Fengqing Golden Buds Ripened Pu-erh Cake Tea 2005

I have really liked every Puerh I have tasted from Teavivre. I have saved this sample that I purchased for almost a year, but my best friend came over to try my new flourless chewy chocolate cookie recipe and I thought this would be wonderful with them. It was!

I gave it a rinse because it is such a tight chunk. It is pretty large, more than I would normally chip off for my little gong fu pot. The first few steeps were kept quite short, maybe 20 seconds. I made four steeps, filling a larger pot, and made four more after that. The fifth steep was super dark, really quickly. It tasted great, too. Dark puerh doesn’t scare me, I like it! I saved the leaves because this doesn’t look like it is even close to quitting.

Delicious, refreshing, moist, clean leaves on a forest floor with streaks of sunlight streaming down on you. That is this tea.

Uh… 3-4 teaspoons for 8 oz?

WHOOPS

This is what happens when they don’t put the leafage on the bag! Grrr!

Ah well. It’s a free sample, so there’s only so much griping I can do. I would try steeping it longer, but I have a bad feeling that would only result in the overwhelmingly flagrant essence of FISH! Like the last pu-erh I had, which is still sitting in a bag in the back corner of my cupboard with absolutely no plans for a sipdown anywhere in this dimension of time and space because it tastes exactly like FISH!

This one is… earthy? It’s got a fair amount of FISH!, especially in the aroma, but the flavor itself is darker and bassier. There is actually a bit of maltiness in the aftertaste too. It’s actually fairly pleasant, at least once I stop smelling it. Next time, I’ll use more cake per water. Also I won’t spill it all over the damn stove as I’m trying to pour it.

i had this today too, and will likely have a few more steepings now that i’m home. I think i prefer the other puerh i had from teavivre this past week, but not by much. this is a really nice mellow, refreshing puerh that i’m glad i have a bit more of!

About a week ago I was weeding my blackberry bramble, & as I breathed in the aroma of the mulch under the berry canes, it reminded me of Shu: rich, earthy, musty, damp, wonderful. I have 3 Oak trees in my yard, & every year I pile all the leaves in a very large bin, where they are allowed to break down for 18 monthes. I have 2 such bins, for alternating years, & the resulting leaf mulch gets piled under berry bushes, mixed into garden soil, etc, along with compost from my compost piles.

I haven’t been drinking a lot of puerh lately. I have plenty (believe me…), & I love both Shu & Sheng. I guess I’ve just been busy. Also, I’ve been sampling a lot of teas, & because I like to do long gongfu sessions with Puerhs (and oolongs), I end up just drinking one tea all afternoon, instead of several samples. Also, I’ve been running around on errands &/or gardening a lot lately too, so not a lot of time to sit around pouring gongfu steepings.

So today is the day! Tony & I have been in pajama mode all afternoon, & I’ve been enjoying this generous sample sent to me from Angel @ TeaVivre. Thanks Angel :D

I have a gaiwan at Tony’s, but no scale, so I don’t really know how much tea I put in there, basically the whole sample. It was a beautiful sample: nice dark fragrant chunks of teacake, beautiful brown with golden highlights. I gave it a quick rinse, then started steeping.
1st round, all combined in a cup: 10 sec, 15, 20, 25
2nd round: 30, 40, 50, 60
3rd round: transferred all the leaf to a steeping basket & steeped in the cup for 3 minutes.
I may do another couple of rounds at 4 & 5 minutes.

The resulting brew was a beautiful dark chocolate brown, rich with an earthy grounding flavor, smooth & sweet, with a pleasant qi feeling, & a delightful tongue tingling sensation. A perfect way to spend the afternoon.

First let me just say that this is the first Pu-erh I’ve had the opportunity to taste, so I don’t have much to compare it to, but I’ll explain my first impressions.

Dry tea smell: I didn’t know what to expect but when I first opened the packaged I was surprised by the extremely strong smell. It had a distinct fishy/oceany smell to it. Under the initial smell was a very moist scent. It reminded me of a moist forest floor and old decomposing leaves. It wasn’t a bad smell, it was just a very different smell from the teas I’m used too.

Wet smell: The tea leaves smell very much the same wet as they do dry. They have the same fishy smell with the underlying moist leaf. It was a little bit lighter smelling.

Taste: Luckily none of the fishy smell translated to flavor. It had absolutely no bitter or tart flavors. The taste was really damp. It reminded me of a misty forest. It’s a very interesting, refreshing, heavy flavor. I did enjoy it, but it will probably be one of those teas I only drink once in a while. It has pushed me to order a few more Pu-erhs to see if they’re my thing or not

It was time for me to stop being a wimp and to just try this.

Look! It’s puerh! It’s really great!

I only steeped it for a minute because I thought under was better than over-steeping and I’m really enjoying this mellow earthy blend. I don’t know enough about puerh to say where this ranks amongst the others, but I know I like it which is encouraging!

Tea of the late morning……

If I had to choose one pu’erh to have in my cupboard, this would be it. When deciding how to approach the pu’erh samples sent to me by Teavivre, I decided to save the most expensive for last. Price in tea is usually a pretty good indicator of desirablilty, and in this case for me, it was very true. The price difference is enough that I would want there to be a significant taste improvement over the one with the lower cost, and this tea definitely delivers.

The smell of the dried leaf is less earthy than all of the pu’erhs I have tried (we are only talking about 7 or 8 total…), but only slightly different than the Teavivre 2007 ripened cake. I can see the golden buds in this one. The liquor is only slightly reddish, golden reddish like the 2007 cake. The taste is like you would expect from a pu’erh. Mellow, rich, slightly earthy, and this one is sweet. I am sure that is the first time I have used the word sweet in a review for a pu’erh. Kind of a note of honey which is surprising to me. I do love the mellowness and….I am going to call it the clean-ness of the 2005 Fengqing Golden Buds Ripened Pu-erh Cake as well as the same from the 2007 Fengqing Ripened Tribute Pu-Erh Cake. Very little debris from these two even on the first rinse. Nice high quality full leaves. The liquor still has a clear quality to it rather than a murkiness I have experienced with others. And it is the sweetness of this one that has won me over.

Thank you to Teavivre for the generous samples of their pu’erh cakes. I may become a real pu’erh drinker, yet! It is good to know there are pu’erhs out there that I would enjoy. One just has to know where to shop and who to ask. Thank you for your guidance in choosing these for me to try!

Gaiwan, boiling water, roughly 1 tsp cake, 30 second rinse, 1 minute for steep #1, 1 minute for steep #2…and I am sure it will go much longer!

Steeping this in my gaiwan tonight while I play Sims 3 :) It’s as nice as I remember. Pu erh night for me I believe.

Thank you Teavivre for this wonderful Pu-erh sample!

It is a gloriously beautiful day on the Frontrange! After yesterday’s rain, everything sparkles today in the sunshine at this mile high altitude. The green trees seem greener and the birds are hunting for worms in the still damp grass.

I remembered that I had one last Pu-erh sample from Teavivre to try out. A special older one. Good choice for my early morning lazy bones enjoyment.

I prepared my Yixing pot and a 1.5 tsp of the dry pu-erh. My rinse time was 10 seconds and I did 2 rinses. In all I was able to do 5 steepings before I was full, but I continued later in the day and will this evening. I made iced, bottled pu-erh for on the road (delicious) from these same leaves. I have to note that this was some of the darkest, dry pu-erh I’d ever seen, and tightly compacted! There’s not much scent to the dry leaf.

Steep time on the package said 2 min. (I like pu-erh strong but, you could shorten a bit).

1. The color of the liquor was chestnut brown and there was no musty, earthy scent. When I smelled the wet leaves they smelled like sweet grass and bread. The first sip was sweet, salty hazelnut-pecan without any tannin. The flavor was full and rich.

2. I messed up and let this round steep 5 minutes…eek…it looked like espresso. Not to worry! The DARK chestnut liquor still tasted good. I drank it (are you kidding me?!)
I made a Cappucino because, eh….in Rome you can add some milk in the morning ONLY! I had saved my cuppa!

3. I noticed that the leaves had still NOT opened all the way inside my Yixing. This was really tightly packed pu-erh! The leaves were smelling a little more like leather in a good way. The pour was chestnut brown so I had not killed the strength (whew!). The flavor had changed. It was lighter and juicy. There was cinnamon that filled my whole mouth mid sip and was sweet but not biting. All the flavors together had body. This was a good pour.

4. Now the leaves had become as black as midnight and smelled of sweet leather. The flavor on the pour had become juicy with some tannin and less cinnamon or nuttiness. The color was still good but the tea seemed to be going flat on flavor.

5. Here is where I added a little sugar…the spice returned and the tannin toned down, but now an apricot floral flavor swept in at the finish. I mean, which would you prefer? Flat and tannin, rich and apricot floral? I pick #2. On and on this tea delivers and does not quit. It does not give up. Amazing!

Here is my take. This is a bargain! You can steep this tea forever! I have just scratched the surface on the steeping possibilities of just a little bit of this pu-erh and the delicious flavor is worth purchasing! This is a quality pu-erh!

And note about what to do with used leaves. I have a garden pot where I mix mulch with good used organic tea leaves (especially pu-erh). I also have a jar for pu-erh rinse water that I let cool and pour on my herb garden plants. They thank me by growing strong and healthy.

Based on pre-infused aroma I wasn’t sure if I would ‘dig’ this one much but it tastes different than I anticipated.

The taste was of a sweet wood – maybe with a hint of something citrus. There was a dark-type of mocha likeness to it, too, which I wasn’t expecting.

THINK – walk in the woods after a light rain…in the fall…while sipping on a Dark Mocha.