be removed from the wrappers, broken up and fermented so you can have a drinkable (according to your taste) beverage instead of money spent on tea you are merely storing.

The main reason to "store" rather than ferment is because storage preserves what you already like about that tea from new. Makes perfect sense to keep those delicate fragrant notes rather than pounding them into oblivion with heat and humidity. 

But if your collection consists of teas that you don't like when they are new, teas that are too bitter or whatnot, why not just go ahead and ferment them? The only reason to keep these teas intact is because you plan to sell and they are worth more unwrapped. However, if your tea is primarily for you to drink, with no plan to sell, then no reason at all to keep the tea intact. Get your money's worth by drinking them.

I am just gonna say it. You must be in love with the wrapper. You are in love with the shape. You don't mind all the space in your house taken up by teas you can't or won't drink. You harbor nonsensical hopes that the tea will magically be wonderful someday, only to find your storage has done nothing to move them toward merely drinkable for you. For the warehoused tea lover, any raw tuo is a waste just sitting around in a dry wrapper. It will never be what you want to drink, unless you do to it what God intended for the large leaf varietal. 

Let's go further. I don't think any tea you are dry storing will be what you want, especially if you are ordering your actual drinkables from overseas. 

The upside is you can stop with the tea storage. You can stop complaining about your dry tea climate and apply the proper method to get your tea fermented and done. You now know the only reason it doesn't work for you is because YOU won't unwrap that tea, lose the wrapper, break up that compressed shape, and mist it down. You have to break up the tea because heat and water can't penetrate the iron compression. If this is too much for you, why not just sell it and continue ordering already-done tea from Hong Kong as you need to? 

Puerh fermentation takes mere days to complete. The tea needs to rest for about two years. Longer if you pull the tea early, and only want a half fermented. I have completely fermented tea twice. I personally like shou after 10 years, but it's quite drinkable after two years. Shou is so much easier to store, because I am STORING to preserve it. I can use less humidity and lower heat than when fermenting. My storage set-up then makes sense as more of a tea pantry.  

Think about it. All the tea you own is days from done, not years. If that is what you want.

Whatever Happened to Bad Tea? A Return to the Outlaw

"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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

Why Don't People Understand Puerh Fermentation?

The so-called “mystery” of puerh fermentation keeps cropping up on forums. Why do people not understand how vegetable plant matter is fermented? Fermented foods are basic farm science, not rocket science. Puerh fermentation is a two step process. In the first step, the cell walls of the leaf must break open to release the bitter leaf juices, and this work is primarily done by Aspergillis Niger. Next, the bitter juices are sweetened by a new set of microbes, primarily Rhizopus, which use the carbon waste matter from Aspergillis as food. The process requires heat and sufficient humidity to keep the microbes alive.

While I am simplifying the process for the sake of discussion, this is not an inaccurate description. The most common remark that I see is “we don’t have enough research.” Yes, we do. Puerh has fermented again and again for hundreds of years supplying peoples in regions of China with necessary dietary microbes to supplement a meat diet. Not only puerh, but Hunan brick, FuZhuan brick teas, all of these teas have a long history of production, storage and consumption in areas like Tibet and Mongolia, more recently in Taiwan and Malaysia.

How much research do you need? Taetea and Xiaguan understand exactly how to produce teas that store and ferment properly and provide people with a dietary supplement. They’ve been doing it for decades. Even during times of war, China has made sure tea bricks are produced and transported to the people who need them. This is no more a mystery in China than how milk cartons get to school children in the US.

Okay, so some people need “research,” here is one article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4918958/

I like this article for several reasons: the quantitative analysis, the demonstration that aged sheng and shou puerh have virtually identical microbial communities, and finally, a sound analysis for throwing out the first rinse of your tea.

This is just one article. I can find many books and journal articles with the science behind fermented puerh tea. People who complain about a lack of research are either too lazy to do a search or too lazy to read, because the research is all out there for anyone to find.

If I gave a class on fermenting puerh tea to women in my local community, Amish and farm women with no more than a high school education, I would merely need three minutes to show and explain what a Yunnan Leaf tea is. I would not need to explain fermentation because these women ferment vegetables and beverages every year. These women can go right out the door and age puerh tea without any instruction whatsoever. I doubt I would need to give them the parameters, even.

I think the “Problem” is not a lack of scientific research, the problem is many urban people do not know the origins of their food. They don’t grow, harvest, ferment, kill, butcher or cure. They don't store food over a long period of time.  Food and beverage processes are a mystery when people buy everything from a store ready-made, or depend on restaurants to eat.

Taetea and Xiaguan are two factories which produce proven teas. Their jincha, beengcha, tuos and iron cakes are proven to store and age well. Their shou puerh teas are proven to contain the necessary microbes for consumption, they are shipped to peoples all over who need these teas. If you want a guaranteed tea to age or ferment well, these companies have the proper and safe products for you to buy. A nice bitter, smoky Xiaguan tuo costs about $10 and in 20 years properly kept that tuo will taste as intended.

So, what is the real mystery here?

The real mystery is not the “how” of fermenting puerh tea, but rather the why behind great teas. Why is a 7542 a great recipe? Why do some teas turn out great, and some don’t, when stored in exactly the same warehouse, storehouse, basement, etc.? Can we predict which teas will turn out well? Or rather, why can’t I predict whether my tea will be great? 

Well, we already know that a Xiaguan tuo will turn out just fine, great even, every year. For other teas, we have a hundred theories not only related to storage, but about blends, climate, over-picking, the soil, and who knows maybe even the wrapper. One big reason value grows for older puerh is because so few teas survive to 20 years or longer. Just surviving is a major additive value on a puerh tea. 

Tea lasting past 20 years is one big problem in the mystery of predicting great teas, for reasons more than storage parameters. We just don’t get too many teas surviving past that 20 year mark. The vast majority of teas are consumed or disposed of past the 20 year mark. Keep in mind that a 357g beeng is a small amount of tea. In parts of the world where puerh is consumed regularly, a 357g beeng is 2-4 weeks or less  of tea for a family of 3-4 people. This is not much tea; even if a family holds their tea in storage for 20 years, they can consume a tong quickly. 

Why do you not have 30 year old dried cranberries? Does your beef jerky last you ten years? How many 30 year+ bottles of wine do you have stored up? People consume their good stuff and toss what goes bad. People move. Houses get flooded. People need money, people get bored. People need to drink the tea so they drink it. Or they give it away. If you manage to put away a bottle of wine or puerh tea and still have it at the 20 year mark, this alone is worth money. 

The Vendor Problem

We have many vendors nowadays who are not interested in aging. They are interested in what sells, not necessarily what might age well. Given the cost of tea, this is not surprising. A vendor must sell a tea whether or not it is processed correctly. This is because their cash investment is up front, not on the back end like clothing retail or crops like corn for which money is borrowed at the start of the season and paid back with interest when the product sells. A vendor who buys maocha must sell it whether or not it is processed properly for aging. Vendors also have the problem of consumers with too little experience, who expect the tea to taste good now, rather than in 20 years. This is an incentive to process the tea to maintain its fresh shelf taste, because the customer will try and drink the fresh tea and complain if it tastes bad or harsh. 

The realities of selling tea, in addition to the problems of urban food consumers with understanding food, all contribute to confusion in how to ferment raw tea. Making a batch of shou is very informative and I wish people would do that, but few will. People want guarantees without the work involved.

A 100% Guarantee

Guess what, we DO have guarantees. We have Xiaguan tuos and jincha, we have Fu Zhuan, we have Hunan brick, and we have Taetea 7542. I can 100% guarantee you that these products will ferment properly given room temperature storage and 60% relative humidity. These products have and will keep people alive and well. 

This is such a sure thing, we even have an old expression in American English, “I will bet you all the tea in China that…” Fill in the blank, because China has people and tea factories that know damn well how to make proper tea that will ferment, such that I can bet it all and win that bet. If you can get the proper storage conditions on these teas, whether in a plastic bag or cabinet or crock, wherever, the tea will age eventually.

Of course, we still have unknowns when buying new tea other than the ones I mentioned. Aside from proven products, any other tea you buy is a best guess for the future. Your teas will indeed ferment, but whether or not they turn out good or great involves a number of variables, the greatest of which is simply keeping the tea out of the dumpster.

Questions I get asked about Puerh Storage

Big old crock.

Over the past few years I have received quite a few emails about tea storage, usually a few every month. Most of the questions boil down to one of two possibilities, “is this storage solution okay?” or “help!” I can hardly say enough how important my storage fails from 2009-2014 were for me to begin to learn what to do with my tea, and how to deal with my climate and the types of puerh I am storing. My storage failure consisted of copying the cardboard box method advocated by Cloud and a few other very early online posters. This method, even with a bowl of water in the box, left my tea too dry, flat and flavorless. While I managed to recover some flavor by moving the teas to crock storage, luckily I have consumed most of them now.

My climate in the house is far too dry to leave tea in the open, unless the tea arrives with years of wetter storage under its belt. Fortunately, I have a 3 season porch which is enclosed with glass windows. In the summertime, this porch gets very hot and humid, and I have a large ceiling fan to circulate the air. My tea enjoys the summer months fully awake, and the porch smells of tea when I walk in. But during the winter, I experience very dry, desert-like conditions and this is when I need some sort of storage solution to preserve the progress made during summer. I settled on traditional farm crock storage used in this part of my country. I have so many teas now that some are stored in almost every other type of container you can think of. Most of these extras are samples or small amounts of tea, and many are experiments of various kinds. Others are bits of Liu Bao or small packages of oolong teas.

Here are some of the common issues I get emailed about.

My tea has mold, what should I do?

This means your storage is too wet. If the mold is white or grey looking, this is okay, brush it off and adjust the humidity or add air flow. Keep your tea in the open for awhile or cover with a cloth or use a cloth bag for a time. If you have green mold, you must throw this tea out, or at least take off the affected chunks.

People who report mold to me are mainly doing one of two things. One, they are trying to replicate Hong Kong storage parameters, with 70% RH and warmer than room temperatures. This is very risky to do in a small storage situation, because you do not have much space and air flow to keep mold from forming. I prefer a more conservative set of parameters, such as 60-65% RH at room temperature or slightly cooler.

I do not feel that high parameters in small storage areas will age tea much faster. A tea that needs 20-30 years will still need 20-30 years whether at 70% RH or 60% RH. Honestly, if I want wetter tea, why not order it already stored wet? Wet teas are far less expensive to buy than dry stored, and then all I need to do is provide dry storage for a few years.

People who want to try 70% RH or higher will need to babysit their tea. This type of storage is a daily hobby, not a “store it and leave it” situation.

The other mold situation is storage of puerh tea in plastic containers, such as plastic tubs. Plastic has no ability to breathe. There is no air flow, no cracks or anything porous. Plastic is a temporary solution for students or people moving to a new residence. Because I write a blog I must be as conservative as possible. You might see online that people are storing in plastic and report their teas are doing well. That is well for them, but I cannot recommend it, especially for people who do not watch their tea carefully.

Recently I stuck a couple of 20 year wetter samples
in small food jars to air before consuming.

My tea is too dry.

Then it does not have access to sufficient humidity. This is easy to solve. However, it takes several years for tea to really die off, 3-4 years at least. A few months of dry is nothing to panic over, but people email me panicked after a month of dry. Keep observing the tea.

Adding a new tea.

Getting a new beeng or tong in the mail is exciting but anything new added to your storage will affect the humidity balance. If too dry, the tea will suck up all the moisture in the storage unless you have a large room for storage. If a tea is new and fresh, it might add too much moisture and you will need to remove any Boveda packs or back off on adding moisture for awhile. That new cake is a water-filled sponge.

Can I store shou and sheng together?

I would not.

Can I store old tea with new tea?

There are two schools of thought. One is that old tea adds microbes, and these microbes may be beneficial. The other school of thought pertains to perhaps poorly stored tea that might add unwanted odors.

20 yr Yiwu stored by itself in a crockery bowl
with a lid. The wrapper was too worn.

I currently store old tea with new tea, in part because I am out of space. I also am interested especially in how well-stored teas, such as from Malaysia, might positively impact my younger teas. I am currently storing Malaysian-stored Liu Bao with young Liu Bao to pursue this idea because this type of tea will show me some results sooner than sheng.

How do I get started with storage?

The best way is to experiment using pungent factory teas, such as Dayi and Xiaguan. Xiaguan tuos are in the $10 range. Even non-descript brick teas are ok. Factory teas like these are very forgiving if they mold, you can brush off the mold and the tea will recover nicely. When too dry, you can recover the tea quickly. They also are compressed firmly so the interior is not likely to be affected by experiments.

Buying inexpensive teas, not too many, but maybe a handful, is the best way to get started with puerh tea. People use the words “tuition tea” as a pejorative or cautionary tale, but in reality these teas are the least painful on the wallet and the best teas to learn storage. No one wants to lose pricey tea to an experiment gone south. My bad storage years were done on teas like 7542 sheng and 7572 shou. I learned what went wrong on teas that cost under $30 apiece. Nothing prevents these teas from turning out nicely when treated well too.

Relax.

Are we puerh people? Yes we are. Will dusty/dirty put any of us off? Not really. Do we brush off the mold and keep right on drinking? Of course. Do we love our tea more than our children? Probably. We can always have more children, but we cannot get back that old Dayi. So watch your tea like a hawk.

What a Puerh Lover Learns from a Fruitcake

This year I decided to bake a fruitcake. I have made fruitcakes before, and even have a recipe I developed back in my vegan days using beans. For this year’s fruitcake, however, I wanted to make a rather boozy version along the lines of a fruitcake I picked up during a trip to the UK a few years ago, what was called a “Christmas cake” with frosting. This cake tasted very unlike the fruitcakes I avoid here in the States. 

Many Americans dislike fruitcakes, mainly because of mass production of this confection in the mid-twentieth century with nuclear green candied fruit. I learned from my English fruitcake that many US mass produced versions are mistakes, but what I did not know until this year is that a quality fruitcake "matures" in a rather similar fashion to our puerh cakes. That is, if looked after properly, a fruitcake and puerh over time will develop sought-after complex flavors.

For my fruitcake, I hoped to use up much of the dried fruit accumulated in my kitchen cupboards over many years. Alas, one large fruitcake made only a small dent in the number of packages of prunes, apricots, dried cranberries, figs and the like that somehow ended up in my house. Where did all this dried fruit come from? I like dried fruit, but really! Apparently I do not eat any of it, and neither does anyone else in the house. I guess I ate it to stay regular, but now in recent years I need only brew up a drain cleaner puerh for this purpose. 

Fruitcakes are part of my family history. My aunt Alvina baked fruitcakes every year. She developed a family tradition during World War II when my uncle Leonard fought as an infantry soldier. Aunt Alvina sent him care packages at Christmas time with fruitcakes and frosted cookies packed into a huge box full of plain popped popcorn. The box arrived with most of the cookies broken, but the popcorn and broken cookies eaten together were a huge hit with my uncle’s infantry unit. So Alvina continued mailing out Christmas boxes to her brothers, my father included. Dad was the only one in my family who ate the fruitcakes. They remained in the refrigerator wrapped in tin foil well into the following summer (I found out the tin foil actually has a rationale for maturing fruitcakes). 

I remember asking my dad one July whether I should toss the leftover fruitcake.

“No, no don’t throw that out, it is still good.” 

He’d hack off a chunk, eating it in front of me to show he still planned to finish the cake. One could never be certain of food facts from my father. This was a guy who ate lettuce and pasta out of the sink drain, and saved soups in pots out in the garage for weeks.  

So really, in terms of fruitcake knowledge, I am on my own here. Although I have plenty of fruitcake recipes in my kitchen already, I am intrigued by a BBC recipe. Sort of following the recipe, I cook up prunes, apricots, cranberries and figs into spiced rum (I am not a brandy fan) and then fold them into the cake portion of the recipe. I did not have fresh lemons, so I use a chopped preserved lemon. I cannot bother to go buy one orange just for the zest, so I toss in some fruit punch instead. I slow bake the lot in the oven and the cake turns out all right.

My fruitcake

Now, this is when the OCD kicks in. I have some notion that a fruitcake needs to mature with some alcohol in it, but not much idea of how to do this because all the fruitcakes of my past were ready to eat. How much booze do I use? How often should I add some to the cake? Do I just pour it on, or brush it on? How long should the cake sit, weeks or months? I turn to the internet for information.

Let me tell you that every single fruitcake article on the internet for the past seven years is repetitive and blatantly plagiarized from the same sources without attribution. I am ashamed at all the blog posts I read on fruitcakes that repeat the same tropes over and over as if they are original to the author. A typical fruitcake article has the following:

--a trope on ancient Roman fruitcakes

--a trope on Filipino fruitcakes

--a Johnny Carson joke

--a Jay Leno joke

--a trope on American fruitcake nuclear green tutti frutti (even I repeat that one here)

--the American designated day for fruitcake toss games.

--the 106 year old fruitcake found in Antarctica, still edible.

Finding useful and apparently obscure information on “maturing” fruitcakes takes no fewer than eight pages into a Google Search, and I ended up scouring more than twenty search pages.

So, a fruitcake “matures” over time with periodic “feedings” of booze. The skins of the fruits break down, releasing the tannins. The flavors of the tannins reduce the sugary sweetness, balancing it out and creating flavor nuances. In this sense, fruitcakes are more akin to wine maturation than puerh fermentation.

97 year old Australian fruitcake. It's still good.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/tusnelda/11373152845/

A fruitcake does not mold, or should not mold, assuming the cake has a much higher proportion of fruit to cake. One reason the cake should not mold is the amount of alcohol which is preserved by wrapping the cake up in layers of plastic and tin foil. If the cake is to be kept for long term, people wrap the cake in muslin soaked with booze, and then cover the thing in plastic and tin foil. Another reason the cake does not mold is because of the high sugar content. Apparently, sugars are resistant to molds, the butter and flour are susceptible to mold rather than the sugars.

A light bulb goes on in my head. Over time, puerh tea breaks down its cell walls to release the bitter juices which are converted to sugar via Rhizopus yeast which uses carbons from bacteria as food. As the tea sweetens with more and more plant sugars, the molds present in the tea decline over time until they die off at the end of decades of fermentation. A fully fermented puerh tea should have almost no bacteria or mold, because these are consumed by fermentation and replaced by plant sugars. Thus the puerh tea is safe to drink, and sweet rather than bitter.

I learned more about the nature of sugars in fruitcakes. Apparently, sugars with their crystalline structure are very hard, and hold water. If the fruitcake is appropriately moist, the structure of the sugars is loosened. But if the fruitcake dries out, the sugars want to return to hard crystals. Should a fruitcake dry out and harden, the sugars in their crystalline structure can be induced to release water and return to a moist state. To do this, one can heat the fruitcake in a dry low heat oven.

😲

Wait...so, a dry, hard fruitcake actually returns to a moist fruitcake by heating in an oven, without adding more moisture? Apparently so, and this is because the sugars are holding the moisture.

I start to think about the overly-humid stored puerh cakes that get dried out like old autumn leaves. Of course vegetal matter has simple sugars, whereas a tighter sucrose sugar has an extra carbon and a more complex crystalline structure that holds water molecules. I did add about ¾ cup dark brown sugar to my fruitcake. 

But I wonder if added heat does more to reconstitute a dried out puerh cake than added humidity. Not to mention the musty mildew odor that can disappear with added heat. I have that dried out humid eBay fake tea donation from July…should’ve thrown it away, but didn’t. 

eBay Fake, from this post

Into the oven it goes.

I am not expecting this tea to turn into something miraculous, it is a health hazard more than anything else. However, I am curious to find out what changes, if anything, after an oven-bake. To reconstitute a fruitcake, a scientist recommends 140F (60C) for 10 minutes. I have a small oven to use (no way am I gonna fire up my expensive gas oven for a piece of crap) that has a lowest temp of 150F (65C), but tends to the cold side when using it for cooking. Close enough.

A rack seems like a good idea.

After ten minutes of bake time, I get a wafting odor of basement from the oven. I went twelve minutes, doubting whether this is enough time for the heat to completely penetrate the tea cake. Come to think of it, a dried out fruitcake is likely equally dense if not more so. I am going to try the outer leaves anyway, not the innards. I fire up the kettle.

Oven view.

The tea does not look any different in appearance after the oven, so I did not take another photo. As for my previous testing of this tea, I used 8g and the same Yixing pot. I threw away the first three rinses as before. I still smell some mildew basement in the Yixing, but much less than I remember.

Could be worse...

The brew is light and actually sweet. Not that unpleasant really. I still feel just a slight tongue numbing but if I can get past that, the tea is still a bit lively. Now the wet storage is at more of a perfect level: when a wetter stored tea has one part woodiness and one part humidity, to me that is just the right touch. 

I cannot discern whether the tea is actually made sweeter by the heating, or if the basement humidity is reduced enough to taste the sweetness which was already in the tea, but previously obscured. I do not recall seeing green in the leaves the last time, but perhaps I did not look closely enough in the sunlight to see. Maybe the cake is not quite dead.

I notice now the leaves still have some green.

One thing is certain to me now. If I have a tea with storage that I feel is a bit too much, I will definitely put the tea in the oven for ten minutes. After all, most rather wet teas are on the less expensive side, so I am not potentially risking a very fine tea. I will also consider the idea of using the oven to reduce any accidental white fuzz on tea. In fact, if tea is not yet a loss I might rehabilitate an experiment “gone too far” by oven heating. At such a low oven temp, I am not risking burning the tea. 

So, what did I learn from fruitcake that I can apply to tea? A fruitcake is actually more akin to wine, but has a maturation process fed by moisture. High sugar content and alcohol inhibit mold, and once tannins are released from the fruit, a complex balance of flavors emerge. This too happens with aged puerh as it converts bitter tannic juices to sugars. Those of us with a craving for complexity might find a fruitcake hobby satisfying, and certainly more rewarding in the short term as we wait years for our tea to mature. 

Some interesting links:

Fruitcake chemistry

https://cosmosmagazine.com/chemistry/how-your-christmas-cake-might-outlive-you

Kosher Fruitcake recipe

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/kosher-cuisine/almond-dried-fruit-cake-for-the-kosher-kitchen-on-tu-bishvat-1.410969

Kerala India Fruitcake recipe

http://theeatgallery.blogspot.com/2014/12/kerala-plum-cake-fruit-cake-step-by.html

What the Hell I'm just gonna buy gluten-free from the UK.

https://christmasfood.marksandspencer.com/the-collection-gluten-free-snowflake-cascade-christmas-cake/p/p60051521