57 year old tea

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Hey, does it seem odd to anyone else that folks here are drinking 57 year old tea?

Reply to
ladygreyer
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Not to me. Don't knock it if you haven't tried it.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

If it's a tea bag from 1949, then yes it's very odd. If it's pu-erh, no, not odd. I'm not quite sure if I've ever heard of a 50+ years aged oolong. Maybe they exists...especially those high fire gong fu tea or wuyi shan yan cha. Any idea?

Reply to
Phyll

A couple of the usual vendors sell wulongs from the 60s, which would of course be up to 37-46 years ol - and that's a baozhong!

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It doesn't seem too unlikely to find some older wulongs. Let me know if you find some. :)

Toodlepip,

Hobbes

Reply to
HobbesOxon

snipped-for-privacy@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com9/13/06

18: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

I have drunk 50 year old Oolongs and can report that they can exude many wonderous complex aroma and taste elements. They produce a remarkably clear red liquor. These old oolongs are usually, but not always, from the WuYi mountains. Delicious! But, not as delicious, complex, or spiritually edifying as a 50 year old Pu'erh that had been properly made from good leaf, and properly stored. Drinking such is truly a heavenly experience.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Plant

Tell me how much money you got to spend and I'll tell you how old the tea is. The people who bought the tea 50+ years ago are dead. At best it was passed person to person for whatever reason but not for commercial investment. Who was the last person to sell commercially to make a profit. It would have been done in the chain decades and decades ago and consumed. You scan the Chinese webpages with a translator and you might see the collectors comparing taste but nothing for sale. The aged Pu'er in the West is the same as the aged Pu'er in the Chinese markets. It doesn't exist and there is always a fool willing to part with his money. I have a 1oz tin from Tenren of loose pu'er from 75. I have a black CNNP Tuo I bought in 85. These are the kind of quantities that survive just by sheer chance. I don't see the case made for any aged pu'er prior to say pick an arbitrary year 95 that due to public awareness would be considered worth storing as an investment. The Chinese are the masters at selling mass produced old stuff to the West. Just watch the antique shows. The same for tea of any kind. It is very easy to doctor the taste of tea. There are plenty of people who market you can trust me and take your money.

Jim

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Reply to
Space Cowboy

Jim, can you repeat that last sentence please...I didn't get it. I have begun to agree on the general skepticism. Thanks.

Reply to
Phyll

...I quote me...

"There are plenty of people who market you can trust me and take your money."

There is an argument if you are part of an inner circle you can get authentic aged puer of whatever age you choose from someone who credentials are really nothing more than trust me. There is some truth that somewhere in the general pipeline of tea you have to trust somebody. I'm not sure of what was in place before the 75 modern factory system capable of mass production for puer. AFAIK in the old days it was produced and pressed in Yunnan bog pits. Also AFAIK back then what was produced was sold and not stored for a rainy day. It was considered a 'dirty' tea by the Chinese due to the nature of the processing before the regulated modern factory system. My argument 50 year old tea has been consumed or got tossed out with the trash. It may exist but not on the market for sale. What you see is 50 year old tea available for tasting but not for sale by merchants. They do have plenty of expensive supposed 30 year old tea. He won't sell the 50 year old stuff so I'm lucky to get the 30. Nobody has ever explained to me why their tastebuds are any more important than those who came before who didn't taste and those in the future who won't even if you get your hands on some.

Jim

PS I'm > Jim, can you repeat that last sentence please...I didn't get it. I

Reply to
Space Cowboy

It is not "ODD" to me at all. If I am correct I believe the tea being referred to in that article came from

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and having personally tasted their aged offerings I can honestly say that they are authentic in my honest opinion. Are they "exactly" 1949 vintage, heck I don't know but give or take 25% I would say the vintage is accurate. They are definitely on par with other 30 year + puerhs that I have tasted. While there are those who doubt that the aged genre actually exists, I can honestly confirm that it does indeed exist, as a matter of fact several of us in this newsgroup have together shared several pots of the real McCoy! A truly awesome experience! However you MUST know your sources as the vast majority of so-called aged puerhs are totally bogus forgeries.

-- Mike Petro

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Reply to
Mike Petro

Mike, are you saying that you are pretty sure they were manufactured sometime between 1461 and 2436? Good thing they weren't using the Hebrew calendar.

Best,

Rick.

Reply to
Richard Chappell

Or, more to the point, the Thai calendar:

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5

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

Why it can be claimed as 1949 exactly but not its manufactured name? How many tea factories were existing by that time...Shun Ning (Feng Qing) Tea Factory that was producing a little bit of green tea and red tea, Xin Kang Zang (Xia Guan) Tea Factory that was producing Tuo Cha and Jin Cha, and Fo Hai (Meng Hai) Tea Factory which had totally stopped tea producing by that time...While I know this could be an aged tea the timeline is just weird.

That 1949 is very compressed for a 57 year old tea and I bet that a

50's red lable won't be half compressed compares to it...there was no iron mode with machine compressing by that time if I can remember well. I like the 1978 compressed on the surface of the 1949 as well. This 1978 reminds me what I saw in Dali when I was travelling in Yunnan a couple years ago...I wanted to buy an exact type of brick like this with "production year" compressed...there was all years available and was promoting as "get your birth year piece".

Jing

Reply to
SEb

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Drinking aged Wulong is absolutely breathtaking experience. Last week I went with a Taiwan pal of mine to visit one of his friend's shops down here in the local tea market and they were able to let us try some

27 year old. Usually, I would be skeptical about someone trying to market an age to me rather than a flavor, but actually they let me try it first before they told me anything about it. Apparently, his friend's family has been in the tea business for over 4 generations in the Taizhong area actually growing their own tea on their own plantations. Each year they keep several kilos of the good stuff for aging and they have a decent stock of it.

So...how much do you think the offer would be for this kind of thing? ...

They don't sell it. They wouldn't even consider a really good offer by my rich Taiwan pal; he was willing to pay in the hundreds of dollars range for some of this stuff. You would not believe the multitude of flavors that one can experience from such a tea.

How to describe it. Imagine swallowing liquid silk; that would be basically the only way to describe the the texture of it. The aftertaste was the most surprising thing. It had sorta like an aged brandy flavor that was residual for more than an hour after we drank it. The "hui gan" was so nice that my friend remarked that he thinks he hadn't drank tea like that in the past...he is a little more than 50 and has been drinking tea for more than 20 years.

An excellent night.

Reply to
Mydnight

Thanks for the report Mydnight. That sounds incredible. It makes me want to go out and age some oolong in anticipation of drinking it in

2033.

Two questions:

  1. Was it tightly rolled, like modern-day TGY, or twisted, like wuyi or fenghuang?
  2. Storage. Do you know if they re-roasted it every year? I understand that some aged oolongs are kept dry this way. I'd like to know more about how to store oolongs this way. It would also be interesting if any of the chemists out there had any theories as to what happens to an oolong when it ages.

Right now I have some 2004 yangqing hao going that is very nice, although not as nice as some young pu'ers I've had, and certainly nothing like drinking liquid silk.

Reply to
Alex

Something purposefull has to be done to change the taste. Just sitting around 20 or 30 years won't change the taste if stored with anykind of care. I look at some of my old teas as a snapshot in time of the way things were back then. I do think teas today in general don't taste the same as back then. The commercial teas have lost something in the process. I do have a liitle bit of a 30 year old sowmee that doesn't look like or taste like something more recent. But sowmee taste itself varies. I have Darjeeling in clay pots from the mid eighties that taste better than anything I bought recently. But Darjeeling taste itself varies. I think with old teas you do travel back in time but the taste won't change. I think with puer it is the same. There is the process of clearing the air or allowing it to breath but the taste won't change but I could be wrong and won't be around long enough to find out and was told why my 20 year old shu tuocha and 30 year old loose shu didn't taste really different because they stopped aging at 5 years 'back then'. What will be the excuses in the future. IMHO if it taste like liquid silk today it tasted like liquid silk back then. I just have too much 25 year old stuff from 1980 when I started buying more than I could drink to think otherwise.

Jim

Alex wrote:

Reply to
Space Cowboy

... I whack but I'm not a butcher ... (best line ever, credited to you)

I fully agree with your comments. I may bring fire and brimstone down, but I don't really buy into the aging theory. With a highly compressed mass of tea, i just don't see how any more than the very top layer would be affected. I have a feeling that the really good Puer's of yesteryear were just as good then as they are now. Not this, "yeah it tastes like arse now.. but give it 10-15 years and it will be amazing stuff." Maybe slight variations but not this wholesale metamorphasis. That being said, I have had many different types of tea (green, black, oolong) that have been stored with normal care that I enjoy more a year or two later. I think it is actually a dulling of some of the flavors due to age and loss of some oils, but it actually helps to some extent... however this is loose tea to begin with and any more than 2-3 years would most likely not change it any more for the better.

This aging business is something fairly new in the grand scheme of tea and I'm just not sure if I buy the whole hog. Yearly re-fired tea, sure, I can see a difference being made and it is loose so it is being evenly altered... but to sit in a chest/cupboard/etc. for 30+ yrs. and magicaly turn from a caterpillar into a butterfly is a bit out of my beliefs. Also, let me say I'd be more than happy to hear the theories and/or be put in my place... I'm a big boy, I can take it :)

- Dominic Drinking: Puerh mini-tuo from Nicholas coffee (they knew nothing about them or origin, but they are good and different than any other mini-tuo I've had)

Reply to
Dominic T.

Maybe the problem is that you romanized its name correctly:

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/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

Well, it's your feeling against the testimony of lots of people, some of whom I know personally and regard as both knowledgeable and honest. I recommend Mike Petro's site as a place to start (and not just to start):

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/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

I've read through his entire site and have referred back to it on occasion, and I don't doubt their knowledge or honesty... just the facts. With it being highly compressed I can;t see how more than say the outter 1/4" or so around could possibly be affected.

Also, since I tend to follow more old traditional schools of thought when it comes to tea... it takes me back to the caravan routes. So this aging and fermentation and subjectivity to a range of environments is most likely less than a year of aging before consumption, and then maybe stretched out over a year of drinking... so 2 years tops. I could see buying a few though to store since who knows how long the next supply would come around and possibly 2-4 years max. But the extreme aging of 20+ years is what I question. Obviously it is very difficult to say what if any effect it has since no one here was there to try that 30 year old Puer when it was fresh to compare to the aged version. Mike may have had this opportunity from something of the 80's vintage, and I'd like to actually see or hear about something like that. I've got a two sets of two kinds of identical tuo's that I plan on doing my own "experiment" on, but that will be some time coming.

I'm not claiming to be right, just giving MHO on the matter... not even worth 2 cents :)

- Dominic

Reply to
Dominic T.

Obviously no one is going to change your mind on this, but for what it's worth I have in my very modest collection green or sheng pu'ers ranging from zero to about twenty years of age, and the effect of aging is blatantly obvious even from such a small sample. It is a simple thing for even someone with very little experience to tell the difference between a young pu'er, a five-year-old pu'er, and a ten-year-old pu'er. If you look at this post,

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you'll see pictures of leaf and brewed tea from something that was allegedly 10 years old. Below the picture, the author asks if the tea looks 10 years old or not. My first reaction, upon seeing the picture, was "Of course not." I expect that the other pu'er fans here on RFDT would have the same reaction. Point being: a rank amateur can pick out the effect of aging so easily that one glance at a picture of the brewed tea is enough to tell the age, within a five-year range. The taste is also completely different, and older is generally much smoother and tastes better. So all I can say is this: if you think aging doesn't matter, go to Hou De, Jing, or any other reputable dealer from Petro's website, order some samples that cover a range of years (raw only!), and drink them. Any experience at all with such teas will teach you that aging makes a profound difference.

As to what causes the changes, as I understand it it's some kind of bacterial fermentation, like yoghurt, that happens very, very slowly. The cakes are compressed but there is certainly enough space between leaves for air and microbes to mill around.

Aged oolongs are great too, but harder to find.

Dominic T. wrote:

Reply to
Alex

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