I recently decided to try some pu-erh since everyone on the group was raving about it. I went down to a cute little local tea shop and bought Republic of Tea pu-erh.
When I opened the can, it smellef faintly of a horse stable and had a very dark red-brown color. When I say horse stable, I mean the mixture of hay, horse sweat, and maure. I brewed up a pot and the horse stable smell was very strong. The flavor of the tea was good.
Is this what pu-erh is supposed to smell like?
Hehe, yes, there are varying degrees of "earthy" smells from different puerhs depending on age and style, and "horse stable" would be one of them. I often associated cooked or black puerh with that of my compost pile out back on the day after a rain.
Mike
There's a wide range of aroma and taste profiles in Pu'er, but yes, that sounds like one of them.
/Lew
It can taste that way like the Xiaguan CNNP you find in Chinatown. There are others of 'higher' grade that don't taste that way but you can't completely escape the earthiness. I call the taste you described as 'rancid' and it grows on you. You can change the taste by adding a piece of dark chocolate and telling your friends it is an expensive coffee from Columbia by mule. Yours is a class called sheng or ripe. Off the bat you might like the class called shu or unripe better if you are familiar with bitter green teas.
Jim
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:
Oops. Switch the terms sheng and shu. I've botched two posts this morning. Not bad.
Jim
Space Cowboy wrote:
Space snipped-for-privacy@f16g2000cwb.googlegroups.com10/27/06
10: snipped-for-privacy@ix.netcom.com
Sorry for totally unnecessary previous interference. Michael
It wasn't easy digging out the Jing post, then 2003 sounded right, then you couldn't find it, then 1995 as I remembered but thought that another post but couldn't find it, shu and sheng I more or less have to look up if it's been awhile, ripe-unripe-green-black-cooked-uncooked I don't.
Jim
Michael Plant wrote:
Space snipped-for-privacy@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com10/27/06
12: snipped-for-privacy@ix.netcom.com
Jim, if the terrible truth be known, this will all mean about as much in a hundred years as it did a hundred years ago. Michael
I know but Google never forgets and my back hurts from shoveling yesterday trying to stay ahead of a blizzard so I could get out in the afternoon whose intensity the NWS never saw coming. Like shu or sheng I can never remember to park the urban 4WD at the top of the hill.
Jim
Michael Plant wrote:
...I delete me...
Like hay/stable/horse/horse sweat/manure :)
Green/uncooked is different, my mother describes it as more of a cigarette/cigar ash smell. I don't get that and find it much more easy on the palate.
Puerh varies wildly and then the aging changes it again so the range of flavors and aromas is almost infinite. I have had very good cooked puerh and I have had pretty nasty stuff too. The best thing is to hit up some samples from a place like Jing Teashop and give a few a try. I wouldn't let anything made by Republic of tea stand as an example of any type of tea, especially puerh in a can. Puerh needs to breathe.
Its an assault on the senses for sure, and as many of my previous posts I often ask myself why anyone loves this stuff when lovely normal teas exist in abundance. But I am kind of drawn to it for some unexplainable reason too... so I can't talk.
- Dominic Drinking: Mountain Dew (and then some Assam in a bit)
I got it. It smells like an old 'shu'. Now if I can remember to undo spring back, fall forward.
Jim
Michael Plant wrote:
I might be wrong here, but I consider the cigarette ash taste a negative. I've noticed it in cheaper Xiaguan tuos.
Oh, I consider it negative too, but I just don't taste it even in a cheap Xiaguan tuo. I normally have a pretty accurate palate too so I'm not sure why I'm missing it but I don't ever get that note. She tends to detect it in many green puerhs, and she isn't a tea buff so I tend to believe her when she brings up tasting certain flavors or aromas. Her exact quote was it smells like a Dinobli cigar ash. (Dinobli's are strange little Italian Cigars my great-grandfater smoked)
- Dominic Drinking: slumming it with a lipton teabag and white sugar.
Yeah, I think a little of that ashy taste goes a long way, like sarcasm. But there are those who believe that ash in a young raw Pu'er is a marker for a vigorous old age.
/Lew
Wait, in my mother or the tea? :)
Just because she tastes ash doesn't mean she is of "vigorous old age." Sheesh the things anonymous online folks will say...
- Me (I'm just joking in case anyone missed that)
negative too, but I just don't taste it even in a
Lucky for you that you can't taste it! It's pretty nasty.
negative too, but I just don't taste it even in a
Lucky for you that you can't taste it! It's pretty nasty.
As far as I'm aware, from what I've been reading these days, the ash/smoke/cigarette smell is a product of the processing, usually of the raw leaf, and really shouldn't be there if the tea was handled 100% properly.
The most likely source of this is when the leaves were left to dry under the sun, the weather did not cooperate. So instead of drying under the sun, the farmers dried it on top of their stove using heat from that, thus the smoke.
There are other possibilities too, like when the cake was pressed and smoke got into it, etc
MarshalN
That's an interesting idea, but wouldn't you expect a tea marred by this to taste like charcoal rather than cigarettes? (I'm thinking of badly fired oolongs.)
As in employees smoking: this seems plausible. But it couldn't happen if the cakes were manufactured here in smoke-free New York City!
/Lew
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