stevorama wrote:jayinhk wrote:Drinking late 80s CNNP 7581 (HK traditional storage) with 20+ year old traditionally stored sheng (also from HK). Very nice combo. Both were stored VERY wet for quite a while. The shu on its own is just warm, black water with a hint of storage taste, but with thick body. This brick had a light layer of white/gray mold on it, and after all of those years of humid warehouse storage, I could break it apart by hand.
The sheng is a little spicy with a much more pronounced storage taste, even after airing it out for two years+. Together, the brew is kind of like aged date and sweet, too, with a little storage taste in the cup. Overall it's extremely smooth drinking, which is what Hong Kong bo lei drinkers are all about. Old school HK pu erh today! Even the blend is classic HK style drinking. Lower fired zini is perfect for traditional storage pu as it reduces the storage aromas. Brewed nice and strong, too...looks like black coffee in the cup.
Sounds like an enjoyable tea session. I've been feeling the draw to more humid stored teas recently. Although I don't think I've had anything as wet stored as you are describing.
The really wet stuff is not something I want to drink all the time anymore, but when I first got on TeaChat, that's all I knew of pu erh. My brother, who isn't into tea, was amazed the first time I gave him dry storage pu erh. Again, growing up in HK, we'd never even encountered it! We mostly drank traditionally stored shu with meals at restaurants, although my dad was drinking traditionally stored sheng at work and probably had no idea it was sheng.
I didn't know at the time that really wet pu erh was very much a HK thing. These teas are so wet, that even after 2-3 years of airing out at home, broken up, the sheng STILL tastes wet. I don't know how long it was aired out by the dealer before I bought it.
Interestingly, dealers in Guangdong are trying to replicate this kind of storage now and claiming HK storage so they can charge more for their tea. I tried some very poorly stored Guangdong examples earlier this year. There definitely is an art to HK traditional storage; wet, but not so wet that it tastes horrible. The best traditional storage (and airing out by the dealer) tastes only a little wet, but the tea brews up like something much older.
I have 90s and 2000s 7581s from Kunming and Taiwan, too (dry storage), and the Taiwanese dry storage is the best because of the higher humidity. The Kunming one tastes much younger than it should and doesn't have the intensity and depth of flavor that the Taiwanese bricks have, but it's already starting to improve here. Whether it will ever catch up with the Taiwanese bricks is debatable, though.
The HK one has almost no 7581 flavor at all! I only detected a tiny bit of 7581 character very recently, and it was a fleeting moment.
I recently realized a dealer I buy loose pu erh from quite regularly uses 7581 in their loose pu erh mixes, but again, the traditional storage is so wet that you can't tell it was ever 7581! 7581 has such a lovely flavor when dry stored (with sufficient humidity, a la Taiwan or HK home storage) that I feel it is a pity to lose that flavor to storage. Still, tradition counts for a lot here, and sometimes I just need a good ol' HK bo lei fix. I especially like drinking it at my office, when I know the old school tea dealers and their warehouses are all around me! I feel like part of HK tea history then.
