Fengqing Ancient Tree Spring Chun Jian Raw Pu-erh Cake Tea 2012

I have become more and more of a ghost on this website. This is mostly due to the fact that I have spent tooo much time and money on tea these past couple months. sigh but it is so much fun…and so tasty.. Silly bills drying out my tea funds:P Luckily, I have lots of tea in my tea stash…must have to avoid the temptation to buy more.. rawrs. For those of you that have played the game Ni No Kuni illustrated by Miyazaki, I am in much need of more restraint.

Anyways, onto this incredible tea.

I am by no means a pu’erh expert.. but thanks to advice from the awesome Spencer I knew just how to brew this tea. The dry smell of this tea was much more pleasant than I was expecting…probably because some of the other pu’erhs that I have had smelled much like dirt or fish. But this one was fresh smelling. The flavor of the first cup was a light woodsy sweet almost honey-esque flavor with a very like liquor. The second cup had much bolder flavors of musk and floral but oh so smooooth. There was only slight bitterness at the end. A beautiful pu’erh.. hopefully I can age as gracefully as this tea.

I suppose this is my second or third sheng as far as tasting… But it is the first one I have brewed the right way. I’m starting to get it…. This love for shengs that the rest of you seem to have. I’m not ready to rate them yet…

I ordered this quite a while ago as part of the pu-er sampler from TeaVivre. Then it sat because I decided I wasn’t ready for it.

Today, I decided I was ready.

So I brought it to work, and I’m pseudo gongfu-ing it, following the gaiwan steeping directions from their website.

The first few infusions after rinsing were still…not quite right. Heavy, kind of earthy. Something that just wasn’t quite right for me. I couldn’t identify what that was. It was just an off flavor for me. It was just kind of bitterish. The aroma, on the other hand, really nice. I admit it, I dumped out half of the third. It just wasn’t working for me.

Starting with the 4th steeping…I started to really dig this tea. Woody, a little sweetish. Different. And it’s getting better with each infusion.

By the tenth infusion, it’s starting to really mellow out, sweeter and tasty. That woody is almost gone. I can’t stop drinking this tea. But I’m only half way there.

And yes, this is a lot of tea I’m drinking. The worst part is that it’s not actually waking me up.

And there’s some flavor here that I just don’t know how to describe. It’s interesting. Unique. I like it a lot. What it is? Gah. I hate this. It’s driving me crazy that I can’t identify it.

But I am downing cup after cup of this tea like a mad woman. It’s good. It’s really good. (Well, after the first few infusions, anyway.)

And maybe that energy is starting to come.

And I keep drinking this tea.

Nom nom nom nom nom!

All this tea nomminess is mine!

I wish I had more time (and a bigger bladder.) Unfortunately, the fifteenth infusion will have to be my last.

This beautiful sheng has kept me company at work all afternoon. It has made a crazy draggy day seem to go a little faster.

But I am officially a sheng pu-erh lover.

Have you ever gotten almost done with writing a really long and involved tasting note on Steepster… and then you hit the back button?

OK. Two reviews of this tea in a row. I’m doing a resteep of this, but as I usually do when I resteep something that’s been sitting for hours, I added some fresh new leaves.

Green, astringent, bright, mineral, cleansing, just a hint of “minty” or some cool overtone like I mentioned in my last note.

I now know the difference between a sheng and a shu! Knowing that this is a sheng makes me feel more confident in my description of it because I’m aware of the usual flavor associations with shengs. If they’re all similar to this, shengs probably fall in the category of “I really have to be in the right mood for them, and I’m rarely in that mood.” But I appreciate their qualities a bit more, especially if you like bright, cleansing teas. (I’m still fascinated that I’ve finally had a tea I can actually call “mineral” tasting.)

Another noteworthy thing about today: after a year of watching seven seasons’ worth of episodes, I watched the season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation tonight. I still have a bit of heaviness of having finished something I loved. Actually, I got into tea and TNG at almost the same time, so they’re kinda linked. They’ve both become unexpectedly comforting presences in my life. I am definitely going to have to give TNG a second go-round, because, as usual, I was REALLY good at following the character development and REALLY bad at following the, you know, plots. The thing that kinda makes it science fiction. Whoops.

Tea. The (hopefully not final) frontier. These are the voyages of the TeaKlutz Enterprise. My continuing mission, to explore strange new teas, to seek out new flavors and new infusions. To boldly go where… somebody else has gone before and already written a Steepster review but I’m trying it for the first time and I didn’t read the parameters and I boiled the water too hot and then I oversteeped it but it’s still kinda good and I think it’s gonna grow on me now I know what to expect.

(orchestra wonders whether to play the opening theme or not)

tastes ok, kinda like trees.