When I first started drinking wine, one of the things that I most enjoyed was the feeling afterwards, once the wine had coursed through the throat and into the stomach. That warmth. It was amazing to me to feel how the body responded to the drink.

I had a similar experience this morning with tea. The tea is an aged pu-erh tea from Bana Tea Company, a Menghai factory raw (sheng) pu-erh that has been aging since 1996.

What struck me about this tea was how refreshed the mouth felt after drinking it. Just like you can feel the wine burning in your chest, I could feel the tea coating and cooling my mouth.

I had steeped the tea according to Linda’s (the owner of Bana Tea Company0 instructions: start with two rinses, followed by a 10-second infusion; increase it by 10 seconds for the next three infusions; then infuse it for a minute, and increase it by a minute for every subsequent infusions. I am now on my fifth infusion, and the tea still has plenty of juice to give. In fact, many of the leaves have only just now begun to unfurl. I’ll be drinking this all day.

Dry, the tea looks impressive. Big, lush leaves, with some bronzed tips. It smells of earth, as you would expect from a pu-erh.

This is a very earthy pu-erh. But perhaps the most notable flavour I have found is a citric tartiness. This becomes more pronounced as the tea cools, and it has also become much more obvious with subsequent infusions.

Menghai Aged Raw Pu-erh is available in cake form from Bana Tea Company. Linda still has a limited supply of the loose leaf pu-erh, so if you’re interested in that, email her directly. Browse and compare more pu-erh tea from different merchants in the Tea Finely Brewed marketplace.

Disclosure: Bana Tea Company is a current advertiser on Tea Finely Brewed. This tea was sent to me as a free sample.

© Eric for Tea Finely Brewed, 2010. | Menghai Aged Raw Pu-Erh from Bana Tea Company | No comment |
Post categories: Pu-erh tea, Tea reviews
Post tags: Bana Tea Company, raw pu-erh, sheng pu-erh

I’ve been writing about tea for almost a year, and drinking it for much longer than that, but sometimes I still feel like a kid in a candy shop full of sweets he’s never tried. There is an almost never-ending variation in the world of tea. How one tree can yield such an immense array of flavours never ceases to amaze me.

Within this world of teas is pu-erh tea, itself a wild and varied beast. My dabbling in pu-erh has so far consisted of a couple of loose leaf pu-erhs, a small brick and a mini green tuocha that, according to a much more experienced pu-erh aficionado, isn’t green at all. But I am very thankful to Linda from Bana Tea Company (a current advertiser on Tea Finely Brewed), who has graciously sent me a sampling of her pu-erhs, along with plenty of advice on how best to prepare them. Today, I turn to her Treasures from Five Mountains, a 2008 vintage, early spring harvest pu-erh tea.

Right off the bat, it’s clear that this is unlike any pu-erh I’ve had before. It infuses into a golden soup, suggesting to me that this is going to be far milder than previous pu-erhs I’ve tasted, which tend to brew into a very dark tea.

As anticipated, this tea has a milder taste ? the earthiness that dominates other pu-erhs is faint here. Instead, this tea is marked by a sharp nutty flavour. It’s astringent and mouth-drying, but leaves me feeling warm and nourished. There is just a wonderful sense of wholesomeness after drinking this.

I enjoy three infusions of this, the last of which I enjoy the most, perhaps down to the fact that I used water that had cooled to 65º C. I’ve no doubt I could have re-infused these beautiful leaves at least a couple more times, but responsibility calls and I’m due to go to work.

Treasures from Five Mountains is available from Bana Tea Company on its own ($28 for a 200 gram brick) or as part of their $10 sampler pack, which features 7 of their pu-erhs teas.

© Eric for Tea Finely Brewed, 2009. | Treasures from Five Mountains: Vintage 2008 Raw Pu-Erh Tea from Bana Tea Company | No comment |
Post categories: Pu-erh tea, Tea reviews
Post tags: Bana Tea Company, raw pu-erh, sheng pu-erh

I am no expert on pu-erh tea, but I’m learning. Over the past few months I’ve tried several loose leaf pu-erhs, as well as a small pu-erh cake I picked up from Ten Ren here in Melbourne. Last week, I made my latest pu-erh purchase: a small bag of mini green tuocha, sold by Tea Leaves (a local Australian chain of tea stores).

Today, I finally got a chance to make this for the first time. As I said, I’m no expert on pu-erh, and for a minute there I stopped and realized that I wasn’t really sure how to brew this. Ardent pu-erh aficionados tend to prefer the gong-fu style of brewing, but I have neither yixing nor gaiwan, so I am yet to venture into the world of gong-fu brewing. In The Story of Tea, the Heisses offer some broad parameters: 2 – 5 minutes with water around 93° – 100° Celsius. Two to five minutes is quite the range though, so I decided to conduct this little experiment.

The Experiment

This a very simple experiment, and one that you could apply to any tea if you want. Here’s what I did:

As suggested in The Story of Tea, I decided to use freshly boiled water. Lately I’ve been leaning towards using my Japanese porcelain tea set, so again I used this. I probably used about 300 ml of water, though that’s little more than a guess.

Four cups of the same tea, just poured at different stages in the brewing process.

The experiment is all about timing. I let the tea steep for a minute before pouring one cup, then waited. At the 2 minute mark, I poured another cup. I poured two more cups, one at 3 minutes and another at 3:30.

The first thing that’s apparent is how much the extra infusion time affects the brew’s colour. The first cup was a very light orange amber, which grew steadily darker with each consecutive cup ? by the time I’d reached the fourth cup, the brew was almost black. Based on its colour alone, I was already anticipating that one to be a bit too strong.

Off to the tasting table. I was very glad to have my esteemed wife join me for this part of the experiment.

First up, the 1 minute brew: I could smell very little in this one, but Bec picked up a hint of woody, smokiness ? like a bonfire on a farm, as she put it. The taste was on the weak side, with a sweetness bounded by the slightest earthiness. Bec, who ate an entire clove of garlic last night, couldn’t taste much at all.

Next came the 2 minute brew, which had a more intense smoky aroma about it. For Bec, it evoked images of old time, rustic places. I tasted it and found that it had grown earthier in that extra minute of brewing time. After a few sips, I thought I could taste something fruity. A few more sips. Dates!

I could taste those dates even more intensely on the third cup, which was starting to feel a bit too strong. I found it quite drying of the tongue, with more tannins, astringency and a slightly unpleasant sourness. Bec agreed that it wasn’t as nice as the second cup.

Then came the fourth cup. As I’d anticipated, this one was too strong. Far too strong, it turns out. “Yuck!” That was Bec’s reaction to her one and only sip. I tried it and while I think being familiar with pu-erh allowed me to put up with it a bit more, it was obviously far too strong. That astringency that was starting to emerge half a minute earlier was biting now. I ended up emptying half the cup on our beleaguered chili plant.

The 3 Lessons I Learned

It’s good to experiment: Don’t always go by the book (or the instructions on the packet). Experimentation is fun, and it will help you figure out how to make tea the way you like it, every time. Now that I know how much difference a couple minutes of infusing has, I’ll be very careful to time how long I infuse this tea for.

Timing matters: I have a tendency to be lazy about timing a lot of the time, but depending on the tea, it can make quite a considerable difference. Many teas turn out far too weak if you don’t give them long enough, and will make you gag if you steep them too long. Occasionally, you’ll come across a tea that just doesn’t seem to care how long you steep it, but those are in the minority.

Taste with someone: It was really fun tasting these teas with Bec. She would pick up a lot of smells that I would miss entirely, while I tended to be a bit more perceptive on the taste profiles. I loved how the tea would evoke vivid imagery for her. It didn’t do the same for me, but even just hearing how she was experiencing it allowed me to appreciate the tea’s depth a bit more.

© eric for Tea Finely Brewed, 2009. | The Mini Green Tuocha Experiment | 9 comments |
Post categories: Pu-erh tea
Post tags: experiments, raw pu-erh, sheng pu-erh, tuocha