Cloudy Pu Test Day 2
The results are in.
Yesterday:
Today:
That picture might not be obvious enough. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the 5 fives teas, from top to bottom:
- 2007 7542
- 2008 Nan Jian Tulin “902″
- 2008 Brick of Dehong
- 2006 Yun Zhou Zhai Zi Po brick
- 2008 Yi Wu Mountain Bamboo loose puerh
As usual, my predictions were as wrong as possible. The Dehong brick is the cloudiest, while the loose Yiwu is as clear as can be.
The 7542 is probably the second cloudiest, but it’s pretty close to the Zi Po brick and the Nan Jan Tulian 902.
What do we conclude? We are told that cloudiness is bad, but even the 7542 is somewhat cloudy, and as we all know that is a classic recipe. We already know that it ages nicely. Well, we at least know that the 7542 of 10-20 years ago ages nicely.
To be fair, maybe this test should be repeated for the sake of confidence in the results. Maybe the loose Yiwu is the clearest because it is composed mainly of whole leaves. Maybe the Dehong brick did so poorly because it had more loose bits (this isn’t necessarily the case, but it might have been). The Dehong brick is actually the tea that is most drinkable now, so this is all very strange.
In conclusion, nothing.
There are mysteries in the world of tea, believe it or not. And aging Puer is indeed known to be a task fraught with so many variables it’s extremely hard to ensure the outcome. I fear this little lesson is going to encourage me to drink my own Puer instead of letting it age awhile.
That is a great idea to compare the differnet colors of tea. But I dont know which stage of loose leaf tea is best to drink for black tea.