A Tea Addict's Journal

I went to the tea market today, but didn’t accomplish what I wanted, and basically didn’t drink any tea.  So I got home, and decided to drink some cooked samples I got from Teacuppa thanks to their generous offer of tea that Hobbes at the Half-Dipper organized.

Since I only got two of the three samples… I am tasting only two and don’t know which particular tea I’m missing, but the three possible candidates are:

1) 2005 Menghai Factory “Tiandiren” (Shupu)
2) 2005 Luxi Tea Co. Organic 8821 (Shupu)
3) 2005 CNNP (Shupu)

Anyway, so my two samples are from these.

I tried the first one:

Smells mildly of cooked puerh.  Nothing too exciting.  When I rinsed it and smelled the lid… it smells, oddly enough, like a young raw puerh aged 3-4 years.  I think it’s because it’s been stored with a lot of that kind of tea?  When I tasted the first infusion… the overall impression was that it was fairly weak and bland.  Ok, maybe I didn’t brew it strong enough.  I let the second infusion go longer… still thin, a little stronger in taste, but doesn’t taste quite like a cooked puerh.  A bit sour…. not too exciting, and a little off-putting.  Third infusion… really, really sour now.  This is no good.  I gave up on the tea.  If a tea doesn’t show anything good to me in three infusions (and in fact, got worse because it was really quite sour) then it’s not a tea I really want to drink, and given how weak it is, I don’t think it was going to improve.

Overall impression: weak, thin, not really like a cooked, more like a screwed up raw puerh or just something very odd.  Didn’t like it at all…

The leaves don’t even look quite right

Something wasn’t quite right about this.  I was telling vl that I can make a better cooked puerh than this.

Utterly unsatisfied, I went on to the next sample.

Looks more like a normal cooked to me, actually.  The last one was a little black.

The tea tastes a little more like a normal cooked puerh.  It’s lost that nasty pondy smell, but just has the regular cooked pu taste.  A little too bitter for a cooked puerh, in my opinion, but it’s thick, at least.  An average cooked tea…

Since the colour of the actual tea is basically some variation of soy sauce… not a lot of reason to post the colour of the tea itself.

All in all… one tea that is really not good, and one that is so so.  I have a suspicion that the bad one is the CNNP, and the so so one… the Tiandiren, perhaps?