Puerh Blog

Another Yuan Yuan Tang tea! The last time I drank my first YYT tea and it was great.
Let’s see how this first impression continues with this tea. Slightly younger sheng from 2014.

I am very excited! Today I am going to try my first tea from the taiwanese Yuan Yuan Tang boutique brand. This is new territory for me, as I am not really familiar with those boutique brands in general. Definitely they are significantly more expensive. So I hope it is worth the extra dollar - let’s see! :-)

This sample is hanging around for a while. I think it is time to drink it.
This is a general reminder to myself. Drink them. Don’t wait too long - compared to whole cakes they don’t actually age
well.
Quite the opposite: They will lose their taste & flavor.
Now this all sounds bad, but don’t worry. The sample for today did not suffer too much - so let’s jump right into it!

A refreshing cup of raw puerh is what I need on such a hot day - even though it is already September!
If you demand the same, then this tea is for you. :-)

This tea is a gift from a very special person in my life and I am thrilled to dive into that sample for many reasons.
As you might now, I rarely drink shou puerh. Hence, this is a good opportunity to check in with the “dark(er) side” of puerh. For me, I really love the directness of a fresh sheng puerh, however, today I am also really looking for these calm and sweet notes that a shou usually has to offer. Those perfectly match winter times and the inward focus. Lets see if my expectations hold true for that shou, or if my memory is too rusty because I did not drink that sort of tea for too long.

This thing is hard to break! That was my first impression of this sample.
Right from the beginning I noticed how hard it will be to break it apart. Basically I got a sample
which is one big compressed piece. A little tearing here and there and some stitching with my puerh knife eventually loosened up the sample.
First challenge done! Now lets look into if it was worth all the trouble.

This tea is 22 years old! Ancient…well in the context of tea definitely, right?
This puerh is shaped like a tuo/mushroom. Although I only have this sample I could already see the characteristics of the original shape due to the compressed and round part I got as a sample.
Some of you might ask yourself, does the shape matter. To be honest: I don’t know. I’ve asked myself the same whether puerh pressed into a brick-like shape is different than tuo-like shapes. I think there is a subtle difference. Since the tuo shape offers more surface, it will presumably also age differently.

Most puerh tea comes packaged in high quantity of typically 357 gram. This dates back to when tea salesmen needed to carry as much tea as possible but waste as few space as possible. The byproduct was tea compressed into cake-like-forms - the creation of our beloved puerh tea!
Nowadays it is rather cumbersome to have such big quantities for tea. Especially if one just wants to try a tea that is not known yet. Paying the full price for 357g can be quite an invest for that. More so, if your goal is to explore a whole tea growing area like Lincang or a specific manufacturing year.
Luckily most tea vendors offer samples of their tea! YunnanSourcing does so definitely. I bought a bunch of samples and I am thrilled to go through them.
This will be the start of a small series on the YS-samples.

Today is quite a sad day - I finished drinking one of my most favorite daily go tos. On the other hand I live by the philosophy “Drink it, while it’s there”. James from teadb also themed this in his videos. Puerh lovers tend to let their tea lay around for too long - sure everyone likes to do their little experiments in aging and wants to come back to the tea a few years later to be surprised how great it developed. But this blocks us from just enjoying the tea how it is right now. Still I am guilty in the sense that of course I also store some of my precious teas and only drink them for special occasions! :-)

Continuing my journey of exploring Thai Puerh, I treated myself with this delicious sample from puerh.sk.