The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [48]
Unlike every other tea leaves, puerh leaves require rinsing to open up their flavors. Set the piece in your brewing vessel, pour in boiling water, and let stand for 30 to 45 seconds before draining. Wait a few seconds to let the drained tea awaken.
You can make just a single cup or you can brew the leaves up to a dozen times. As with oolongs, with each round it is fascinating to observe how certain flavors emerge as others disappear. Traditionally, each brew is poured out into puerh tasting cups. Though each contains only a few thimblefuls’ worth of liquor, after twelve of them you will feel quite alert. Puerh devotees call the buzzing sensation “puerh intoxication.”
There are many different ways to brew puerhs. Whether for a mug or a round of small cups, brew the first batch in boiling water for 1 to 3 minutes. For subsequent brews, start by steeping the tea for just 10 seconds, increasing the time by a few seconds for up to a dozen rounds. (Puerh fans sometimes time it by a number of breaths, but breaths can be so variable, seconds are more reliable.)
What follows are three puerhs of varying styles. We’ll start with a young, bright three-year-old green puerh that still has some sweetness and fruit. Next comes a blunt, earthy black puerh typical of the more recent mock-aged style. The chapter ends with a robust, rounded fifteen-year-old green puerh, a nice example of an aged puerh, full of ripe earthy flavors. Don’t worry if you cannot find these exact varieties; just look for a young green puerh, a black puerh, and a true aged green puerh, and the descriptors should still help you understand the general categories.
BAN-ZHANG 2004 GREEN PING CHA
A characteristic young green puerh, Ban-Zhang Green Ping Cha can also be aged at home. Like a young Bordeaux wine, it is drinkable now, but its best days are ahead of it. While it has nice fruit flavors in its young state, age will help mellow and round those out, giving the tea greater nuance and polish.
Like a great French wine, this tea comes from one of the finest puerh “châteaus.” But unlike a Lafite or Latour, this name is a little more cumbersome: the Yunnan Tea Branch of the China National Native Produce & Animal By-Products Import & Export Corporation. As the awkward title suggests, the company is a relic of Communist China’s old ways before it began privatizing many tea companies just a few years ago. But unlike most state-run tea operations, the Yunnan Tea Branch is a reliable company, producing some of the best puerhs in the world.
This tea is made in Ban-Zhang, a mountainous region in southwestern Yunnan province, close to Burma. Yunnan is thought to be the region where tea plants first emerged; near Ban-Zhang, centuries-old wild tea trees still grow, many of them up to thirty feet high. The tea bushes for the puerh teas are tended by a local ethnic minority called the Hanai, and the puerhs are made in a particular style. After the leaves are fixed and partially dried, they are shipped to the Yunnan Tea Branch, where they are fully dried and formed into cakes. The Yunnan Tea Branch holds on to the cakes a little longer before selling them, to allow the rawness to dissipate and the fermentation to begin.
More and more puerh drinkers in China and elsewhere are collecting and then aging these teas at home. The best way to age Ping Cha is to keep it in a dry room away from strong smells and let it sit there for ten to fifteen years. Of course, it can also be drunk sooner, if you run out of patience.
LOOSE-LEAFED BLACK PUERH
Often marketed simply as “puerh,” this black, or shou, puerh illustrates a style invented in the early 1970s to imitate the affects of aging. True aged puerhs are so rare that black puerh is now the most common style found in the United States.
With the demand for puerhs on the rise, tea makers at the famous Menghai Tea Factory discovered