Thursday, June 7, 2012

2000 Ripe Pu Erh - My Second Brick






One of my earliest blog in 14 Nov 2009, was on this ripe tea brick.  I had purchased this brick from Awazon, a Yunnan based tea shop.  One of the reason for my purchase was its age and relatively inexpensive price ($17 - air freight inclusive).  I had remarked that this tea had a red date flavor.  I had bought 4 bricks in total and had stored away these tea since.


It has been about 3 years since I had blogged about this 2000 brick.  I had been privileged to have access and drank quite a considerable amount of pu erh tea during this time.  At about 8-10 g daily with an additional round over the weekends, I am able to consume up to a cake or brick within a month.  This had allowed me to 'find my personal preference for a tea' whether I should add/reduce more leaves, shorten/lengthen the infusion times which would not be possible if I had purchased samples.  I am not showing off, but to me, its really difficult to make a judgement call on a 8-10g sample.  I had sounded out my thoughts on this matter to my online tea dealer friends and you would have realized that the samples now are in 20-30g amounts (hip! hip! hooray).  


This 2000 brick has its own unique characteristics.  Its dried fruit aroma is the most intense I had experienced in my ripe pu erh adventures.  The dried fruit aroma resembled something like chinese red dates or dried cranberries.  I could detect an extremely mild hint of leather in the scent as well.  Overall, the tea was smooth and pleasant to drink.  I found that I could reduce the amount of tea a wee bit ..... 7-8g of tea in a 180-200ml teapot and could get 8 drinking infusions of the tea. Its interesting the herbal scent and flavors associated with ripe pu erh was pushed to a distant background while the dried fruitiness aspect took centrestage.  I am happy I have a couple of these bricks left.