puer penTEAteuch- 2004 Dayi 7542
10 tevet 5781
i wanted to spend this winter getting to know sheng puer better. i was excited, i was committed, i was intimidated, i was cheap. i am still cheap.
in the past ive had a couple samples from YS, i bought a $40 cake from YS, and ive had good aged sheng at New Century Tea Gallery but didn’t buy any. that’s it. i have not had a lot of aged sheng.
i did a lot of internet research and compiled a bunch of sites that i thought would be good to buy from. for my first mini haul of samples i chose Puerh Shop. they are very cheap/affordable, have lots of options, and have puer that is at the actual aged stage (7-10 plus years). so i pulled up the pages that listed all their aged sheng samples and bought about 8. they arrived very quickly shipping from PS’s headquarters in Michigan. because they have just been stored in a room temperature setting in the Midwest, i popped the sample bags is a tupperware with a boveda pack and added steam to the tupperware and the bags every so often. the smell improved over time becoming more lively and inviting but still fairly one note. after about a month i decided it was time to jump in.
what better place to start than a 2004 Dayi 7542. this tea is considered a classic and a good ‘reference tea’ (one that lots of people have drank and consider good. it is theoretically a good baseline of how to judge other aged sheng).
on the PS website it says it was dry stored. i do not know what to expect coming into trying it. it's cheap for a 2004 Dayi. maybe too cheap, hmmm… but maybe its just a good deal and a solid basic puer. only one way to find out.
the first few steeps are fine. period. no complex flavor. pretty thin taste and no exciting mouth feel. the broth is fairly smooth with not much bitterness and a lil bit of coolness on the back of the throat if i take deep breaths.
i keep going. the flavor receeds a lil more and the bitterness comes more to the forefront. there also seems to be a bit of a mineral and briny aftertaste. hm. okay, so i am not impressed by the flavors, but how does it feel in my body? no enticing mouth feel and no returning sweetness and the qi is hardly noticeable. it does feel nice on my stomach which was a lil rowdy this morning (too much candy while watching an Amanda Bynes movie the previous night). i am about ready to throw the towel in on this one and say ‘oh well,’ but i keep pushing it for the sake of not wanting to be wasteful.
i am now on the steeps where i pour the boiling water, go off to do some dinner prep and strain when i think ‘yeah, that’s probably been long enough.’ the bitterness is gone, the broth is still very mild, but it is a lot smoother and has a nice hint of sweetness. i only got about 3 good steeps out of this stage though. i should pick a day where i have more patience and, at this stage, put it in a boil to boil with some water and see what that does.
i do not care so much about ‘tea reviews’ so why does this sound so much like a tea review? it is less a judgment of this one specific tea and more of a judgment on myself (which i am very good at. too critical perhaps? nonsense.). i want to know if it is the tea, or is it me? am i brewing it right? is its blandness from the storage/lack there of? does it still need to be revived from shelf fatigue? has this 25g sample been sitting in this lil plastic bag for years in a corner with a bunch of other samples?
i will compare this to the other PS samples i got and hopefully there will be a good amount of variance between them to offer some good lessons.
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