Alas, I don’t have a regular supply of 1920s puerh. Today I was drinking the maocha I got a few days ago. I tried doing what the other guy did — brew it for very long, and no bitterness either. Hmmm. This makes me think. Why do some puerh have this problem of easily becoming bitter, while others don’t go bitter at all? Are they even the same thing? Did something happen in the processing? What’s going on? My 20 years old brick is fairly bitter, and can easily go bad on you if you don’t brew it right. Then you have these puerh that seemingly cannot go wrong no matter what you do. Some claim young puerh need to be powerful and nasty tasty in order for it to get better with age. Others claim this is the real deal, that the nasty tasting puerh is a product of low quality tree from the 70s. Who’s right?
On another unrelated note, I boiled the pot I recently bought today — the one I got for cheap. The result was near disaster. The tap water in Beijing is simply too hard — lots of minerals. So when I boiled the pot for about half an hour, and I went to check, I noticed one thing — there were lots of mineral deposits, everywhere. The evaporation of the water obviously kicked the water into saturation, so mineral crystals started forming…
I pulled the pot out, and it was covered in white mineral salts. I washed it and rubbed it, and got rid of the stuff, but still…. nasty experience.
I think for the tea boiling, I need to use low mineral content water to make sure that nothing forms from this mess. Otherwise, it’ll defeat the purpose entirely.
2 responses so far ↓
Phyllo // September 9, 2006 at 12:29 am |
Share the answer for all your questions with me too. I wonder too…
davelcorp // September 9, 2006 at 2:09 am |
Let’s get together and discuss this over a few rounds of aged sheng in a decade or 2.