A Tea Addict's Journal

I remember when I first started out drinking tea and learning about it, a very knowledgeable friend told me that puerh (by which is meant aged puerh — new tea was not in the discussion) tastes best BEGINNING with the 5th infusions. Note that we are talking the BEGINNING of the good tasting part is the fifth infusion onward, going to 10th, 15th, etc. Everything before was not very good, and in fact, the friend rinses two or three times sometimes for older tea, and throwing those away or using them to help age pots.

I think most people, having been raised on the “infuse and throw” culture, will wonder how it could be that a tea can start to taste its best on the fifth infusion. Many I know don’t even necessarily get to the fifth before giving up on a tea.

I think what happens here and what bears repeating is that in the first few infusions, what’s really going into the liquid is what can be called the “storage” taste. Different storage facilities taste different — find two loose traditionally stored puerh, say, from two different stores, and they will taste vastly different. Find two traditionally stored puerhs from the same store, and as long as they have stored both, the first few cups will taste very similar. What happens afterwards is what’s really in the tea — the true taste of the tea, not the storage.

One of the reasons why some people hate traditionally stored tea is the storage taste — it’s not going to go away no matter what you do. If you drink enough infusions though, it does weaken it sufficiently so that you can get to the tea underneath it. The taste is obviously changed, but for better tea, there will be that perfume taste that can be quite obvious in a dry stored tea but less so in a traditionally stored one, but it should still be there.

These days I’ve been drinking my puerh for two days at a time — with the second day being a contiuation of the first. I am using a larger pot with a relatively careless way of brewing them, and they are all traditionally stored, loose or broken tea. While the taste is much stronger on the first day, the second day is often much sweeter and, sometimes, has that nice, sweet quality to it that is ultimately what you’re after.

I’m not saying that that’s the only way to appreciate puerh, but I do think that to focus too much on the first few cups can be very misleading sometimes, especially when it comes to puerh that has been aging for a bit. While it is true that for dry stored tea the effect of storage might be a bit lower, it is still a mitigating factor. What other teas are stored along the cake you’re drinking, for example, will affect the way it tastes/smells the first few cups. That, in turn, can affect your impression of the tea if the first few cups take too much precedence in the taster’s mind.

Moving with a lot of tea to a new place means having to worry about where to store them. Oolongs are simple — you just keep them out of light and air tight, and it’s good. All you need are shelves (which I need to acquire). Puerh, on the other hand, is a trickier matter — right now I have all of them in a cardboard box, the same way they came during the move. I have not moved them at all.

The question is whether or not to take them out at all, or if I should store all of them as is. When it comes to storing tea, everybody has a different take on how puerh should be stored. The various theories I’ve heard range from absolutely closed environment, where little air is exchanged and teas should be “kept” so that they retain much of their qi (so the theory goes), to leaving them out in open air and let them air out. The most extreme, as I’ve related on this blog a long time ago, was a lady who bought a whole bunch of cakes from Hong Kong (all suitably wet stored, of course), took them to the desert weather in Xinjiang, put them in a big warehouse with all the doors/windows open and letting the desert wind blow through the cakes in an attempt to “tuicang”, literally “let the storage (flavour) fade”. I was unlucky enough to get to try the end result of this attempt, and it was, well, nasty. It seems like in addition to getting rid of the “storage” smell, much of the tea’s flavours and especially the smoothness also went out the window, carried out, no doubt, by the desert wind.

Ever since having tried that tea I’ve been more inclined to store my teas in relatively closed environments, or at least in places where they don’t see much air circulation. My teas in Hong Kong are stashed on the top shelves of a bookcase, in a corner where little air is exchanged while still being open to the room. In humid environments like Hong Kong or Taiwan, it’s probably best to leave the teas off the floor or even anywhere close to the floor, because moisture seems to be higher there — a cake of mine that I left in the open air in Taiwan on a low coffee table started growing stuff on it after a week of rain…. and I was living on the 8th floor.

What I haven’t decided is whether or not to keep the cakes in the box. I used to think that cardboard boxes probably give off a bit of a cardboard smell, which is no good, but then, most tea merchants keep their teas in cardboard boxes… so does it really matter? Will we notice? I think it’s probably more noticeable in a dry stored tea, because off notes will be more obvious here. Wet stored teas are so dominated by the storage taste that subtle aromatics like cardboard smell probably won’t be very obvious — or who knows, maybe even add to the enjoyment of the tea.

When I was in Ohio I had no need whatsoever of adding moisture — living basically in the woods, I found the soil and flora nearby kept the apartment suitably humid without excessive moisture. After rains it would get wet for a few days, but will slowly dry out. I think the soil, grass, and tress around acted as a sort of buffer that kept humidity more constant within the house. In a more city-like environment though, I think the dynamics are a little different, especially since I now live on the second floor. It’s been raining a lot, but I think in the winter it won’t be too humid, at least not with the heater on all the time. That’s something I have to consider.

I have, however, been able to smell the tea recently just sitting at my desk. Smell, I’ve found, is probably a decent indicator of whether or not a cake is too dry. When I bought new cakes in Beijing they were almost all invariably odorless — you can hardly smell anything. After a few days in my tea closet in Beijing, they would start giving off some aroma. The difference was obvious, and since in places like Hong Kong a puerh cake is readily detectable by a human nose, I take that as a good sign.

So, lots of unknowns…. but I think I am going to stick my cakes on the top shelf in the closet, and possibly leave them in the cardboard box this time to see if anything happens.