I had tea with Joey the other day at my place.
Tea #1: 2016 Tyler in Two Different Pots
Fun fact about Tyler: Joey actually helped create the wrapper for Tyler! If you ever need a puer wrapper made, he’s your man. We wanted to see how the tea did in two different pots. My pot by Jiri Lang from pu-erh.sk seemed to concentrate the flavor more forward in the mouth, while the yixing pot gave us more throat action. The pour on the yixing is much slower, but the fact that it’s a bigger pot compensated somewhat for the increased infusion time. Overall, the tea was very sweet and quite relaxing. The water here was just me chucking a bunch of minerals into some filtered tap water. It was a pretty good water! Mostly gypsum, some calcium chloride, some epsom salt, and a little bit of baking soda. It did the job. I then tried a steeping with something I call jar-char water, of which Joey remarked that it had a layered quality, almost like when it goes into your mouth, it has a solid structure, but once you taste it, it breaks and melts all over your tongue. More on this water strategy in a future post.
Tea #2: 1990 Wild Brick
Old, a little tart, powerful qi, smooth mild natural taste. That’s about all I noticed. I’m fond of this one.
Tea #3: 2018 Daydream
27 cents a gram and free shipping. I brewed this mostly to convince that it’s worth more than its price and could stand up to much more expensive sheng. We quickly realized that a CLT blend is very different from a W2T blend and it’s hard to even compare like that. It’s a fruity and floral tea with great sweetness. It won’t blast your face off, but it’s very full and a joy to drink. Then we got pizza.
Tea #4: 1990s Blue Mark (W2T)
Unfortunately we only had 3.7 grams of this long sold-out tea, which used to cost something like $1000 a cake. It was light for a bit, but we got 8 or 9 long steeps with great depth and an awesome profile. All we wanted was more leaf, but you take what you can get. Time flew by with this tea. Oh also I got a toy helicopter which we flew around for a while.
Tea #5: Tsukigase Zairai Sencha (Hojo Tea)
I just wanted Joey to try one cup of this sencha. It’s not grown with any fertilizer, so it has a very non-umami profile with some throatiness. This tea made us both so dang tea drunk we had no idea what to do. A strange way to end a session like this, but I don’t regret it one bit.
Tea Secrets 