A Tea Addict's Journal

Revisiting some puerh

March 28, 2008 · 2 Comments

I am starting to revisit some of the puerh I bought at various points to see how they taste now. Living in a rural area actually means higher humidity, as I noticed. It seems like the soil traps moisture and slowly releases them, so that there’s actually less of a humidity fluctuation from day to day. I wonder what that does to tea.

What I drank today is a cake I bought in Taiwan

From Gan’en Tea Factory, made in 2004, and supposedly Yiwu leaves.

Looks quite dark. Shipping cakes out of their tong wrapping really isn’t a good thing unless they have ample padding. Otherwise… it results in much grounded down leaves, as this one has suffered after coming here from Taiwan. I just used a lot of those scarps plus a small chunk from the cake.

The tea is also quite dark, and when drunk, there’s a definite sense of age in it. This is, I think, from the Taiwan storage it received. While it’s not quite wet, it’s definitely not dry dry. It does taste like Yiwu, with a definite tart edge to the tea. Not quite sour, mind you, but tart. I find a lot of these slightly aged puerh have a similar sort of feeling to them. The tea is ok, but not great. It leaves some throatiness, but not a lot. Compared to the Zhangjiawan, which I re-tried two days ago, this tea seems less refined. A bit heavier, but also a bit less fun to drink.

The wet leaves are actually quite solid, if you ignore the fannings that are the result of rough treatment in the slow boat. Beats those paper thin leaves I see quite often these days.

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