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. 

2022 CSH Emperor 霸王青饼

 My thanks to Chen Sheng Hao for sending over their latest sampler pack, the 2022 Yi Pen box. 

2022 Yi Pen Chen Sheng sampler

Also, my apologies for the long delay in getting something posted about this box. I have been out of commission with sheng drinking again due to health issues. 

The Yi Pen Cheng Sheng sampler box is a fairly good deal considering you get 7 x 28g mini beengcha, ready to break into four sessions. For $75, this is 196g of tea, not bad at all considering the price of a full size of each of these teas, some of which are not available on the site anyway. CSH samplers are beautifully packaged sessions, and samples really are a must if you are thinking of investing in any of their teas. If this sampler doesn't interest you, the company seems to add 2-3 samplers a year so keep your bookmark ready to check back sometime after spring harvest.

Looking through the description of the teas, the only one offering any bitter profile is the Emperor, therefore the only sample that interests me. This is a recipe the company has been doing since 2008 or so, looking to perfect the idea of an aroma-forward tea. What this means, in terms of the tea, is a company secret; all we know is that blending is disclosed as part of this annual production. 

My session with this tea started in February when I tried to sneak in a 7g session in between high doses of NSAIDs. I managed to finish only two steepings, and was awake with a stomach ache the rest of the night. Green puerh does not mix with ibuprofen, even in between doses. I know that, but it's annoying to be off my tea so I did it anyway and paid for it.

My little beeng is very green, if I didn't have the stomach issue I would have brewed the whole thing in one go, a 9-day binge novena is more my speed. Especially since I don't want to keep these broken pieces in a gaiwan on the shelf; I am trying to get away from this behavior. Also, breaking apart the 7g quarters just cracks the leaves into bits. But, in we go, 7g into my 120 ml gaiwan. I do more like 60 ml steeps. The brew has a beautiful pink undertone in the first steeping, my photo looks a little too orange, but the brew is a little deep, the leaves might have some brown edges. 

The aroma of the brew is almost dizzying, very floral Mengsong/Hekai-ish, with the more acrid and savory tomato vine, that I prefer, muted and underneath. Bitterness does not disappoint, the huigan is so quick, usually such an asset in a tea. I only took two steepings, that is not enough for me to even feel the caffiene nor any unusual qi. The cup floral aroma lingers.

After this, I let the tea dry out in the gaiwan for two weeks. The tea oxidized black along the top. Normally I am fine with that in my own tea, but I considered starting over with a new session because the tea is different now, I honged it a little. To be totally fair to the tea, I should have started again, but my dodgy stomach decided just two more steeps would be better to get this blog post out sooner by steeping further instead. Both of these steepings still strongly floral with a bit more of the daisy stem than before. I am glad this is bitter, because the floral is just so Disney for me. Almost garish, and cartoon, like those neon colors you know are probably not from nature. 

So I accept that blending is a factor, but aroma-forward tea like this has to also be a result of 17 years they have been working on this tea. Is it all nature only? Or have some of these leaves been propagated for aroma? The processing is also a factor, this could be one of those ever-green teas that are meant to be consumed like it is now rather than aged. 

I dried out the leaves again, and had two more sessions, so 5 and 6. This time the heavy floral is worked off, leaving the weedy/vine savory notes that I much prefer. Still plenty bitter, the quick huigan is impressive. 

But I am overwhelmed by Disney-ish over-the-top everything, the green, the heavy floral, bitter yes but quick get that converted, the huigan like a skater showing off a triple quad. Who is this tea for? Emperor implies a type of tribute, or showcase tea, and this tea shows off the factory more than anything, I can see a table of 8-10 people who can together easily share cups of the first two steepings to appreciate the skill of the factory. Executive tea. This would be great for a teahouse experience. 

I wasn't able to finish all of this session. My stomach didn't hurt exactly, because I'm now down to 12 hr spaced doses of nsaids, but it didn't feel great. This tea isn't for me, a home storage enthusiast. The leaves are translucent like tissue, very young trees. I have more to say on that subject, but I will leave it for another post, on another day. The tea had maybe two more sessions left in which I would expect the bitterness to remain, but the floral is mostly gone along with the aroma in the cup. I just can't finish this out.

Again, my apologies for taking so long to review the box, and I appreciate the opportunity, Next year I need to make a better effort to steer away from accepting more samples, my health is too unreliable now. When I can drink tea, I would rather drink what I have now. I prefer the Jin Xiang series over the Emperor, sure the Jin Xiang is a little twiggy but the stems are thick, the leaves are more substantial and processed for home storage. I am certain this tea will not keep the aroma in very warm/humid storage conditions, which limits it for many collectors who store tea.

Pu-erh Nation

original map by chinatouristmaps.com

A loose leaf tea fan eventually discovers puerh tea, this is inevitable. People who last past that first gongfu invariably start an online search to learn more about this type of tea, and eventually they fall headlong into the rabbit hole of the hobby. The rabbit holes are full of enthusiasts, elite gamers of paper wrapped camellia sinensis assamica x assamica discs, with the goal of sticking a landing, and placing a trophy into one’s personal home storage. We fill forums with shipping problems, brewing problems, lying asshole sellers, fomo, rumors and snotty hubris. 

Beyond the shopping is another warren of puerh-only groundhog trails, running through countries around the world for even more privately-held elite tea, in an unending cycle of spring harvests and shou piles. Heavily sated with buying, we turn to storage matters in another flurry of watering holes filled with members of our kind. We side-eye someone knowingly when they order tea in a shop and sigh over the choices. If you catch a sideways glance, then you just know, like a tap tap under a bathroom stall of mold, pubic hair, corn kernels and plastic ties. Takes a particular breed of tea-human willing to brush all that off and swallow it anyway, all the while complaining about the fungal hoarding stigma, wafting like a wad of wet tissue on the shoe of the tea social sphere, flopping behind us as we wet-knee walk. 

Yeah, we get it. We are insufferable to live with, in our houses full of broken refrigerators, coolers and crocks, with the crunch of tea leaves underfoot requiring one to wear slippers and pick up chunks larger than a dime. Our pets choose our tea, it’s lame, we know that. Complain about the stereotypes all you like. Sorta like Janet sings, so we are one Pu-erh Nation, irrespective of national boundaries, looking for a better way of tea life. In truth, all the tunnels of the earth lead back to Yunnan, because digging a hole to China is, in fact, a real thing. 

Blah, blah they always say, but we are in a golden age of Puerh tea. Because we are all still here, from the early internet pioneer tea writers and forum humpers, and the vendors too, gods bless us everyone. 

At the tip of the spear is our Hero, our very first hero, David Lee Hoffman, who is still defending his cave storage puerh hoard from the Evils of the local city and county governments trying to take his property, and demolish his incredible, fully self-sustaining and waste recycling home facility, including water recycling. He is the first of us to have a Wikipedia entry and a decade of press behind his struggle to prevent the hoard from the horde. I bet half of you never heard of him, and the other half doesn’t know he is still selling tea and has 8 pages of listings! Get over there to his website, support our Brother and try his storage, buy something from him, okay? He has plenty of old stuff in that list. (Don’t be a dick about it either, don’t ask about the stuff he isn’t selling, that is just rude.) Thoughts and prayers and dollars are better. 

We still have so many of the early vendors, apart from the great factories of course. Houde is still adding teas. I know that some like Scott at Yunnan Sourcing and probably Cloud would love to retire, but how do you retire from tea? No one has. People seem to make and sell tea until they drop. Give your favorite vendor some love instead of complaints for a change, put up some of their tea on your socials that you particularly like and help out so their families can rest a little. 

Still can buy here (official re-seller)

Our favorite factories and boutique purveyors are still around too, and more accessible than ever. I cannot complain when tea factories like Chen Sheng Hao open up in Canada and sell Lao Ban Zhang. I can order from stateside and overseas tea shops who are happy to ship. We don’t know if nations outside the Pu-erh Nation will survive which can change our situation at any moment, so I appreciate all that we have now.

A Liu Bao chocolate bar!
PLUS 50g bag white2tea laochatou,
oh, and the pretty cup, all here.

We know that once inside the Pu-erh Nation, there is no way out. Not if you expect to keep your tea intact. I have learned I cannot stop, not entirely. In this golden age, we still have all our writers with us, and our best forum chatters, and more camaraderie than ever before. We are making efforts amongst all of us to look up forums and articles in languages we don’t speak, to try and connect and use translation tools, because we have more respect for one another or we got more snobby or we got tossed out of home, or we want in on the group buys. Sing it, people.

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.

2020 Chen Sheng Hao Naka

Chen Sheng Hao sampler box

I have had a bit of a break on my blog here, mainly due weather. We have had a very hot and humid summer this year, living on the edge of the western heat domes plaguing the nation. In the north where I live, houses are built to hold in heat in frigid winter which is misery in a hot summer. My AC is barely tolerable, and drinking hot tea late in the day holds little appeal. I continue to enjoy my a.m. tea, but by midday I am quickly turning to iced beverages to keep cool. Finally we have a few days break in the heat and humidity so I can get in a nice evening session without feeling like I am dying from overheating. 

The blue bags are blends,
the brown are single-origin teas.

Thank god because I have been looking at my tasty new sampler teas from Chen Sheng Hao with some anticipation all month. I could not resist getting this sampler set. For one, just the box alone is tea Disney for me. I know fancy packaging is ubiquitous factory fare in China, but ordering anything in this kind of packaging direct from China is just asking for crushed boxes. Most of my tea orders arrive from China all accordion-pleated. Once, I ordered some Dayi shou cakes in a metal tin, and the tin arrived crushed even with the whole box wrapped in layers of bubble wrap. That tin was so smashed one of the bottom corners split open. So when I opened my CSH sampler box shipped from the new Vancouver warehouse, I felt like I'd ordered a perfume bottle from Saks Fifth Avenue. The presentation is just gorgeous. 

Naturally I am starting with the 2020 Naka because over the years I have covered some Naka teas in this blog, and want to see how this tea compares. The sampler packets contain 7-9g of tea, and this Naka sample weighed 8g. I can see right away this is the small leaf Naka varietal, the real local varietal and not imported plantation tea. Chen Sheng Hao signed a "cooperation agreement" with Naka village in 2012, and first produced their 357g label beengcha starting in spring 2013. You can buy 2013-2021 vintages from the Canadian website, which means they moved a lot of tonnage to this location. I note that years 2020 and 2021 are 250g teas pressed into a square shape. If you want a 357g round beeng, you will need to buy 2019 or older. The 2020 square costs $73 currently, and the 2021 is $68.

CSH Naka area factory
photo cspuerh.com

A few years back LiquidProust organized a Naka sampler tasting on Steepster featuring CSH Naka teas from a range of years. Quite a few people participated in that opportunity, but few posted any notes on how they liked the teas. That is rather regrettable because we could have a real catalog of notes to help with choosing teas from this new Canada warehouse, but we have nothing to go by really. I have some blended CSH tea samples in my stash that I didn't think are particularly wonderful, but they also have storage issues. 

I brewed my entire sample in a porcelain gaiwan as I always do when testing a tea. The tea is completely separated with no chunks, it's all loose tea. Brewing loose tea like this affects how the session brews, so steep 1 the tea is already presenting strongly rather than slowly loosening up. 

The tea hits the tongue with strong bitterness and very quick huigan, and more fruity than floral. The wet leaf smells like cantaloupe rinds left to sit out in the heat. Bit of a dark whiskey undertone, but no smokiness and very little char in the strainer. Processing is top notch, I am not seeing any oxidation nor oolonged sweetening. 

Steep 2

Five steeps in the tea hits with eyeball and face numbing. Clearly I have been off the sauce for a few weeks now. My fall from the wagon probably makes me love this tea more than I probably should, I really enjoy the hot heavy fumes in my throat and stomach. There is a reason I love puerh tea, at its best I feel like I am drinking a toddy rather than tea. So I might be a tad over-enthused, but this Naka is very clean and the processing is less..shall we say...traditional. It lacks the wood smoke processing notes my older Naka teas have, and none of the tobacco-ish finish. One of my Naka teas is of course bamboo-pressed, so I have a really traditional one. White2tea's older 05 Naka has all that traditional wood processing, but the body effects are so nice one can overlook that. But Chen Sheng Hao is a premium factory charging premium prices, and so I am glad to see the processing is at least up to scratch.

Steep 5

Overall the tea is quite peach fruity with a slight floral note and a touch of hard liquor and vanilla. Very tongue coating and bitter. After steep 6 I got hit with a strong astringent mouth reaction, and a glass of water did not dispel a squeaky-clean tongue sensation. My face-numbing dispelled after about 15 minutes. Most of the action was over by steep 8. At this point I was brewing at about a minute per steep, but the leaves started to get a little bit overcooked and stewed. The gaiwan smelled a bit compost-y like old fruit peels. My 8th cup still retained some bitterness and the tea can clearly brew longer. With loose leaf like this it just won't have much left in terms of flavor. 

I really like this tea for $0.30/g, and anyone enjoying fresh sheng or looking for something to hold might enjoy this single-origin Naka. You can keep your forum '"factory" creds rather than fessing up to buying something boo-teek, but this is every bit as good as boutique, if lacking somewhat in leaf quality. I see some buds in here, however the tea is mainly chopped with a bit more stems than a boutique tea offers. But really all of the Naka small leaf quality is in here and it matches the price quite nicely. 

More important to me is what Chen Sheng Hao is offering us who live in North America. I am not going to quibble over anything when we have the ability to order small leaf Naka, or any of the other teas this company is selling. I don't care what the price is, whether it's this $73 2020, or an over $1000 beeng of Lao Ban Zhang. The important thing for me is that by opening this warehouse in Canada, we can be sure that China is taking sheng customers in North America seriously. We are no longer a potential market for dumping excess summer shou tonnage. Chen Sheng Hao is one of the premium factories, one of the best really. 

I do wonder if there is any other motivation for the company to move this amount of tea to North America, whether costs of storage are part of the issue, or maybe drier storage. Because it seems to me that although we have a decent sheng market here, I am not sure we have the market for the $1000 beengcha and $6000 tongs. Their market is really in Asia for these prices. Even if we did do this kind of buying, servicing our market here would not require a full range of Naka vintages, the last year or two would do nicely. That's why I wonder about the storage issue, because we know about the current preference in Asia for drier stored tea. Apart from storage I can't think why else CSH would move years of tea vintages over here only to ship them back to Asian customers. Unless warehouse storage is just so much less expensive here, but I cannot entirely believe that when the company has every capacity to build a warehouse anywhere in China. Maybe I am missing some essential knowledge here and somebody else knows more. 

What is important to me is that really for the first time we have the opportunity to buy factory tea direct without any Taobao nonsense and no middleman. I am not sure the prices are any better, but I appreciate that Chen Sheng Hao is here. I am glad to access premium factory teas, new and aged, without needing to order from China and getting a mashed box and agent fees. I don't have to worry I am getting fake tea. This is a long time coming, when you think of the 20 years or more we have waited to buy anything direct in our locale other than shou bricks at a local Chinese food market. 

The Sample Life

Here is yet another tea sample I pulled from my stash this spring that I wanted to try. I am not sure where this is from, maybe Mr. Mopar? Anyway, it is labeled 1990s Menghai 8592 which is a shou formula, and if it is really 1990s I can't throw this out without trying it. Now is not really the time of year for shou for me, but I'll try it anyway. I get to thinking about how samples really are not a bad way to drink tea. Sample drinking has a bad rap on forums from tea snobs who feel that a sample is not a sufficient amount of tea to really know a puerh. Or that a cake size is really a sample, and the ideal purchase is a tong. I don't entirely disagree with that notion, but at the same time I feel a sample is sufficient to at least experience a tea in some fashion, and in this sense could be better than never trying a tea at all. 

I don't know why it is, maybe the pandemic or the economy or tricky shipping, but suddenly the idea of a sample stash has a prudent feel to it. I do feel like the negative view toward samples is pervasive enough that people whose stash consists entirely of samples feel the need to hide that fact when conversing on forums. The opinions of those drinking from samples appear to stigmatize them when they express an opinion, "oh you just tried a sample," rather than recognizing the fact that the person actually tried the tea before opining on it. Seems to me trying the tea first matters more than opining when you haven't tried the tea at all. And plenty of opinions get aired on teas people haven't ever tried! I can find plenty of reasons to own sample teas.

Just starting out.

You have taken the plunge into puerh, and are tasting around to find out what you like. In this case, sampling is a great idea. I think especially if you are looking for daily drinker teas, the best thing to do is crunch a lot of samples to find that sheng or shou which suits and sits well in the tummy for every day. Certainly sampling ahead makes sense if you are thinking of dropping a larger amount of money, or are checking whether the claims surrounding a tea are genuine. 

Your Budget.

Let's face it, teas are expensive. You can participate in a puerh hobby, but only to a certain degree because you don't have money to waste. Still, this is better drinking some tea than none at all, right?

No one else in your household drinks puerh.

If you are sharing living space with another person or even a full family, that space is subject to some resentment when one person uses more than their fair share. How many partners complain not about the tea, but rather how much space that tea takes up in the living space, and how loud is that complaint because they don't share in the hobby? Nagging gets annoying. Also, a strategy to try more teas is do-able when you are getting just samples, the partner is not so likely to sniff at an envelope arriving in the mail rather than a big tong box. 

You move around frequently.

Owning a stash takes up space and increases exponentially when you have tongs and when you need specialized storage solutions. Puerh is a long-haul hobby, and hauling just is not conducive to a lifestyle where you need to move every year, or even two or three times a year. Maybe you have no home at all and live in temporary situations. Having a stash of samples means one box as opposed to hauling multiple plastic tubs, crocks and tong bags. Feels good to travel light.

You don't want to bother with storage.

Space is part of the reason perhaps, but another very valid reason to go with smaller amounts of tea is because you have no interest in storage. Some people do have the space and the money, but don't want to bother with storage solutions and babysitting tongs. Is your opinion as a taster of teas really worth less because of this? Someone drinking samples for two years may have a better idea of puerh teas than a person with two years of drinking one tong. Many people find storage challenging or uninteresting, and feel they have to hide this when talking about puerh. 

Opportunities arise in sample form.

Many of the best teas simply are not available any longer as full beengs or tongs, and the only way to get your hands on a tea is when a collector is willing to break up a beeng for a few friends. Any amount of that tea is a gifted moment. Also, many superb buying opportunities from vendors are samples. We all know about Houde's sample sales. Let's see who is sleeping...did you sign up for Chen Sheng Hao marketing emails? If so, you woke up to this in your email box yesterday.

CSH is offering a box of 7g x 10 samples, or a box of 28g minis, or you can get a 10g sample of 2020 Lao Ban Zhang for $38 and change. Better run along quick if you want any of these. Might want to sign up for emails first, you can get a code for an additional 10% off everything except the LBZ.

One criticism of samples is that they may not be in the best condition, or taken from a bad part of the beeng, such as the beenghole. But a beeng may not be in the best condition anyway, and the chances of this are just the same as for a sample, it depends on how well the tea was kept, whether a beeng or sample. I guess someone has to get the beenghole, no one throws it out, it is just more compressed. Aesthetically the beenghole is less pleasing, but if one feels the experience is diminished, perhaps ordering another sample is the remedy. Even if the tea is sold out, I've heard of many instances when a vendor was willing to send out another sample, so if you don't like your beenghole just email the vendor.

Quantities of "gushu" teas are small.

Even if you can get your hands on some nice tea, chances are the amount is small because the harvest is by hand from a small stand of tea trees. 200g beengs are more common now than 357g outside of big factory productions of drinker teas. Some vendors have 100g or even smaller beengs. The quantity of some of the best gushu teas frequently consists of a small bag of loose puerh. The quantity harvested is so tiny that a pressing is not possible, and the leaves are lovely such that the whole leaf may be appreciated rather than potentially broken away from a pressed form. 

You want to taste widely.

After the pandemic year I think people want to make sure they have the experiences they crave. Time is already limited by how much we work and put into family life. I think the whole "stamp collecting" criticism is a bit overdone, especially now when we can find more important places to put time and money. Yet drinking a bit of an experience is valuable time spent, and you can taste your way around 10 teas much more easily with a sample quantity than buying 10 tongs you then must store. 

We have many other beverages in life we may wish to indulge in, perhaps your partner likes wines or whiskies or other drinks, or you do, and you want those beverages as well as your tea. No reason to miss out on a memorable experience of a particularly good tea just because you don't want a whole tong of it. 

You can't fit a beeng down your pants.

Showing up with a gym bag at a tea shop is a guaranteed way to be watched the entire time. 

I think a perfectly valid way to live the puerh life is to get the tea you can afford and have room to keep. One doesn't need to drink an entire sample in one go, a bit can be saved in the bag and tried again in a few years for a renewed experience. You still get the benefits of tasting changes in the tea without being saddled with bulky storage. At some point, even a collector has to stop hoarding. At that point, acquiring any more tea makes little sense except for a sample.

This "1990s Menghai" 8592 consists of slivered chunks taken off a beeng. They opened up nicely with a couple of rinses and started out sweet and thick like apple juice. But I could only get down two steepings. My stomach was hurting from pills when I started. I had hoped the shou would help the pill belly, but it didn't. The tea had more fermentation flavor than should be the case for a 20 year old tea, and I noticed the leaves were small and chopped, they didn't look like grade 9 leaves before the chopping, they looked like better leaves frankly. I started to wonder if the label on the bag wasn't accurate. It could be the gifter re-used a sample bag without changing the label and I have forgotten what the tea actually is. Oh well. It's a decent enough shou, and I am glad I tried it, but also happy I only have a sample. That's another reason to live the sample life, a lot less waste.

I think we need to get rid of the gate-keeping around tea quantity, and stop making people feel their opinions on a tea are less valid because they own a sample rather than a tong or beeng. Plenty of opinions abound on teas given by people with no experience of those teas whatsoever. So how is your sampler life somehow less valid than these total virgins? Enjoy your wide-ranging experiences of puerh tea along with all the other indulgences you can fit in. Stand up and give your opinion on teas and let's welcome the view of someone who definitely has tried a tea. 

You Deserve to Drink Better Puerh

72 Hours from white2tea
an excellent puerh if you picked it up

The whole endeavor of drinking puerh tea and building a collection is really about my best teas. My truly excellent teas define my collection, not the average drinkers or worse garbage I really need to toss out. I want to focus my collection on the best teas, because this is worth the time and money. In this blog post I am going to address the idea of fine drinking, because Chinese teas, let's face it, are the best in the world at reaching the sublime and puerh is really king of the pile. This blog post is addressed to the puerh snobs and tea whores and yes, the connoisseur. If you cannot handle that, please run along elsewhere, there is a group for you someplace else today. 

The truly fine puerh teas.

What is this level of connoisseur puerh tea drinking? More than anyone else, Mr. Max Falkowitz tried to bring the connoisseur puerh experience into the world of fine food and drink during his time at Saveur magazine. Max Falkowitz suggests that "flavor and aroma are only the beginning. Taste is fleeting. But the way the aftertaste manifests in your throat or down your gullet, how the tea makes you feel, where the qi activates--these are lasting hallmarks of quality for which connoisseurs pay dearly. Some of my favorite teas don't taste like much at all. The drama happens from the neck down." [I'll post a reference to Mr. Falkowitz's quote below rather than a link because the link brings up a PDF file] He's not done yet, he writes at least 2-3 published magazine articles a year on tea, mainly puerh. Barely anyone in the puerh tea community has heard of him and yet he was on the finalists for a James Beard award in 2019. I have a fortunate memory of taking tea with Mr. Falkowitz and I brought what I had at that time as my best tea. 

In many respects, his work has shown me that the western food world receives ideas of connoisseur-level puerh more readily than western puerh communities. No one wants to ask themselves: are my teas and drinking all about the best possible experience for my money? It causes pain, ego bruising and very often defensive posturing. But in honestly evaluating my collection, facts must be faced. If whatever I am drinking is not at the experience level described here, then I am in truth drinking downward in my collection. Any defensiveness on my part about this assessment can lead to closing myself off to trying better teas and having sublime tea sessions.

Frequently puerh discourse focuses on a practical mundane level of owning tea which gets turned into a non-drinking aesthetic experience. Tea reviews in blogs function at a mundane data level when describing the number of steeps, the provenance, the cost per gram as virtues. All this data certainly assists in the purchasing decision of a tea. But people think describing all ten steepings of a tea is an aesthetic end in itself, rather than the pleasure they experience, if any. So too are posts about the nuts and bolts of storage. Tea nerdism in the details, but aesthetic pleasure of fine puerh is in the bodily drinking experience. Did I really enjoy the tea or did I just get my caffeinated storage worth?

"Excuse me," Falkowitz writes in the same piece above. "No one tells you this when you start drinking Chinese teas, but the good ones make you burp. There's an idea in tea drinking called qi, which literally translates to 'breath' or 'energy flow,' and refers to the somatic effects that sometimes accompany a quality brew. It's a rare thing--the vast majority of teas aren't powerful enough to summon it--and a personal one, but the feelings are hard to ignore. Think sudden sweat on your palms. Tingling along the back of your neck. A wave of relaxation down your spine, like the relief of a well-placed acupuncture needle. The more tea you drink, the more qi squirrels its way around your body. Eventually, all that breath needs somewhere to go. So you burp."

Can we agree that an excellent puerh tea has the qualities of the finest aesthetic experience in the body, ranging from the aroma to the mouth to the gullet to the body sensations? It's worth the investment to find such teas, and to do so we need sources of conversation at this level. Instead, much day-to-day puerh discourse aspires to what we could consider "office tea drinking," which is satisfied by caffeinated barely drinkable puerh tea with garbage storage.

Vendor and blogger Wilson is fortunate to belong to a group of puerh enthusiasts who, in pre-Covid times, met at least once a year to drink and consider puerh tea at the highest level they can acquire. His latest blog post "short" illustrates the difference between office type drinking and a serious connoisseur session. For practical purposes, he describes brewing up to 5 cups of oolong or puerh at one time to take to his computer, so he does not need to get up for more tea while busy. When buying tea, he pragmatically brews up a thermos of a sample to sip on while running errands, pondering whether or not to buy that tea. 

But then he hints that his more serious sessions are quite apart from practical office drinking. "Readers will know me that I do not describe a tea by each and every infusion but rather by initial and ending thoughts. I enjoy the complications of a tea, the aging results of storage and pleasant sensations after finishing a tea session." He is sitting together with the tea rather than needing to record data on every steep. My experience of Wilson is that he talks equally about easily acquired satisfying teas as well as teas which are more rare and costly. He knows he has readers interested in both. He has sent me many a sample just because he thought I should try something. A couple of my most memorable teas are purchased from his collection. 

The best tea is gonna cost.

Good tea is certainly subjective and aesthetic and I will own my opinion as a personal one if it makes you feel content, or maybe less mad about the things I write. But really, you deserve to drink better tea, not just cheap tea. When I consider what excellent tea costs, it's not cheap. It's more like $200 and up per piece. By "piece" I mean the unit such as a beeng of any size for consensus-level fine puerh.

At a connoisseur level of tea, apart from sampling we are not talking about buying grams, or price per gram. Anyone buying in grams has a financial limitation and is probably drinking downward rather than drinking better. That's just the truth of it. In wine we have plenty of popular discourses directed at finding the $9.99 bottle of wine that tastes like a $50 bottle of wine, but no one seriously considers either of those prices as representative of a connoisseur level of wine drinking. It's the dinner-beverage level of wine drinking. 

Any time I'm drinking tea that costs me less than $200 a piece today, I am drinking downward in my puerh collection, not up. I am doing office drinking or I am accepting storage that ruined a tea. It is true that not every tea costing $200 a piece and up is a worthy connoisseur tea--we do have cultural preferences and collecting quirks and outright scams to sort through. But I can guarantee you that a piece of puerh tea costing less than $200 today is not going to be an aspiration tea. It's downward drinking every time. It's settling for average ordinary tea or worse. 

The very fine level of puerh tea is simply quite costly today, and the best pieces may be out of reach of many of us. Nevertheless I can still buy tea at a fairly top level of quality if I save the money, and am ready when the real opportunities of buying aspiration teas arrive. Keep in mind I have spent salary money, inheritance money, investment money and retirement money on puerh tea. And at my age, food becomes less important a pursuit. It's very possible to make friends who share tea with you if your taste is truly refined, or start your own blog. The money is a real gateway but the opportunity after that is fairly equal if you cultivate sources, which you really should be doing in any connoisseur hobby. If you do not know people, at least start there. 

Cheap tea is not top quality tea.

Office tea drinking and its discourse is not really aesthetic so much as a kind of puritan moralizing. This moralizing celebrates paying as little as possible for a piece of puerh tea and tries to extol some good traits about it because you paid so little. It's not an aesthetic aspiration but a financial limitation and trying to feel better about it. Or trying to feel better about the office, but the office is not about drinking great tea. The office is about a virtue of getting work done and not really your tea. It extols productivity and thrift, and opposes sloth and waste. This is the opposite of the connoisseur and aesthete. 

Drinking downward and not upward in my collection is also the case when I cannot afford aged teas and instead try to pretend hotter or wetter fast storage is my version of "aged." We have a level of tea discourse which tries to pretend office tea prices can acquire old or fine tea, such as on Taobao, and this is simply a falsehood despite the desperation to believe it. There is a reason many teas are so cheap and it's because the aesthetic quality is poor, the body experience is non-existent and it is base drinking at best. 

I can accept a time and place for such drinking, but it is not an aspiration nor a connoisseur level of tea drinking. If my stomach really requires such teas, I suggest that drinking downward is the cause of the distress, and drinking better quality tea is a level where the tea is comforting rather than distressing. If you don't believe that, I will suggest you have never really consumed the fine level of puerh tea, the finest that it is capable of. In other words, you deserve better than that shit tea. 

I can think of a few other reasons why a person might want to aspire to better puerh tea experiences.

Really fine puerh tea is still possible to buy.

The environment in Yunnan is not completely wrecked yet by global warming, or chemicals or farming practices, any and all things that could someday result in a massive loss of tea. China is also still open to the idea of selling puerh tea to people outside of Yunnan. Sure, we have levels of puerh tea accessible only to a few insiders, but we still can buy some excellent puerh teas even from our remote spots on earth. If the post will deliver, we can still get our hands on some good stuff if you have the money to do so. We also have more collector sellers. But we cannot take for granted the tea available now will be so in five years time. The market is changing fast and prices keep on going up. If you think I am pessimistic, others are far more blunt in saying the boat to great tea is sailed and gone, if you want to look around for more opinions.

The puerh hobby is a bother.

Why bother with puerh tea if I am not going for the best I can get? Puerh tea is a pain in the ass to research, buy and store. I am not in a hobby where I put bottles on a rack, leave them to sit and dust them off someday. I either have to pay someone to store the tea, or pay extra for the existing storage as a reality. Any type of storage ranging from a constructed tea vault to shelf storage requires work on my part to check the tea. I give my tea all sorts of mothering for more years than a child takes to raise. 

Given that, why waste my time with all the effort involved just for office quality tea? I can buy a tong of office tea from any factory or vendor or another collector when I need something to drink, and buy the next one when I run out. I personally cannot be arsed to spend my little bit of time remaining on anything less than the best I can get. It's too much trouble. I might as well just buy some hongcha or shou or gunpowder tea, something that doesn't require the elaborate care and storage that raw puerh does.

The storage is not really a worry for the best tea.

We are probably going to drink our best puerh teas well before they hit 20 years. How many of you out there, right now, are drinking tea older than 20? Anyone? You cannot buy genuine 90s teas easily anymore, if at all, so if you are drinking tea that old then you stored it yourself. But I am guessing that all of you drinking "aged" tea are actually drinking somewhere in 10-20 years, and the tea is still greenish, and your finest teas have a bunch of bite marks in them because you've been dipping in all along. In a way the pressure of storage is actually off of us because truly good leaf, kept at least decently well, retains its good qualities. Hard core storage is more of a worry for people collecting wrappers to sell, or on trying to heat mostly mediocre tea to turn it drinkable, and for that the tea needs storage strategies.

The best tea leads to the highest level of aesthetic appreciation. 

Does my tea inspire me on a poetic and gastronomic level? Anyone who thinks tea writing is flowery crap is drinking office tea. Or moralizing on why paying so little for tea is a virtue. Or trying to dump bad tea. I have bad teas in my collection too. But I also have excellent ones that define my collection. The best tea is physically memorable and truly will make a person sing or babble like a baby or strike one dumb in silence. This is the level of tea we truly deserve. I hope you can go where that tea is. I know the best is what I need to drink before my time runs out.

Reference

Falkowitz, Max, "What Drinking Tea Taught Me about Drinking Everything Else," Imbibe Magazine, imbibemagazine.com, Nov/Dec 2018, p. 94.

2013 Guafengzhai by Wymm Tea

Remember Wymm Tea? Been awhile since I thought of this vendor, and you probably never have. Wymm is on nobody's radar and just as well. In fact if a puerh tea doesn't fit your $10 wallet and cellar-ed taste, do feel free to run along now but maybe check out their mulberry puerh wrappers because Wymm Tea is one of the only places I know of in North America to buy thick puerh paper wrappers. I tossed a 15g sample of the 2013 Guafengzhai in my cart along with a re-up on puerh paper.

The last time I wrote about Wymm Tea their website conjured up for me an image of a female customer with nothing in her house and who never eats. Let's see where she is now, because the pandemic has done a number on her with gym closures. Her Botox has long worn off and she lets her hair go silver at the roots. She probably went back to Wymm not for the tea but for the music playlists to download and she can dream of traveling again later this year. Stuck in her house on Zoom calls she longs for a moment of a park bench with a masked stranger and maybe a remote controlled vibrator, as good as it gets anymore, unless she has a husband on a Peloton who mainly drinks coffee which he makes because he doesn't trust anyone with his equipment. Thank the stars for meditation and a hot shower because it works if nothing else. 

I think of her because she more than anyone needs this tea and 8 full grams of it. The sample, like her face in February, is a little dry but nothing a day in a steam room won't open up, if only just. Tea with a middle-aged Yiwu-ish bent is a gentle lull which requires shoving but of course she is pushy. Takes awhile to get going too but she is used to that. Wymm Teas don't offend with acrid factory dirt, never allowed in the house, not even from the dog. 

Five chocolate covered apricot steeps in are enough to melt the Westman Atelier foundation off her face and onto her lap where it oozes to the floor. She watches her lipstick liquify with some fascination, maybe the bitter cold outside adds to the dizziness of the tea except her mouth is finally hungry amidst a fifth steep of intense salivating. She doesn't remember eating except at Thanksgiving, so she nibbles a bit of cracker and fish which will ruin her palate for a few steeps. 

I personally doubt she can take more than five steeps of a tea like this, only the puerh fiend can go further for another five and more cranial novocaine. From one freak to another I ask you, do you merely enjoy your slurps or do you want something more from your tea? Yes, I do think about where I put $20 and I have a whole menu of things to drink here at my house. This is a gentle tea but not for fools. In fact, only the starkly minimal women of my imagination should drink this anyway, for nothing else except to float away a grey frigid dirty sick winter of small hopes in a Harrods bag. She certainly doesn't have better teas than this. I have, but at a higher price point still. How much will people pay to release tears? Then again, maybe she'd rather not or you would rather not. It depends on coping with cracks, or not cracking.

I will leave it for her to decide. 15g for $19, or 200g for $168. Wymm currently ships only to Canada and the US.

Yeah...Whatever, Vendor

"Whatever 98" Green Stamp

Back in 2017 I bought a tea called "Whatever 1998" from Bitterleaf Teas, which I happened to see on their site when buying their 2017 Mansa. This Whatever tea came in a CNNP wrapper covered with another wrapper designed by Bitterleaf as a "raw puer from a private collector." The tea cost $0.55/g and was around $200 all in. I wrote about this tea and completed two sessions, one in porcelain and one in a clay teapot. While I referred to it as a CNNP Green Stamp because of the wrapper, the tea was not marketed as a CNNP Green Stamp. In the listing, Bitterleaf expressed an appropriate level of skepticism of the tea's story from the "somewhat eccentric private collector." Bitterleaf doesn't have the listing on their site anymore, but I found it on the Wayback Machine.

A year ago in February 2020 I had the idea that I might drink up this tea and maybe write about it again after storing it for several years. Before doing this I emailed Jonah at Bitterleaf Teas to ask more about the tea, and especially the private collector. "Anything about him," I said, because I'd offered my Tindr link to this guy in my blog post. Jonah emailed back that "he has a shop in one of the tea markets, looks just like all the others. Honestly, I don't know if we would stop in if browsing the market, but then again they all look the same and it's either that you know someone or fate that you step into a shop with something interesting."

I kept that email for a year now. When Bitterleaf started out selling, they weren't especially known as experienced in puerh tea. To their credit the Whatever tea was sold as a skeptical tea and not as anything in particular, but there is a world of difference between a source who is purely a collector and a person who is a tea shop vendor. Perhaps that's too fine a point for some vendors to appreciate, but for consumers this is a massively different bit of information to know where a tea comes from, a private collection or another vendor. This no-name tea was definitely sold by Bitterleaf as a "private collection" tea in the listing, and on their wrapper, without the additional bit that the guy is a tea vendor with a shop. 

Vendors purchase from other vendors all the time, that's where most get their factory teas unless from, well, the factory. Nothing wrong with this, but then the tea should be sold without any additional embellishments. Perhaps you might disagree on the definition of a vendor. I suppose I consider a "vendor" to be anybody of course with a shop of some kind, but also I consider as a puerh vendor someone who won't tell you where a tea comes from. I suppose Bitterleaf can also come back to say that the tea shop guy sold the tea from his private collection and not from the store shelves, and herein lies a difference for them. Kinda like being a little bit pregnant. I just don't think most tea buyers would primarily view the selling situation as an "eccentric collector" if he is also a tea vendor. I certainly don't.

All I can say is I am glad I am not a collector looking for specific factory teas. Obviously I'm not, because nobody looking for specific factory teas will spend money on something called Whatever with literally no provenance. However, buying factory teas outside of the factory really is buying tea with no provenance because nobody who is a vendor will tell you exactly where the tea comes from. They won't give up sources. So unless you buy the tea from the factory yourself, you are forced to accept "Whatever" the vendor tells you when you buy the tea.

This post is not intended as a huge call-out because honestly there is nothing to learn here, tea-wise. The tea itself is and was of almost no value other than whether it's good or not for drinking, it was priced and sold as a no-information older factory tea. Only people with extra money to blow and who don't care about the wherewithal buys a tea like this. I'm a writer looking for interesting teas to write about, so that gives me a big motivation to buy tea I don't especially need merely because it's a strange tea.

My main message here is not really about Bitterleaf, but rather this: if you have questions about a tea, contact the vendor. You may not find out anything at all, but maybe you will. I was certainly surprised to get additional information that contradicted the listing, whatever Whatever. Of course you may be in a situation where you want a refund too, I don't know. 

Actually, my other intention here is to get around to talking about the tea because I have had it for nearly 4 years and I want to see if it has changed any since I bought it. I thought the tea had a very nice dry storage character but it still had some ways to go. I definitely felt like it was younger than the stated '98, I never believed that any more than Bitterleaf did, and it seemed more like 2003 or some such in my original post just based on the progress at the time. Today I am going to brew the tea in clay, and I am really feeling glad about having a blog just now, because I have photos along with my notes to compare. In my original post I brewed the tea in both clay and porcelain, and now I can use the same teapot as I did then. 

I sampled the rinse this time. The tea still has the aroma of dry, dusty book storage which I rather like, personally I like this better than humid soil, just a preference, and also it is harder to fake. The first flash steeping was a bit too light when I tasted it, so I dumped it and let the tea sit in the water for about 20 seconds. Early notes are the powdery old books along with Mexican coffee notes, like freeze-dried coffee powder with cinnamon added. The tea then opens up with more fruity floral top notes along with a slight bitterness and the coffee powder.

Third steeping

This tea has smoothed out quite a bit since I last tried it. No doubt the clay teapot helps with that. The tea has quite a nice throatiness, very warming. I get a bit of plum and honey along with the fruit and continuing dusty books, along with a grassy/hay note. I have to add more seconds to the steep time with every brew. I tend to err on the too light with brew times because I'm accustomed to much heftier teas than this that instill the fear of tea gods in me.

Ninth steeping

It's been awhile since I drank a more old-fashioned factory tea which is pleasant and soothing to drink, like memories. The tea is much less bitter than it was four years ago, it wasn't heavily bitter then either but my notes indicate it still had bitterness and I'm only getting hints of that now. The soup is much darker brown than it was in my first review, you can see in the photo of the clay session a clear difference. I have to really push the tea because of age and also because it's a fairly stemmy tea, something I noted in my original post. You can't squeeze much flavor out of stems. The tea is warming and gives me the sweats, but that along with a bit less astringency reminds me that my medication suite now is different than 4 years ago. I'm taking a pill that has sweating as a side effect, so I have to ignore that. The tea has some mild qi, mainly just a spinal feeling of well-being and caffeine.

I went about 10 steeps, last time I did 15 and it seems like pushing to get there now, mainly because of stems this time. The leaves are a bit browner than before, but still green too. I like this tea as it is, so I am not tempted to push the storage on it. But it is also not terribly exciting to drink. Just a nice comfort tea of the old time factory sort with no real unpleasantness about it. I know a lot of people settle into a routine puerh drinking where they like a basic comfort factory tea, I guess it's more of a once in awhile trip for me. I just prefer something more engaging. Still, I imagine I will probably drink this up but for now it can sit a few more years.