do you prefer sheng or shou?

do you prefer sheng puerh or shou puerh?

list your preferred choice with your favorite tea of that group with the page where it can be bought and with its stepsister page link to your best steepswter review of it is optional.

i love sheng more than shou:

i love 2013 yunnan sourcing autumn ye sheng raw puerh cake.

steepster page: http://steepster.com/teas/yunnan-sourcing/49544-2013-yunnan-sourcing-autumn-ye-sheng-raw-puerh-tea

my best review: http://steepster.com/Kirkoneill1988/posts/326685#comments

official page:http://yunnansourcing.com/en/2013-yunnan-sourcing-teas/2774-2013-yunnan-sourcing-autumn-ye-sheng-raw-pu-erh-tea.html

46 Replies
AllanK said

I have always preferred shou to sheng and have a lot more of it. I buy it at a ratio of five to one I would say.

what do you like more about shou compared to sheng?

AllanK said

I suppose I just like the flavors of shou more than sheng. I was always more of a fan of black teas over green teas too. Also, until you learn to brew gongfu style, sheng isn’t very good. Shou does fairly well western style. Sheng not so much. When I first drank puerh I was still brewing it in big teapots western style. Sheng needs multiple steepings to get anything good out of it.

both go well with western style for me :) care to explain in further detail how sheng does not go well western style for you? i’m intrigued

AllanK said

Simply put sheng tends to be bitter for the first few steeps. If you are not steeping it more than four or five times your not getting past the bitterness. With shou you have the fermentation taste in the first four or five steeps but that has never bothered me. If I am steeping puerh western style I am probably only steeping it once, maybe twice. I don’t enjoy the bitterness with the first few steepings of many shengs.

that’s so true. however, 90% of the time i like the bitterness

Bitterness aside, I tend to think that the flavors in shou tend to taste better in Western steeping than sheng flavors. Shengs just seem a little more muddled flavor wise as the different flavors released over multiple steepings in gong fu combine all at once. On the other hand, the flavors from shous, which tend to be more uniform to me during gong fu, meld quite nice and sometimes even taste better Western style as you double or triple down on those earthy, chocolaty, and other flavors from shous that can seem almost one dimensional in shous at certain times when gong fuing.

Zack S. said

Hm perhaps I’ll try my W2T Pretty Girls, Lao Cha Tou, and Old Reliable as Western brewed. Still doing a 30s rinse for this, right?

I do rinse it. How aggressive I am with the rinse depends on how much fermentation is left in the tea. The 1998 white tuo from W2T for instance I only barely I just give a quick rinse and it’s ready to go.

I mostly brew shu in an infuser basket in a mug, at a rate of 5-8 gm leaf to 250-300 ml in boiling hot water. I do usually put the infuser in something shallow and rinse it a couple of times before infusing for 3, 4 (and sometime 5) minutes.

I don’t feel that shu (at least the ones I’ve tried) is really worth making concentrated shots in a gaiwan, most of the time.

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Dr Jim said

I’m Allan’s alter ego. I buy almost exclusively sheng. I don’t find it to be bitter and prefer the flavor to shou. Good sheng can be very complex and intellectually captivating, while good shou doesn’t taste like fermentation. I try shou fairly often via things like Liquid Proust’s sales and travelling tea boxes, but only about 1 in 20 really excites me, often because it doesn’t taste like most shou. (I do like flavored shou, where the tea is providing body to a different flavor that has been added.)

AllanK said

The other thing about good shou is it tends to cost less than good sheng. Just look at the cost of the best shou, something like the 2008 Golden Needle White Lotus between $80 and $110 while the best sheng can cost four figures. Or something like Yangqinghao sheng which can cost over $600. I like the fact that shou costs me less too. And considering I enjoy it more I don’t have a great desire to buy LBZ sheng at $1000 a bing.

awesome! have you tried the one i listed in my post or the following? it’s really good! tastes like mushrooms and camphor:

http://steepster.com/teas/yunnan-sourcing/48693-2006-nan-jian-phoenix-ripe-pu-erh-tea-mini-brick

AllanK said

The one thing that sheng will have over shou is qi, but you generally have to spend a lot to get a sheng with strong qi. The processing of shou tends to eliminate the natural qi of the leaves but not always. For instance, the best thing about Yangqinghao teas is in my opinion not the taste, which is in my opinion good at best, but the qi which is often massive.

@allanK, how do i tell what qi is? can you describe qi for me??

Dr Jim said

Cha qi varies both by the tea and by the drinker. For me, it is a feeling of relaxation that is both physical and mental. Some people describe a feeling of warmth, to the point of getting sweaty. It reminds me a bit of the effect I used to experience back when I smoked pot, but less intense and of a relatively short duration. While expensive tea is more likely to have strong cha qi, some inexpensive teas do as well. I’ve found that puerhshop teas tend to have fairly strong qi, even though they are moderately priced. My guess is that they select for it when buying.

Also, while some sheng can be very expensive, there is a lot of good sheng that is roughly twice the cost of shou. Most of my sheng cost between $0.10 and $0.30 per gram, or about $50 to $100 per cake.

AllanK said

Cha qi can also effect different people differently. I have seen many people describe the qi of Yangqinghao teas as relaxing but for me in is more of an invigorating qi, revs me up and all.

interesting info

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I like shou.

shou is quite nice if the fermentation taste is not too strong

AllanK said

I have only come across a handful of shou that have fully lost their fermentation taste but there are some. 2008 Song of Che Tse on Berylleb King Tea on EBay, 1996 CNNP “Te Ji Green Mark” from Yunnan Sourcing and 1998 White Tuo from White2Tea.

Yeah. Really old shous have little to no fermentation taste

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curlygc said

I love them both equally. Some days are shou days, some days are sheng days.

And some days are just oolong.

Rasseru said

that is a good way of putting it. Although every day is an oolong day for me, but not my wallet

I love oolongs too

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Oneironaut said

Definitely sheng for me. I enjoy shou, but it’s more of a once-in-a-while kind of thing, where I could drink sheng every day. My favorite sheng is probably still the first cake I bought, Yunnan Sourcing’s 2014 Dehong Ye Sheng white label cake. I’ve tried several more since then, and loved many of them, but none have surpassed that one yet. I ran out a while back and really need to order more.

can you link me to the cake?

Oneironaut said

http://www.yunnansourcing.us/store/index.php?id_product=730&controller=product

This is the one I bought, and just this morning I bought another. They also have a 400g cake if 100g is too small.

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Matu said

I seem to prefer sheng so far. However, due to my enjoyment of it, I’ve bought more sheng and haven’t really had a lot of good shou at this point. So I do like both, but 9 times out of 10 I want to reach for one of the shengs I have.

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Rasseru said

Sheng over shou – I like tea which tastes like im drinking leaf/tree/forest with the oils/fruit/flowers.

Shou tastes to me more like coffee.

My favourite sheng so far has been the Rui Gong Tian Chao. https://shop.chadao.de/product_info.php?info=p1230_2014-rui-gong-tian-chao—-16114-1.html Tasted to me like stewed apricots with cream

I like less processing with my tea also, lighter roast oolongs over heavier roast, and shou processing falls into the heavy category for me.

Yiwu Sheng, bai, anxi style & fenghuang style oolong all being my favourite and all on the lighter side of things

nice!

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MzPriss said

Sheng is infinitely greater than shu

Lol. I think both are lovely. Still sheng wins hands down

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I LOVE them both and like to keep it balanced – Shou in the morning, Sheng in the afternoon. I’d like to switch the order to see if I’ll sleep better, but the kids, who join me in the morning, are much more into the Shou :)

Also weather, season, and mood seem to determine which i’m wanting…

Put a boiling kettle to my head and force me to make a choice though, I’d guess I’d go with Sheng. It can be, and the good stuff often is, more complex, interesting, and wide ranging in taste and temperament.

I think you make a good point.

AllanK said

A very good shou is a complex thing too. They can be as or at least almost as complex as sheng.

mrmopar said

I think it is great that you share with the kids.

“I think it is great that you share with the kids.”

i agree 100%. it’s good to share

My 6 year old daughter begged me to buy a brick of CLT 2008 Bulang Shou after we had a sample. She still refers to it as The Brick (even though there are other bricks of other teas around) ! Her and her 3 year old brother also like most Blacks, and Oolongs. As the snow melts here I’m gonna get them started on the Greens ;)

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I prefer shu most of the time. I have to be in the mood for sheng and it seems like the kind of tea I need to pay attention to or it gets fussy. Shu is easier to brew in multiple places, like traveling or while at the office. If I was sitting at home all day I might be drinking more sheng.

I don’t travel and drink tea. Never tried :(. Good idea though :D

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