After Dr Jim’s review, I had to:
HOLY SHIT, while you may not appreciate it, I have finally found the first ripe puerh that has a fish taste and smell to it. I have always thought people were crazy, but after all I have only drank the Green Miracle, White Lotus Golden Needle, Whispering Pines stuff, and then some other high end ripes.
So let me be honest: This tea sucks ass and I’m unsure what I’ll do with the rest of mine. I broke off 7g and thought it was fun because it was like a ball holding all kinds of possibilities and the pu came right out; hehe. Dry leaf smells great, but once you brew that… it’s like a dead fish comes back to life in your hot water you just poured on it; YOU HAVE AWAKEN THE DEAD FISH; oh, and there are not xp points for defeating it.
I too shall pour this down the drain.
Here’s where I suffer. I want to help support vendors by providing awesome stuff and help it become known, but in this case… what the heck do I do? For me it was educational to know that fish taste is a true thing with ripe, well as far as I know it is for this one at least, and I’m unsure if it’s typical with chenpi though.
Well, to keep track, here’s one that goes on the ‘no no’ list for Dark Matter 2016 for me.
Make soup out of it? :)
Too young still. Save it for 2 years or so.
LOL! I am so glad I did not try this one first or gift it to another Steepsteruntasted.
@ Rasseru fish soup… no thanks.
@ mrmopar I don’t find the idea of things needing a few years to be good all that appealing. Why would the fish taste go away after years?
@ Whiteantlers you have to try it first, what if Dr Jim and I are wrong?
@ Liquid Proust-I may sound perverse, but this is the kind of tea experiment I would want to do with a few friends after a good meal and several drinks. If it truly is “fish tea,” we could laugh our butts off and have another round of drinks. Brewing it on my own and finding it piscean, well…I guess I could pour out the rest for the cats.
I actually liked this one when I tried it a few months ago. Now I’m curious to try the one I got from Paul awhile back side by side with the one from the group buy. They shouldn’t be any different, so either I like fishy pu, or something is awry!
Big producers usually ‘air’ the tea for 6 months or more going to market. The shou process leaves the odor and taste behind a lot. Airing it lets it dissipate quite a bit. Fishiness can sometime mean bad quality control. In this case I wouldn’t suspect that. I think the small guys on here take pride in being to turn out good tea. It is just young and needs time to settle. Tea can be fickle. I drank the Yiwu Snake blend from the TU group when it came in. Not impressed with it. I sent a sample to Allan and I told him to wait a week and he got a much better result. Resting tea is needed sometimes.
Remember: one man’s fish is another man’s poisson. Seriously, though I loved this review and wish mine were half as fun. I once had a shou that tasted like lobster, and another that was like salmon. I actually enjoyed the salmon puerh. Part of the problem with saving this is that 3 days in my shou pumidor made the thing smell like orange. I had to air it out.