TeaChat

shogun89 wrote: This may also show how crazy some of us pu heads are.

You used the "C" word, not me!

so. how are things?

everything in working order?

heavydoom wrote:so. how are things?

everything in working order?

Tea was great! most satisfying brew I have ever had from it. Will probably still keep it separated for a little bit to make sure nothing is spreading.

heavydoom wrote:sometimes when we use a pu knife to hack away at the cake, and the cake is really compressed, we see yellowish dust but this is more from the metal of the knife grating the tea and so thereby forming some pu dust that looks yellow but really is in fact chalky residue of pu. what do you think? i have seen this on a few occasions.

After reading shogun's first post and seeing the pics, this is exactly what I was thinking. I bet it's just crushed leaf in the exact spot he inserted the knife. An easy way to find out...insert the knife into a different area, noting exactly where the knife touched the cake, pry apart and study the cake to see if the "yellow powder" is where the knife touched the cake. Next, take apart another area of the cake with your fingers and see if there's any "yellow powder" inside. I'll bet you'll find it's just from the knife.

When I pry apart pu, the area that the knife touched always looks different than surrounding areas. The leaves in that area are either shinier than surrounding leaves, or there's broken leaf of various sizes (including powdered leaf), ect.

some people steam their pu loose. i don't see this happening with my pu.

hou de has pics where he shows a cake in one of those bamboo steaming basket, you know those used for dim sum, but this one of course is a bit bigger in size. all the leaves are loosened by the steam. i wonder if the steam does anything to the make up of the tea leaves?

photos taken from hou de's site :

Yeah I have seen this method before as well. I personally dont like it because now the tuo is loose leaf tea and thats just no fun at all. But, could you imagine the wonderful smell that it would produce!

I don't get the whole notion of steaming a tuo (or, perish the thought, a beeng). It seems akin to rinsing the entire tuo in boiling water, and who would consider that?

Once it's steamed, what's the ensuing shelf life? Not long, I would presume.

heavydoom wrote: hou de has pics where he shows a cake in one of those bamboo steaming basket

Doom,
Do you have a link to the article that goes with those photos? I have looked for it several times in the past few months and can never find it.

I would consider doing it for some of my young 100g Xiaguan tuos that are very tasty yet impossible to pry open. If it's something I wouldn't mind drinking up over the next couple months, and I'd end up losing a lot of dust from smashing it with a knife, I might just try the steaming method once.

If I remember the article correctly, Guang was suggesting lightly steaming, separating leaves and drying for semi-long-term storage. While it sounds like a risky business and you wouldn't want to try it on a prized cake, I want to try it some time with one of those tightly compressed little tuo chas.

Salsero wrote:

heavydoom wrote: hou de has pics where he shows a cake in one of those bamboo steaming basket

Doom,
Do you have a link to the article that goes with those photos? I have looked for it several times in the past few months and can never find it.

you mean this?

http://www.houdeasianart.com/index.php? ... =puerhinfo

a big steaming pu

here is a hard working man and his pu erh :

notice the close proximity of his leather shoes/loafers :

heavydoom wrote: you mean this?

Yes, thanks. I guess I forgot that it was buried in a longer article.

This thread is made of pure win and insanity! I wonder how many pu-erh related fatalities there are in history, I never heard of anyone dying from drinking pu-erh. If you did die I would expel solid waste in bricks.