ivduh b'simcha- tasting mystery tea at work

 23 kislev 5871

i have a few coworkers who are also into tea. i am a bit more o.d. than they are believe it or not. i talk to them about the teas im drinking and we keke about tea and rom coms and make puns. it’s a good time. i am very excited to pour tea for them when this pandemic is over (i really miss pouring tea for people). one coworker of mine told me about two puers he bought recently. they are both bings. i was intrigued. he said he had got one from teasource.com and he’d be happy to give me a sample. the next day, he brought in a little corner he had broken off to share with me.

 

hm, it smells like shou, which makes sense because i assume if your are a non-ultra-tea-nerd drinking a dark puer, theyre most likely to have access to shou. i brew some up fake gong fu style using a large tea-ball strainer and a small coffee cup to do flash steeps with the kettle in the back of the warehouse. 

 

it tasted like bad shou. it had that bland fishy taste and was just all one note of thin dirty water. i didn’t do many more infusions before calling a quits. oh well, that’s what i was expecting. i told my coworker about the teas i had at home and asked which he’d like me to bring in for him to try (he chose one of my aged white teas and a roasted Taiwanese tie guan yin. the week before that, i traded some oolongs for a balsam root tincture my friend made. balsam root is delicious especially in the cold times of the year. it is a very hamish root. it is warm and sweet and comforting. it tastes like honeyed old books and cuddling in leather arm chairs).

 

when my coworker asked if i wanted to try the green sheng cake he had i said ‘sure, why not,’ assuming it would be beyond bitter and who knows what else. ‘where did you get it,’ i asked. ‘Uwajimaya in seattle.’ great. grocery store tea. even worse then i suspected. my first puer was a gift from a friend. they bought it at a Chinese grocery store and gave it to me as a gift. this was the first time i had herd of puer and all i learned was that it was fermented tea. i don’t remember much but i remember trying it and thinking it tasted like stale bland hey and i gave it away to someone else. so i did not have high expectations for grocery store tea.

 

okay, its form spring 2017 so its young but just getting to that supposed awkward stage. ancient trees you say? mhm, okay. lets break a piece off with this puer pick (yes, i brought my puer pick into work and made many bad jokes using it as a cigar and pretending to be groucho marx and brandishing the knife end saying how tea drinkers should always have protection). the tea was very dry, which makes sense for being a 2017 grocery store tea, and the leaves came off in little bits and pieces. time for some more fake gong fu brewing at work. the large tea ball was gone (damn this shared kitchen. all the good coffee cups disappear too. and all the forks…). i grabbed a normal size ceramic coffee cup, put in what id guess would be 5 grams of leaves, grabbed a smallish hand strainer from the kitchen and a glass measuring cup (my cha hei) and a small glass coffee cup to pour into to serve. i gave the leaves two quick rinses and got water from a hot water dispenser that said it was 200 degrees, but it was probably cooler, which i preferred because i wanted to go gentle when trying this tea out. i was ready for it to be very bitter and wanted to take it slow.

 

first brew. hm. wow, that is really not that bad. it’s a little weak because i was being overly cautious but that is really not that bad. it is smoky with a little bit of honey sweetness and  its not even bitter. okay, second steep with this barely hot water but ill let it steep longer. same deal. smoky, sweet, a touch floral, and not bitter. lets try some hotter water. i boiled water in a kettle on the hot plate in the back of the warehouse. now some rounded fruit flavor is coming out and there is a little astringency from the added heat. this tea is really not that bad at all. the smokiness im guessing indicated it wasn’t dried the best (definitely not sun dried and probably got some smoke from the kill green or storage by wood stoves. things i am hypothesizing not because i hang out in tea villages and actually know whats up but from reading things on the internet. millenials, am i right?) but i like smokiness. i keep on telling my coworker how surprised i am by this tea. and, out of nowhere, i was starting to get a little litty. damn, am i getting buzzed at work. this tea has some qi. i was talkative, i was energized, and this is saying a lot because i have been very zonked since winter started (me and my boo sing eddie murhpy’s ‘my girl likes to party all the time’ but we change it to ‘my girl is so tired all the time). i didn’t feel overly jittery or super tweaky, but i was definitely jazzed on this tea. i was talking my coworkers ears off about brewing tea, and puer, and the reasons it might be smoky and how theres so much we don’t know about this tea because i cant understand the info on the label and even if i did my overt skepticism would have me doubting most of it. 

 

this is where i feel most lacking in terms of tea blog writing. i think i am good at brewing tea, i think i have a pretty good palette, and i think i am a good writer. but i have a serious lack of knowledge when it comes to knowing the history of cakes and the regions and producers they come from. i could not walk into a tea shop and know what might be a good tea by looking at it. and if i found one i liked by taste, i would have no idea what a fair price would be for it. but my coworker doesn’t know any of that either and they bought this cake where i would have turned up my nose at it not even having tried it. good job coworker. that is the kind of stuff i need to be doing. drinking tea. that is how you get to know tea and learn more. you just gotta try it and im gonna need to over come my penny pincher ways if i really want learn about and stop limiting myself. that tea was only $12 for 227 grams ($0.05/gram). that seems pretty damn good to me. 

 

i took a chunk home to brew and do a more in depth tasting. stay tuned for that post in future.

 

xoxo