Sunsing Tea
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January Sipdown Prompt – a tea that makes you feel better when you are sick
Sipdown
This was a gift from whiteantlers long ago and it was a big enough sample that I have had it a few times now. Many thanks, friend! We miss you!
I am not sick, but I am drinking this tea with lunch as a preemptive strike because I am having red meat and I rarely eat red meat. My sensitive might rebel so I am going in early with the digestion help of puerh tea.
Does it work? It does for me. Years ago I had two pieces of pizza and then was daft enough to give in and eat the crusts dipped in garlic butter at the end. The food felt like an immovable insult sitting stubbornly in my belly and refusing to budge. At that time, I had only had puerh a few times and it was mediocre shu, but after sipping a cup of it the sun rose and the birds sang and all was right with the world.
This is really lovely. I think it has matured nicely into a very well-behaved sheng. I get a little smoke, some leather, no bite, no astringency, a little creamy/oil mouthfeel, and thirst slaking wetness. A hint of sweet soil follows. Really nice.
Edit to add: burger is finished and tea is going strong still. New note I notice without food obscuring it – minty minty minty! Some dry fall leaf crispness and aroma.
Sipdown
I grabbed this from the storage, after a recent rotation, and decided it’s time to start hitting the tea cakes more often. I have so many partial cakes remaining, so it’s only necessary to top them off. I really want to reduce buying any more tea, with the exception of a couple monthly clubs, to help reduce the pile of teas I own….
I don’t remember where or how I acquired this cake. I’m thinking that it may have been a Liquid Proust tea snag, but it’s possible I searched for it on my own. All I know is that this tea has been in my stash a long while, and I hoarded the last 14g for a reason (likely I enjoyed it so much, I wasn’t ready to part ways, yet). I split the remaining 14g into two 7ish gram sessions.
Notes – Part One: The first session was 7-8 infusions. I was in the middle of working, and work can easily distract me from the tea. I didn’t make any notes.
Notes – Part Two: Last night, I made myself take a lunch, so that I could give the time for the last session with this tea. My storage (semi dry – I will monitor the humidity and throw in a Boveda packet or two, as needed) has proven to allow this tea to keep the original “aged” taste, but has really reduced the previously noted menthol taste. It was still there, but the bitterness had faded some. The tea was smooth and sweet – I noted some menthol/mint notes. The qi was calming, and allowed me to feel creative and journal, prior to returning to my workload.
PS. I did manage to find the tea online. Roughly $25 per 100g. Not too shabby. I’ve added it to my wishlist.
https://sunsingtea.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=226&search=+2009
Flavors: Menthol, Mineral, Mint
From the Pubertea group buy organized by Liquid Proust. Wow…this tea was incredible – perhaps nearing my favorite that I’ve yet tried. I spent probably close to five minutes smelling the leaf between dry and rinsed. Lots of nice sweet and earthy aroma; dark vanilla, sweet, cinnamon, nutmeg. There is a slight aroma of storage. More than anything else, the scent reminded me of a slightly dank bourbon.
The tea started off quite sweet, with some woody notes, a bit of that bourbon/oaky vanilla flavor, and some deep and thick texture. The sweetness lingered my mouth for a good while as well. The tea was thick and mouth-coating from the get-go. As I started to steep it out more, the flavor got deeper and earthier. The color of the tea liquor was very dark for a sheng as well.
As the session progressed, I found some more spicy woody notes taking the fore, as the intense vanilla sweetness moved more into the background – sort of reminded me most of cedarwood. There is also a slight bitter backbone still remaining in this tea. The tea has a throat-tightening feel and I started to feel some relaxing qi in my upper body.
I agree with LP that this tea had very impressive longevity – I didn’t get 30 steeps off of it, but did get quite a few more than normal. Vanilla still lingers a little bit in the finish in the late steeps. I threw the leaf in a thermos with hot water for a few hours afterwards and it gave me a nice and thick infusion. I probably could have done the same thing overnight for even more tea.
I’m going to use the second half of my sample in my Jianshui teapot and see how it does. This is the first tea of this price range that I actually could see myself picking up a cake of to have as a special occasion sort of drink. I’d have to check what the price actually is of course, but maybe a self-Christmas present….
Flavors: Cedar, Cinnamon, Earth, Nutmeg, Oak, Sweet, Thick, Vanilla, Wood
Preparation
This tea has the most longevity out of any aged raw puerh that I’ve tried to date.
I went through over 30 steeps of this at 5g/60ml
The color is a little more transparent than I thought it would be so I was like ‘ahhh man this wasn’t aged as much as I wanted!’ but then the taste… this is a cleaner storage taste than most of the other Sunsing cakes that I’ve tried at this point. Leaf was and is very dark! Good mix of material in this cake which makes me glad because older cakes with this blend isn’t the norm for what I have bought.
This session kept a really strong grass and earthy balance that made it very enjoyable without having any of that dank/damp taste going on. As I got towards the end it sweetened up which was pretty odd, but enjoyable.
Part of me is curious if this could go a second day… :p
Really good stuff. Somewhat delicate in a hard way to explain as depth exist but doesn’t demand as much in return to enjoy it… if that makes sense.
Hitting this one today myself.
> without having any of that dank/damp taste going on.
It has that wet stone taste of HK storage though, what I’d consider a humid taste. Enough humidity to pretty well hammer out most of the origin character.
No mold though AFAICT. Smooth, easy drinker. I find myself pushing it pretty hard. Doubt I will stick around for 30 steeps :)
I suppose what I meant was just clean age?
I’m brewing about 6.75g of this from LiquidProust’s group buy. The dry/warmed leaf smells musty and a bit spicy. With a rinse, those aromas are intensified and some leather is apparent.
The first flash steep is a slightly cloudy light orange color. The flavor is very light – my sample was pretty compressed and will take awhile to open up in the gaiwan. Steep 2 is darker and getting fuller in taste. It’s smooth with some background sweetness and mustiness. I don’t really notice much storage taste, so I’m guessing conditions were quite dry for this cake.
Subsequent steeps are thicker and cloudier as the compression continues to open up. There’s a very light drying effect on the tongue. Not enough to bother me.
At steep 6 or 7 I decide to push this tea a little wrt to time. It’s darker – orange bordering on orange red and the bitter backbone of this tea is much more obvious. Not the best steep of the bunch but I was curious.
Nothing about this tea really stands out to me, but it should be interesting to go back to after I’ve tried the other teas from this group buy. It was certainly enjoyable, but maybe not in proportion to the price on Sunsing’s website (to my taste buds, at least).
Preparation
Okay, let’s cover all the points to this tea in a very brief session.
1. Price
$.38/g via http://sunsingtea.com/PuerhTea/Boxes?product_id=91
I want to buy some more, but I only want about 50g… anyone want to go in :P
$38/150g for 1999 Raw is a GREAT deal
2. Taste
Yes
3. Color
Yes
4. Aroma
Eh… not really, but the taste is what I’m looking for
5. Additional properties?
Body warmth, but no drunk feeling.
6. Worth?
Yes.
7. Is seven really a perfect number?
8. Why didn’t you answer #7?
Overall this tea was very very enjoyable and I got to show it off :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/tea/comments/5qnt6i/drinking_some_raw_puerh_from_1999_via_sunsing/
P.S. Sunsing has one SERIOUS 1999 raw cakes that you can see by the color of the brew here: http://sunsingtea.com/PuerhTea/1990’s?product_id=163
Look. At. That. Brew.
Clean. Semi mountainous taste. Medium body. After notes of old fruit. All around great tea.
Friday night and I finally had time to dedicate to a brewing so I pulled out the Pubertea teas. Heard some talk about this and pulled out the 4g I had left from everyone and knew I had to be careful with the brew.
The leaf has a good rustic look to it and a decent smell. This was one of the cheaper aged shengs surprisingly, but I choose it for what it is to Sunsing and all; it’s also my first Sunsing tea : )
The first brew was a bit murky with some real smokey notes coming through and a little grit. It might be the dust I brewed with, but this tea seemed like it was going to be a journey through the sand. The next few brews still had some rather strong smoke for the age it is, but it is clear that this has been stored more dry than humid as the tasting goes on. Sides of the mouth have decent dryness going on but the aged taste that comes through makes it enjoyable.
Around the 8th steep and I’m getting use to the taste to which each sip comes with a cooling taste at the end as if I ate a warm cucumber… if that makes sense. Still not the best in taste, some depth still there, and slight smoke. No qi, oh well. For what it is: There’s plenty of room for this tea to develop based on how it is stored from here on out. The price isn’t so bad either compared to others, but it really does need some airing and a little humidity to bring it to life and maybe even add some legs to it because I feel as if something is holding this back. The leaf is quite beautiful and I am curious as to what Sunsing’s own Yiwu pressings are like.
The first tea I have tried from the Pubertea group buy put together by LiquidProust, pulled out of the bag at random. The leaf on this one smelled slightly leather and musty, though I wasn’t getting much of any strong aromas from it. I brewed it up in my Jianshui teapot with boiled water.
The first steep was leathery with a bit of a smoky aftertaste. Not particularly pleasant, but thankfully the leather only persisted for this single steep. Could be solved with a second rinse, but it’s still drinkable so no point there.
Steeps 2-5 are extremely thick – by the third steep I was almost chewing it. The flavors were sweet, a little hard to place, I’m thinking bamboo perhaps and slightly vegetal. Also inklings of vanilla in the middle of the sip. The smoky flavor in the aftertaste persists as well, coming through as a slight BBQ note in the finish. Sounds unpleasant, and it would have been if it were stronger, but it’s really just an echo on the end of the sip, and one of the rare times a smoky flavor has kind of added to a tea rather than subtracted from it for me. If I had to guess, I’d say this tea was a bit smokier in its youth and this is all that remains. I was feeling this tea quite a bit in my throat and the back of my mouth. Not really getting much of anything in the way of qi.
Steeps 6-8 presented a brew which I described as “cleaner.” So mostly the same flavor, but the meaty BBQ aftertaste was gone. In my first session, I had to pause it after steep 8 to go run some errands. While I was riding around in the car for around an hour, I could still feel this tea in my stomach and chest, and felt just a tiiiny teadrunk fuzziness. Not much, and I didn’t notice it while I was actually drinking the tea.
Steeps 8-11 were a little bit lighter all around. The flavor and thickness were less intense. More silky than what it was before, when it almost felt like pudding. Occasional spice notes on the front and still getting the odd hint of vanilla.
Steeps 12-19 were very soft and sweet in flavor. The texture would come and go, depending on how long I steeped it for, never returning to the crazy heights it had in the early session. The last two steeps were really all texture with little to no flavor remaining aside from maybe a sweet feeling in the mouth.
This was a good tea, and makes me excited not only for the rest of Pubertea, but also for trying more quality aged sheng. Most of my puerh exploration has been on the younger side of sheng to this point, which I certainly enjoy, but these teas promise a different and exciting experience of their own. I’m curious to see if all of the good aged sheng I try is this thick in the mouth. The only young sheng I’ve had that approach this thickness are some of the W2T productions.
Flavors: Bamboo, Leather, Meat, Smoke, Sweet, Thick, Vanilla, Vegetal
I used to think all camellia senisis teas were the same until I did a deep dive on the internet and found that ripe puerh has inulin, and your gut microbes feed on that. So not surprising that it aids digestion :)
I didn’t know about inulin in it , Michelle! That’s awesome! Inulin is in Teeccino roasted chicory drinks, too. According to webmd, puerh bacteria produce lovastatin, and the older it is and the larger the population of bacteria, the more lovastatin is produced. The lovastatin supposedly causes the system to “ignore” some of the fats by basically binding with them, and allow them to pass on through without being digested, speeding up the movement of the food and eliminating the heavy feeling. This is an explanation I saw, could be wrong. But it seems to work! Inulin is a pre-biotic, so win-win!
I seemed to have confused chicory for ripe puerh, but I thought I read somewhere that ripe produced inulin. Probably on some wiki page that is now rescinded. I think all three, ripe, raw and chicory are good for gut health!
I always wonder whether they are testing ripe or raw when we see the health claims. Often it isn’t specified. I plan to drink it anyway, and if it is good for me then that is even better!
@ashmanra, that is a good question indeed! Since (I believe) the orthodox process involves a heat-kill to dry and stop oxidation, we can assume that it has the effect of pasteurizing the leaves, which become maocha as a green tea, possibly with a further intermediate heating steps before being portioned out and compressed. Of course we don’t expect the work environment to be sterile. So, much like Belgian-process beers, further microbial activity in Sheng Pu-erhs is the result of uncontrolled environmental introduction of fungi and bacteria. I suspect some spore-forming bacteria may survive the cooking process unless it is very long — over an hour at >100°C (think of the canning process). Shou, on the other hand, is piled a meter or more deep, moistened and inoculated with a culture of (known or unknown) microbes, much like a sourdough starter. Those microbes would rapidly dominate the tea leaf microflora, outcompeting any environmental or integral species. Thus it is possible that the two processes (raw vs. ripe) could differ considerably in their probiotic content. It is also possible that the inoculum used in Shou is derived from isolates found in one or more Shengs, and thus having similar probiotic content. I do not know how the inoculum for Shou Pu-erh is prepared and/or maintained, and I suspect it is a trade secret among the various tea companies, as they are among brewers of beers. I do not know the scientific literature of tea fermenting well enough to say anything beyond this.