Golden Peacock Shu Puer Cake

A tea lover named Richard recently returned from China with a tong (筒) (or possibly more) of these shu puer tea cakes. Nearly two weeks ago he sent me a generous half-cake sample to evaluate. 謝謝 Richard!

The cakes are labeled Menghai seven sons cake tea (勐海七子餅茶) across the top and Li Ming Xing Huo Tea Factory (黎明星火茶厂) across the bottom. In the middle is a painting of two lovely peacocks and a sign that says Golden Peacock First Class Cake (金孔雀一級餅). The wrapper is stamped with a May 2007 production date. I also found these cakes here on Tao Bao.

The dry leaf has a pretty appearance, mixing rusty-red and golden-brown flecks with dark brown leaves. It has a woody, nutty aroma.

I've had a few sessions with this tea now and I like it quite a bit. It is easy to pour dark and smooth. There was a little bit of an acidic finish on some infusions but most were sweet and milky. It's not terribly complex but it goes the distance and it doesn't have any unforgivable faults in my opinion. Later infusions, when the tea soup starts to lighten up in color, are wonderfully sweet and even display fruit and honey notes that remind me of ripe plums. When the liquor got cold in my cup it yielded some great vanilla bean notes too.

Richard reported "a highly caffeinated" sensation after drinking this cake but my sessions with it have left me feeling relaxed (almost sleepy), mellow, and thoughtful. That is my most common physical reaction after drinking a large amount of decent shu puer.

Zina Tea's '06 '07 '08 Shu Puer Cake

My friend Donia has some excellent connections for Chinese tea. She recently started a Seattle-based business called Zina Tea (website coming soon) to bring these treasures to the North American market. Last weekend, she debuted her current selection at this year's Northwest Tea Festival and I was lucky enough to procure a small sample of an interesting shu bing (熟餅) called "2006-07-08 Blend Puer Cooked Cake" to review here on my blog.

The cake is beautifully presented in a wrapper advertising 喬木古茶 (tall trees old tea) in bold black characters. The factory is listed as Chang Yun Tea Company (昌雲茶業有限公司出品).

In her product description for this cake, Donia describes the production of shu puer as it pertains to this product. She notes that the level of fermentation differed for each of the three batches, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and that care was taken to ensure good air circulation for the leaves between batches. At a certain point, while processing the 2008 leaves, 2006 and 2007's leaves were mixed in. This melange waited three more years before being pressed into cakes.

The dry leaves appear dark brown and black with a few golden buds and stems. They have a sweet, toasty smell.

I used a ~100 ml gaiwan with 5 grams of leaf and boiling water. A short rinse released a pleasant malty, earthy aroma.

As expected, this cake performed very well for me. Six infusions poured silky, smooth and complex. The broth was a little bit lighter than most of my favorite shu puer teas so I'll try a couple more grams of dry leaf for my next session. My tasting notes included walnut, old growth rainforest, and vanilla bean.

I'd recommend this cake to anyone looking for a delicious and interesting shu puer blend. I also encourage my readers to contact Donia directly (dalexandra@zinatea.com) to receive her tea list or to ask her any questions about her business.

2005 Gu Yuan Chen Xiang Shu Puer Cake

Today I'm reviewing the Cang Yuan Wa Mountain Tea Factories' 2005 Gu Yuan Chen Xiang shu puer cake (滄源佤山茶廠-古遠陳香-熟餅). I was recently given a half-cake-chunk by my generous friend T.Bass in Georgia (the state, not the country). He also included the beautiful gift box for this tea.

The box.


The wrapper.


The chunk.

The session.

I used a ~5 gram chunk of tea in a small gaiwan. I started with a three-second rinse before inhaling the sweet, earthy and smoky aroma on the wet leaves. The underside of the gaiwan lid presented a similar aroma with more fruity and rosy aspects.

When I drink shu puer tea I'm usually looking for something smooth, rich and pleasant. The liquor on this worthy specimen was very smooth and pleasant but not too rich. Compared to its cousin, the Cang Yuan Wa Mountain Tea Factory's 2006 Ripe Puer Brick (滄源佤山茶廠熟普洱茶磚), this tea seems pretty light.

Although lighter than I expected, it did display many lovely little bursts of complexity. My tasting notes included old wood, vanilla and ripe red grape. I'm also glad that the liquor was not very smoky. This cake will make an excellent summer shu.

2006 Gu Zhuang Loose Leaf Shu

My online tea buddy, John Jelly, gifted me this 50 gram pack of loose leaf shu puer (熟普洱) back in 2007. I'm not sure how he came by it.

The brand, Li Ji Gu Zhuang (李記谷庄) is based out of Jinggu (景谷) in Yunnan, China. They appear to me to be an upscale, though relatively new tea company. Royalpuer.com claims their owner is a descendant of the inventor of the Tuo Cha (沱茶) and that "they still use traditional processing methods that were passed down from one generation to another for more than a hundred years." That may just be marketing but it all sounds pretty good to me.

Here is the wrapper for my 50 gram bag:

Everything appears to be in order... so let's have a drink!

I filled Xiao Xiao about 1/3 full of dry leaf and gave the leaves a 5-second rinse. They had a warm, toasty aroma with delicate forest and soil notes.

The first infusion (about 25 seconds) poured a dark reddish-black color and had a milky texture with soft smokiness. My daughter took a little sip, and when I asked her opinion, she replied "it tastes funny, and it tastes like honey."

This is a shot of the second infusion.

I enjoyed four more dark, malty infusions and one weak, orange-colored fifth infusion. My tasting notes included: fat ripe blueberry, carob and sugar cookie. I found the Gu Zhuang to be a smooth and worthy shu puer.

Dai Fragrance Puer Cake

A few years back my friends Robert, Jessie and Tiffany gifted me this fine cake of shu (aka 熟, aka black, aka cooked, aka ripe) puer tea. It is called Dai Fragrance (傣香) and was purchased from Seattle's own New Century Tea Gallery. I'm not sure of the vintage but I estimate it to be early to mid 2000's.

Along the bottom it reads: 中國 (China) 雲南省 (Yunnan Province) 勐海 (Menghai) 雲妹工藝茶廠出品 (Yun Mei Gong Yi factory produce) and the internal ticket includes the famous Menghai "Dayi" logo. I've never taken the time to translate the text in the middle of the cake.

Here she is.

This cake has been one of my "go to" cakes lately and I've been looking forward to sharing a blog review of it for a little while now.

The dry leaves are mostly small and dark but they do have quite a bit of gold and rust colored flecks. The compression is loose and the aroma is malty and mellow.

Sans paper.

A few of the early infusions can have a coffee-like-acidity if over steeped but mainly it is silky smooth. I'll usually do a nice long ten second rinse before I steep the first infusion. Then I'll do many super-hot short infusions. This way it tastes clean and pours thick as oil. To me, it yields a very nutty flavor that reminds me of walnuts, amaretto, and cocoa. I'm sure some folks would disagree (because every one's palate is so different) but in my opinion this cake is neither earthy nor smoky.

The soup.

This "Dai Fragrance" cake is a winner in my book but I'm not sure why it was given its name. Do the Dai minority people have a particular marketable aroma? I bet a few of my readers have the experience and/or connections to wager a guess. If so, please leave me a comment.

Cang Yuan Wa Mountain Ripe Puer Brick

I would like you to meet the Cang Yuan Wa Mountain Tea Factory's 2006 Ripe Puer Brick (滄源佤山茶廠熟普洱茶磚).

Hello. 你好.


Pleased to meet you!

These bricks were imported by my friends at Tacoma Trading Co. and have been floating around various Northwest tea shops for the last few years. Teacup has been selling them off and on for the last three years and they have been given the nickname "those sweet and smooth bricks" by several of my regular puer customers.

According to T.T.C. these bricks were crafted by a talented female puer master name Tanmei who used to work for the Kunming tea factory. Now she is independent and works with her husband to market her tea.

I recently scored 10 of these bricks from T.T.C. with the hope of making a little extra tea buying money before I head off to Taiwan in mid-January 2010 (more about that soon).

This puer is long lasting and dark with a smooth and silky mouth-feel. I tried to over-brew it but I failed. It can get very dark and pour like thick black oil, but it will stay sweet and smooth. My tasting notes for this morning's session included: fresh soy milk, walnuts, and amaretto. To me this ripe puer is not smoky but it does have a hint of a rosy, fruity, some-might-say-smoky, Keemun* note in the finish.

Infusion #2
(but infusions 1 to 5 pretty much looked like this)

Updated 2-1-12 = Cinnabar's and my tea shop Phoenix Tea in Burien may have these in stock. Please email us for details.

*Keemun (Qimen) (祁門) is a popular Chinese tea. We call it black tea but the Chinese call it red tea (hongcha) (紅茶).

Pengyou's Puer - 朋友的普洱

Quite a few friends consider me their "Chinese tea guy." Though I'll never feel worthy, that is a huge honor and I strive to live up to it. Because of this, friends (or friendly acquaintances) will often tell me about a random tea their friend bought them in China or Taiwan. They will say something like: "So my buddy just got back from {some amount of time} in Hong Kong (or Shanghai, or Taipei), and gave me some puer tea (or green tea, or oolong tea). I haven't tried it yet and the writing is all Chinese. I wouldn't even know where to begin. Would you like to try it with me sometime?"

I will always answer: "Sure! I'd love to."

This happened a little while back when my friend John brought in a couple of puer cakes to try. Later, when I decided to blog about our cupping, he was nice enough to email me these great looking photos that he had taken of one of the puer cakes.

The Cake

Before I go any further I should admit that I'm far from an expert on puer tea. In fact... all I really know is that I like to drink it and read about it. I've never been to Yunnan (雲南) so all of my knowledge is based on books (such as First Step to Chinese Pu-erh Tea by Chan Kam Pong), websites (such as pu-erh.net) and magazines (such as Art of Tea).

John's cakes were cooked (aka black, aka ripe, aka 熟/shu) puer. I read the Chinese printed on their wrapping paper, but that was pointless because it says the same thing in English as it does in Chinese. I noted the green "茶" stamped in a circle of eight "中." To my untrained eye, the wrappers revealed no other specific details about the tea inside them. We were not certain of their production years.

We cupped them on a quiet afternoon at Teacup. They presented dark, thick liquors. Some pours were a tad bit harsh but others were quite smooth. We didn't take notes and I don't remember too much about them now.

In the end I'd say the teas were drinkable but unremarkable... but that is not really what matters. The point is that I love to help my friends identify random samples of unknown teas. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes I am reminded how little I really know about tea.

Xiao Xiao's big day

You may already know that quality loose leaf tea is a great value. I usually tell my clients that a pound of tea brews 180 to 200 cups, which means that the price per cup can fall anywhere from one penny to a few dollars. While I'm sure this all varies greatly from person to person and tea to tea, I still feel this statistic is a pretty accurate rule of thumb.

One day Xiao Xiao and I decided to find out just how much brewed tea we could make using my last 8 grams of 1997 Nannuo shou cha. This tea cost $128 per pound, so 8 grams would be $2.26.

Xiao Xiao!
(What he lacks in size he makes up for in spirit.)

Xiao Xiao holds enough tea to fill three small teacups, but because I was drinking solo, I poured a third of each infusion into a large mason jar, a third into another small drinking cup, and the rest into my own cup to savor. We went for 13 delicious infusions.

After I was done the mason jar held 10 ounces of tea:
(This room temperature mix of all 13 infusions tasted great too!)

... and the cups looked like this:
(I didn't drink all of these, because I was already feeling a super puer buzz.)

(They are shown here in order from left to right, top to bottom.)

30oz of tea is 3.75 cups so this time a $128 per pound tea worked out to about $0.60 per cup!

After our little experiment, Xiao Xiao was very sleepy (brewing 30 ounces of tea can be very hard work when you're the size of a golf ball) so I made him a nice little "nest" out of some used tea leaves and let him rest.

Pretty Tuo vs Ugly Tuo

Ladies and Gentlemen... tonight's main event is a steel cage match-up between longtime Xiao Tuocha (小沱茶) puer rivals!

In the steel cage!

In this corner, weighing in at 4.12 grams, our returning champion, "Pretty Boy Tuo"...

Pretty Boy:

Pretty Boy showing off his nice physique:

...and in this corner, weighing in at a mere 4.02 grams, tonight's challenger, "Ugly Joe Tuo"!

Ugly Joe:

Joe minus that tattered rag:

Ding! and there's the bell. Pretty Boy started round one with a full bodied brew, though his tea soup was a bit "thinner" than Ugly Joe's more luscious broth. Ugly Joe wins round one with complex, and almost "keemun-like" punch (pardon the pun).

Round 1 goes to Ugly Joe!

Ding! Round two is off to a great start with both combatants putting forth a thick black infusion. This time Pretty Boy pulls ahead with a divine "milky smooth" brew. Joe falls short with a distinct "dirt" taste that distracts from the infusion's redeeming qualities.

Round 2 goes to Pretty Boy!

This steel cage match-up went on for 3 more exciting rounds with each tuocha presenting great cups of dark puer tea. The referees (me and Shu Shu) decided to relax, stop taking notes, zone out and enjoy these luscious teas. In the fifth and last round Ugly Joe came through with a slightly darker color and a more pleasant flavor.

And the winner is... UGLY JOE! WE HAVE A NEW CHAMPION! (...and the crowd goes wild!)

Nannou Shou Cha 1997

These days America has no shortage of businesses that sell Chinese and/or Taiwanese teas. If you live in an urban area or have access to a phone or computer, then excellent tea is fairly easy to come by. In fact, I could easily name about 20 wonderful and trustworthy tea vendors right now off the top of my head. One of these tea shops is Red Blossom in San Francisco. My wife and I had the pleasure of checking them out last year when we traveled down to the Bay Area for our baby shower. We sampled many sublime teas at Red Blossom and ended up buying an ounce each of: 2007 Spring Heirloom Lishan, Spring 2007 Supreme Panan Dragonwell, and 1997 Nannou Shou Puer tea. Our total came to $48. That provided us with 25 amazing tea sessions each with 3 to 8 delicious infusions, so I'd say we got a fantastic value!

This afternoon I savoured my penultimate pot of Nannou Shou Cha 1997 and on a whim I decided to blog about it. Up until now I haven't posted many tea reviews, and when I do attempt a tea review, I rarely say anything critical or negative about the tea. The best tea reviews, in my opinion, are the ones that balance the "clinical" aspects of the steeping parameters (ie. the amount of leaf, the water temperature, the brewing vessel etc...etc...) with a good story. There are plenty of writers out there who can produce an interesting, informative and genuinely "readable" tea review. My goal is to be one of them (someday).

This loose leaf puer is from Nannou Mountain (南糯山), a famous tea producing area in southern Yunnan, China. Because I do not have much experience with region-specific puer teas, I will not be making any claims about how Nannou Mountain tea should taste or what particular flavors they usually possess.

I used about 4 grams of tea in Xiao Xiao (a very small clay pot). The dry leaf is a random assortment of different sizes, stems and colors. The colors range from orange to grey to black. They have an earthy, malty smell.

The dry leaf:

Because today's weather is cool and cloudy with a soft misty rain, I have cracked open the dining room window to let in a bit of fresh air. I believe that the sweet smell of Northwest rain can be highly beneficial when paired with some teas. (On that note, the smell of newly fallen snow is a heavenly compliment to Winter Shan Lin Xi High Mountain Taiwanese Oolong Tea.)

I used filtered Seattle water that had just reached a rolling boil and first gave the dry leaves a 5 second rinse, then I prepared five delicious infusions. Each infusion steeped for about 30 to 60 seconds and always produced a milky-black color. This puer had no smokiness and the flavor was velvety and malty like an infusion of roasted grains. I wonder if Nannou shan's tea leaves are known for thick, round, and smooth tastes or if this particular tea is an exception to the region's usual flavor profile?

Xiao Xiao and the fourth infusion:

I drank my tea slowly and mindfully while my little daughter sat in my lap. She is a peaceful and sweet baby who seems to enjoy good tea. When I pass my teacup under her nose she will instinctively stick out her tongue and try to lick it.

As I sip this satisfying puer tea I think about traveling to Yunnan, China. Someday I will go there and spend some time learning about puer tea production. Hopefully my wife and daughter can come too!

A quick look at the spent leaves: