Another Unknown Soldier

"Try this blind and give me an opinion", reads the Alice-in-Wonderland-style label on a little packet that I recently received.

Twodog, of white2tea, has a habit of finding low-cost, decent cakes, as a cursory glance through the tasting notes page of this humble web-site will reveal.  I am, therefore, expecting good things.

 

Then, it is enigmatically revealed that "This is definitely not a bargain."

First of all, consider the leaves, pictured above and below.  In this instance, which is a blessed rarity, the colour balance of my camera has been accidentally set to a level sufficient to capture the colour of the leaves entirely accurately.  You may conclude, perhaps, that they are more than a little bit red.  This was my impression, and the photographs convey the same impression.

 

The age of this cake feels as it is around five years or so; the tips have a slight rustiness in their colouring, as of that age, but have not yet become entirely changed.  The fragmentation is significant, as you can probably see.

The soup is orange; the aroma is a very "bean-like" affair.  The flavor has the red, malty flavor of processed tea (or, more accurately, tea which has been processed "unusually").  It has a floral note that makes it taste like more like an old-fashioned Darjeeling than a pu'ercha.

As the infusions plough on, the tea develops a certain positive sweetness, but it never loses the characteristic of being thoroughly reddened.  It is straightforward in texture, character, and scent, with minimal kuwei consistent with questionable processing.

 

However, we should not be too quick to write off this tea, whatever it may be: my journal has "While red, this mysterious sample is clean and oddly enjoyable."  There is a pronounced cooling sensation, as if the inputs were once of decent quality.  "There is quality, but it is buried", I seem to have written.

Mr. Dog subsequently revealed that this is a 2006 Xinbanzhang cake; that is, not "Lao" Banzhang, but the nearby eponymous village that has become increasingly more popular as "LBZ" becomes more expensive.  He points to occasional flairs of brilliance that keep him hooked, mixed in with the red, fruity tea that I described.

 

If there is one thing I have come to conjecture about "red" teas: their deliberate lack of potency tends to result in unimpressive results some five or so years down the line.  The wet leaves, shown above in my waste-water bowl, tell the story: a small portion looks green - the majority are red.  This "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" combination leaves me, similarly, in two minds.

Discovering

discovering

the last of the winter's snow

in my wellington

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Mould.  It comes to us all in the end.

I recently tried out a new location in our house in which to store tea.  That is, my main shelves are currently overflowing and I needed to find some new space.  "That bookshelf looks ideal", methunk.  It was in the same room as the majority of our collection, and therefore would, presumably, share its rather decent aging profile.  So was the reasoning.

I promptly evicted the books and bazillion operatic CDs from their home, and popped various cakes onto the new-found space.  The results, as you will see from the photographs above and below, are "sub-optimal", to use a statistician's phrase, approximately translating into English as "bloody awful".

The majority of cakes on those shelves were fine, but some three or four had developed dark wrappers.  In a recent sweep through my collection to organise and catalogue a few rogue pieces, I thought that I'd bring the cakes down that had such wrappers.  Imagine my happiness when I discovered the mould!  Oh my, how we did laugh.  Or cry.  The difference is marginal.

The reason that these cakes suffered, after some few weeks on the shelf, was because of excess humidity (genius, Holmes) building up in contact with an exterior wall.  Those cakes not touching the exterior wall were fine.  The solution: open up the cakes and brush off the mould with a toothbrush.  You can imagine the sight of your humble correspondent, hunched over the compost bin, scraping bingcha.  I have now moved the plastic CD cases and glossy books (which were impervious to the damp, over several years) touching the exterior wall.  The previously-mouldy cakes are in "quarantine", where they will stay until I deem them fit to return to the population.

 

C'est la vie.  They were only the 2012 cakes from Essence of Tea, so it's not as if they were eye-wateringly expensive.