2016 Post Truth

Wet leaves: dried apricots and smoke.

1
Aroma: something soapy reminds me of a swimming pool. Hay, dried fruits. Delicate.
Liquor: smooth, a bit too weak despite the 45sec infusion (leaves are thighly compressed)

2
Aroma: dry fruits, leather, hay.
Liquor still on the delicate side.
This tea opens up very slowly.

3
This time it gets interesting. Liquor has a nice presence, good balance of savory/sweet. The body is medium thin and gives me a peculiar feeling. Slightly drying, delicate aftertaste.

4
Aroma is muted and malty. Leans towards fruits rather than flowers.
Liquor is medium dry, enjoyable astringency and light bitterness.
Aftertaste lingers in the throat.
Body feeling: it’s telling my brain to stop working.

5
Still black tea maltiness. I need to increase steepings times or leaves ratio. Some numbing in the side of the tongue. Aftertaste: bittersweet hay.

After this the tea gets stronger, drier, spicier. Vanilla. Very mineral and drying astringency.
It’s really interesting how the session evolves, however I’m not so excited by this experience.

After 8-9 infusions the tea is still strong. There’s not much sweetness but a very strong astringency. Aroma: earthy/mushrooms.

Opening my sample bag, I was surprised to find that this is an iron cake. Must not have been paying close attention when I added this to my order! The smell in the bag is very vegetal and green like grass clippings. Warmed up in a gaiwan, the smell is thick and pungent, reminiscent of juicy late summer vegetables. It has a sort of heavy sweet tomato vine thing going on. It’s very unusual and doesn’t smell like a typical sheng at all.

Because the compression is so tight, I’m giving this two rinses, each followed by a long standing period with the lid on to loosen up the leaves. This worked okay but I ended up carefully pulling the layers apart by hand to speed things up.

The first steeps are very light but they leave a lingering sweetness in the mouth. Once this tea gets going, it’s quite good. Thick and creamy with a green tea body upfront followed by a lasting grape skin sweetness. It’s fun to taste the evolution of the flavor over the course of 15 seconds or so in the mouth. There’s some very light astringency and bitterness but it’s very tame for puer harvested just 1 year ago.

Flash steeping carried me through 6 or 7 infusions before I had to start adding time. That’s a little bit more than average for me, so that’s pretty good in my book.

This is a fun tea that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone who enjoys green tea or is tired of typical apricoty sheng.

I decided to drink this yesterday when I couldn’t make up my mind on starting a tea or not. This being an iron cake is no lie. I started it early in the day, did four steeps (washes) with long rests in between each before it started to open up. Long like…I went to do dishes after one, went to groom my two dogs after another, went skating after another…you get the idea. I’m glad the chunk I pulled out of my sample was perfectly sized at 7g so I didn’t have to do anything to it.

Once the leaves did separate themselves from one another, their quality became apparent. I steeped this tea out throughout the afternoon and evening of yesterday and continued with it this morning. I didn’t get much out of it as far as complexity goes. It mostly tasted vegetal in the way green tea does, which I found interesting.

I will certainly give this one another try, but at this point it’s one that I would rather let mature than drink at this exact moment.