To me, the flavors depart from the realm of agriculture and nature. The flavors no longer taste like tea to me, they taste like the basement in which the tea was stored. Full of talc, basement, salt peter, attic, wet cardboard, old paper, medicine, and grandmothers, I feel as though these flavors lead me on one of my father’s genealogy expeditions or a trip into an historic copper mine shaft than through a sub-tropical forest or a farm of any kind. I do appreciate the woody, ginseng-like herbal qualities, but always end up vacillating between an appreciation of those flavors and a distaste for the damp, musty ones heralding a basement storage. I think I was a little too far gone to really focus on the flavors when I had the 1985 Menghai 8582 with Tim at The Mandarin’s Tea Room, but have a pouch of 1980s Menghai 79092 Loose Ripe which perplexes me in the same way for its super-heavy talc, grandmother, medicine and basement flavors.
Everyone has their own palate, suited to certain flavors and textures. Obviously, with aged sheng puerh being very popular, there are quite a few people for whom the flavor profile of this type of stored tea matches their palate. However, I think I am more attracted to the young, fresh, and fruit-like earth tones of teas such as young sheng puerh, certain oolongs, whites and dark green japanese teas. All that said, I’m still excited to try the other two examples in this tasting to see what variations in storage condition can elicit from the tea.
Full blog post: http://tea.theskua.com/?p=387
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Sounds interesting. Appareantly the “wet storage” ages tea faster, but leaves it “weaker”. We had a pu’er tasting a couple of weeks ago, and we had some wet stored pu’er from ‘99 and some dry-stored (8582, by chance) from ’98. The wet stored tasted older, it’s flavor was more evolved and advanced, but the dry-stored was somewhat stronger in character, and had more interesting taste. Your commentary seems to reinforce this.
I was surprised at how few really solid steeps I was able to get out of it. I’ve got some dry stored in the works, that I’m excited to try.
Sounds interesting. Appareantly the “wet storage” ages tea faster, but leaves it “weaker”. We had a pu’er tasting a couple of weeks ago, and we had some wet stored pu’er from ‘99 and some dry-stored (8582, by chance) from ’98. The wet stored tasted older, it’s flavor was more evolved and advanced, but the dry-stored was somewhat stronger in character, and had more interesting taste. Your commentary seems to reinforce this.
I was surprised at how few really solid steeps I was able to get out of it. I’ve got some dry stored in the works, that I’m excited to try.