A few more reports from my continuing exploration of the world of pu-erh tea, specifically sheng pu-erh.
2005 Menghai “Meng Song Gu Cha Shan Peacock”
This is a young sheng that I saw mentioned on Teachat. I bought a sample from Hou De Asian Art as part of my first order from that company. I’m very impressed with this tea. Even dry, it has a beautiful woodsy aroma with a bit of tobacco. When brewed, the liquor is a rich amber. The mouth-feel is thick and the aroma is smoky. The smokiness is foremost in the taste, followed by some more typical young sheng astringency and a nice hui gan. For such a young tea it seems relatively mature and certainly doesn’t have any of the fishy or medicinal qualities that can ruin young sheng. Overall, a great tea. I’d be tempted to buy a bing if I knew where to find one. An aside: in descriptions of sheng, I often run across statements implying that smokiness is somehow a bad thing, whereas I very much enjoy it in moderation. I’ll have to investigate this further.
2000 Zhong-Cha Kumming “Lan Tie”
This is another purchase from Hou De and another definite winner. Writing about this tea is kind of exciting because I can’t find much about it on the web. I must have bought the last sample, because even Hou De doesn’t have anything. Like the previous tea, the aroma of the dry (and wet) tea is pure tobacco smoke, with maybe some wet moss behind it. Based on this, I wasn’t expecting the complexity of taste that this tea offers. You can definitely taste the smoke, but there is a lot more going on. There is a delicate flowery quality that I normally associate with oolongs more than pu-erhs, and a mouth-feel that is also thinner than what I expect in a pu-erh. I confess that this may have something to do with my brewing technique, since I used a bit less leaf than I usually do with shengs: I might have to try that more often. This is the oldest pu-erh that I have tried so far, but that will change once I get to the …
1999 Menghai Yiwu Mountain (Dark Blue Piao) Green Big Tree
This is another sample from Hou De and the oldest pu-erh that I have tasted so far. I gather from posts like this one that this tea is something of a holy grail in the world of pu-erh. I could only afford a very small sample. Thanks to Hou De for making such samples available. I will never shell out $400 for a cake. The dry tea is lovely: big leaves with flecks of silver. It doesn’t smell like much dry, but when brewed the leaves have a fascinating odor that I’m having a hard time placing. No smoke in this one. Maybe camphor? The liquor is reddish even in the early infusions and the taste is amazingly complex with a sweet fruity/honey quality foremost. If not for the telltale camphor/medicinal quality, I might almost think this was an oolong if drinking it blind. There’s a strong cha qi and I felt a little flushed and light-headed after only two cups. The spent leaves smell very strongly of honey. Just as a curiosity, I found the largest tea leaf I’ve ever seen among the spent leaves: that puppy was about 5 inches long!
2004 Menghai Superior Grade Pu-erh
I bought a whole cake of this one from Pu-erh Shop a while back and I haven’t gotten around to commenting on it yet. This seems like an appropriate place to write about it, because it actually bears some similarities to the above 1999 Menghai. Like that tea, it falls at the “fruity/floral” end of sheng pu-erh rather than the “smoky/tobacco” end. There is a bit of honey flavor in this one, but the more dominant taste reminds me very strongly of dried apricots. Also, the spent leaves have a more characteristically pu-erh smell of moss or damp wood. And best of all, this tea is actually affordable, at about $50 for a whole cake.