A Tea Addict's Journal

My cat’s choice

April 18, 2011 · 6 Comments

For those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, I have two cats who have been with me for almost ten years now.  Normally, they don’t care much for tea.  In fact, they ignore me when I brew tea.  Sometimes the male cat, Sunny, will come by and sniff, but no more.  He is, by and large, not interested in such things.  Smokey, the female one, generally avoids me when I make tea.  Napping is much more interesting.

Recently though, Smokey has shown extreme interest in one particular cake of tea I have sitting around.  This never happens, but the other day, she was positively pawing it and sniffing it, something which has never, ever happened before with any other tea.  I figured I need to give this tea a try again, since she’s generally quite selective in her food choices.

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The tea in question is one I sent recently to BBB for some tasting.  It’s a Bulang I picked up over Taobao for a not-very-cheap price.  The tea was shown without any identifier on Taobao — just a generic Bulang claim, pictures of the leaves, and that’s it.  Turns out it actually has a real wrapper

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The tea is pretty good looking, but nothing too special.  With dry leaves, especially in pressed form, there is only so much you can tell from the looks.  At the end of the day, it’s all about the liquor.

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My tea looks way darker than BBB’s for two reasons — lighting, and because I use a much deeper cup.  I think this tea is one of very few in recent years that I’ve tried that fit my criteria for a good, young puerh — one that excites the tongue, turns sweet very quickly, has qi, and does not give me hints of odd processing or green tea processing.  The last point is particularly important, as many teas these days are made in such a way as to yield immediate, bean like pleasure, but will, over time, turn to a bitter mess.  Nine out of ten samples of new teas have some version of that.  This is one of the other 10%.

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I might actually pick some more of this up, eventually, but it’s just expensive enough for me to think twice about it.

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6 responses so far ↓

  • Sherab Chen // April 19, 2011 at 10:23 am | Reply

    Okay, that’s the kitty picky? Hmm, do have to think about getting a cat for tea testing…. Did you mean that the “green process” should be avoid for Puerh only, right? I also quite admire those tin cup saucers you acquired!

    • MarshalN // April 19, 2011 at 4:31 pm | Reply

      Well, Smokey is the power behind the throne.

      Of course, I’m only talking about pu at this point, although many TGYs from the mainland are also insanely green.

  • Di // April 19, 2011 at 5:10 pm | Reply

    I’m rather intrigued by the wrapper…a hybrid of a dragon and….zebra/horse??

  • MadameN // April 22, 2011 at 4:01 am | Reply

    For the record, neither Sunny and Smokey like coffee — whether it is from Starbucks or the finest Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. When they were living just with me, Smokey would sometimes perk up at the scent of high-quality oolongs too, so I have to corroborate MarshalN’s hypothesis that there is something unusually attractive about this tea…

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