90’s Puerh Tasting

Wel­come to the Tea Chat OTTI, fea­tur­ing Puerh tea from the 1990’s! I feel that although there is great enthu­si­asm gen­er­ally about puerh, there is still not much lit­er­acy on aged teas.

I only nav­i­gated the dark­ness of the puerh cave with the guid­ance of early pio­neers like Jason, and both of these teas also come to me by the gen­eros­ity of Tea Chat mem­bers. I hope that by pass­ing it on, many more of you will come to learn about and enjoy aged teas.

1997 8582 “Wet Stored”

This clas­sic Meng­hai recipe was stored in a more humid cli­mate, result­ing in a richer and smoother brew. And not many ‘off’ tastes as a result. Decent Cha Qi.

Com­pared to the cur­rent crop of Dayi prod­ucts, com­pres­sion of the cake is very loose and the edge is com­ing apart just by han­dling it.

This cake has ‘white frost.’ This mold is con­sid­ered ben­e­fi­cial to the tea, and harm­less to you. If you like cheese, you are prob­a­bly already used to this.

Make sure to read up on “tra­di­tional” stor­age meth­ods.

Brew­ing this one is quite sim­ple, as it will not eas­ily yield bitterness.

Brew­ing

1990s Raw Puerh Brick

Stored in the dryer cli­mate of Malaysia, this brick has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent fla­vor pro­file from the 8582. The leaves are pretty high qual­ity for a brick. The brew is extremely thick, when brewed strong it may be astrin­gent or aggres­sive. Color is dark orange, approach­ing red.


Com­par­i­son to 2005 tea brick (left).

Edit: So it is wisely pointed out that Malaysia is not in fact a dryer cli­mate, and a lot of the tea stored there results in some­thing quite “wet.” This was stored, then, quite inten­tion­ally to achieve a “dry” result. At the risk of mud­dy­ing the waters, please read Cloud’s take on Wet and Dry Stor­age.

Which stor­age do you prefer?

These are pretty extreme exam­ples to high­light the dif­fer­ences. Both have big fans, both have their detrac­tors. How about you?