2011 (2010?) Yangpin Hao 'Jing Mai'

Today's tea, the 2011 (2010?) Yangpin Hao Jingmai mountain cake, is another sample from the set of sheng pu'er offered by China Cha Dao with the expressed intent of contrasting plantation "small tree" teas with older arbor "large tree" teas. This is one of the small tree examples, and it is not a tea that the vendor carries. Perhaps this indicates the vendor's opinion of the tea?

The leaves, as pictured in the photo above, are of smaller size. This is typical for teas from Jingmai, whose tea trees are of a smaller leaf varietal. One other trait of note is the heavy stripe-rolling treatment given the leaves.

The first infusion has a hard-to-place aroma, and "leafy" seems like a terrible description, but I can think of no better word for the "baseline" smell of raw pu'er leaves when they are very young. It offers a brothy taste, meaty and astringent, with a cooling aftereffect in the mouth. It moves onward to taste more sour, but with a mouthfeel the lasts and extends to the root of the tongue.

At times chocolatey and alkaline, and in later infusions becoming thinner in texture and offering mostly bitterness and hay, the tea falls into the "ok" category. It appears to be well processed enough, but of a medium quality material that, although it will likely improve with age, may not become spectacular. If this is the cake I suspect it is, it sells in China for about US$8 per 380g cake, a reasonable price given the quality.

Two Teas from Twenty Ten

Amongst a small cache of cooked pu'er MarshalN recently gifted me he included a sample of a raw pu'er from 2010, indicating only that it was one (the only one?) he liked, and that this tea is not inexpensive. For some context, I decided to try it back to back with another 2010 raw pu'er sample I received, the 2010 American Hao Youle Mountain (1001, spring). I tried them both in the same teaware using the same amount of leaf by weight.

Both teas have appearances I find attractive: mostly whole buds with 1 to 3 "flags" and healthy, furry leaves with minimal visible signs of excess oxidation. But one I liked and one I really disliked. To reiterate at a point I often repeat: a pretty appearance says very little about a tea.

The sample from MarshalN surprised me. When I think of what he has avoided in young green pu'ers in the past, it has been bitter and smoky teas like this one. In terms of flavor, it takes many infusions for the smokiness to disappear and the bitterness to soften. When it does, it becomes floral, rocky, and astringent.

But the sample from MarshalN didn't surprise me in that he normally seeks in young green pu'ers a "ubiquitous" sensory experience that only begins by hitting the tongue and affects and lingers as many other regions of sensory tissues as the tea manages to touch. In that regard, this 2010 is typical of his tastes, and in my opinion, pretty good. It's a little thin in terms of texture in the mouth, but it triggers salivation, soaks into the soft palate, cheeks, tongue root, and even into the throat a bit at times. It has a menthol/camphor effect as the flavor dissipates (evaporates?) off the tissues, and my face became quite flushed drinking it.

Also, it smells really nice, too, thicker than it tastes. And it lasted 15 infusions before I became bored and figured it was time to move on, and for the first 10 or so, I didn't have to increase steep time by more than a second or two.

The cons: at times pretty thin textured and there were some burnt flecks of leaf in my cup (hence the smokiness?). Minor complaints, overall.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say this tea is a Bulang, because the flavor profile matches well with the Bulang samples I've had recently from Yunnan Sourcing and Nada and the leaves seem the right size. [EDIT 15 March: I was right!]

2010 Sheng pu sample from MarshalN:

The flecks in the cup make it look like the carp are coming to feed on fish food flakes.

2010 American Hao 1001 (Youle Mountain)

Looks are deceiving!


I had already tried the 2010 American Hao 1001 (Youle Spring) in 2010, but I suspected it was too fresh and thus waited to try it again now. Which is to say, I tried it and disliked it for flavor reasons that I thought might change as the tea aired out. As it turns out, it didn't change much.

The tea is confusing. It smells like green pu'er (smoke and all), but its flavors are very vegetal. It tastes leafy and creamy like green tea, and the very light color in the cup supported this idea. The bitterness in the leaf dissipated, rather than transforming into the lingering sweetness of pu'er it became alkaline, and there was very little detectable aftertaste. Past the 6th infusion or so, some pu'er flavors emerged: florals and straw. Although the texture was thin even when pushed, the tea certainly had more tenacity than a typical green tea, lasting upwards of 11 infusions. Another point in its favor was a certain tingliness in the earlier infusions.

This Youle also had many black burnt bits in the cup, even across many infusions. Maybe these are more frequent in newer teas, or maybe I have begun noticing them only now.

As a Yunnan green tea, it was actually quite nice, but as a pu'er, I don't know what to make of it. I almost want to buy a cake just to see what happens to tea like this, but I think I'll just keep the rest of my sample to try in a few years.

2010 Dayi 7562

As mentioned in my post on the 7452 cake, the 7562 recipe offers heavy competition in the realm of Menghai shu pu. A little grittier and less refined than 7452, the 7562 brick's blend contains more heavy fermentation leaves. This yields a greater complexity than the aforementioned cake, but sometimes at the cost of brewing tenacity and usually making it less "easy" to drink.

This year's 7562 is certainly more complex than 7452. It's earthy, chalky, woody, mineral, and aromatic. The earthiness and chalk/talk are bold and bolder still after the tea cools in your cup: a shu lover's shu pu.

As the tea brews on, it lightens some, tasting of bark and then of wood, eventually tasting thinly of rocks--or, at least, tasting the way rocks smell. All in all, it gives the impression of wet stored sheng pu'er but without the mold smell/flavor and with more punch.

7562 lasted a few infusions less than 7452, perhaps 9 good infusions. Knowing of its limitations, I used a lot of leaf to get this many out of the tea. I think that, using less leaf, the tea would have a smoother feel, but taste less rich.

I brewed leaves from the back of the brick. As you can see, there's a fair amount of broken stem in the mix.

2010 Dayi 7452

You read that right, 7452, not 7542. Reverse the 5 and 4 of 7542 and you get a shu pu'er instead of a sheng pu'er. Funny how that works!

7452 is probably my favorite standard Dayi shu cake, which means it's probably my favorite shu cake of all time. Some years are better than others, and in some years 7562 sometimes beats 7452 for "shu of the year" in the Bearsblog "Teas of the Year" Awards.

I haven't tried this year's 7562 yet, but 7452 clearly wants badly to hold onto its title. It displays some of its best traits this year: richness, smoothness, clean earthiness, mineral/"rocky" flavors, thirst-quenching throat "feel", tenacious brewing, and an aftertaste that lingers in the mouth for an hour or more after drinking.

My two complaints with this year's 7452 is a lack of complexity, maybe highlighted by having drunk the Nan Jian Tulin brick too near in time. Second, 7452 has little aroma this year, but this could be my sense of smell (?).

2010 Autumn Yong De Cha Hua "Tea Flowers"

I haven't had much opportunity to buy tea lately. I bought perhaps three dozen samples of young sheng pu'er some time back hoping to drink through them, find good aging candidates (at least, by my standards), and buy in bulk.

While I found a few winners, I found myself without money to buy them before they became too expensive to merit bulk purchase. And now, I have three dozen half samples to add to my jar of "shake".

But, I have been regularly drinking through shu pu'er. Having drunk through 90% of my last two bricks of shu cha tou--those little nuggets left over at the bottom of the pu'er compost heap--I ached for variety. And variety I bought:

7452 and 7562, two of my favorite Menghai recipes. Lancang (Simao) 0081 and Tulin (Lincang "border tea") were recommendations of Scott of Yunnan Sourcing. Normally I don't venture far from Menghai, but one risks becoming too boring when consuming only one brand. Drinking only Menghai is the pu'er equivalent of wearing only Giorgio Armani: it's classic, always well made, but after a while your friends think you predictable and maybe a tad snooty.

More on those teas later--much later if my recent posting frequency is any indication.

This post actually treats with a tisane I have come to adore: tea flowers. No, not the little balls of green tea with globe amaranth, notoginseng, and strands of jasmine flowers tied into ornate shapes by the tortured hands and strained eyes of Chinese girls: these reproductive organs of the tea camellia require no more than picking and drying to blossom into a beautiful product.

In my conversations with Scott online, I requested he find me some fresh tea flowers. I drink these pearl colored gems at night because they have insignificant caffeine content--if any--and help me sleep. After running out of some 2006 vintage, I had to dig deeper into some 2003 vintage, and although they still did the job, their taste had morphed into something like "tastes the way dry sycamore leaves smell", and not in the good "earthy pu'er" way.

Scott replied that he had found some 2010 autumn flowers from Yong De county in Lincang prefecture.

You can't tell from the photo above, but these flowers are so fresh, they yet hold enough moisture to bend when touched. Their color is another fine indicator: compare to this less fresh, golden brown-yellow bud of a previous post.

They taste most like honey (appropriately for a source of honey!) with a bit of orange zest. Light, crisp, subtle, never going bitter and delightfully free of mouth-drying tannin.

And here I sit, drunk on tea flowers, half sleepy, wondering how I'll stay awake until my proper bedtime.