Yes, that’s right. The blog is back from the dead. More accurately, it never really died. It just sort of went into an extended coma. In that time, children were raised and launched successfully. A daughter-in-law was gained and grandparenthood looks to be in my not-too-distant future. A parent died and those who remain are gratefully and lovingly cared for. Careers have ended and retirement has taken root. Throughout it all my tea collection has been a constant source of enjoyment and interest for me, a delightful long-term project.
When I launched this blog 15 years ago it was all about learning about tea, specifically puerh. Like every other blogger at the time I would mostly upload tea reviews. I was (and still am) very serious about the title of this blog – listening to leaves. Initially, I was ‘listening’ to the basics in an effort to gain some manual skill in brewing. Things like temperature, water quality, grams of leaf to ml of water, timing of infusions, etc. There’s plenty to enjoy in that and, for those of us with an inner science nerd, offers countless ‘experiments’ of testing this method to that, this water to that, on and on.
There’s a lot of emphasis in the gong fu world on accoutrement. Personally, I think the wide array of tools and ‘things’ one can buy points more to market opportunity than necessity. But each to his own. I have friends who regularly use items I confess I purchased and tossed long ago. It works for them, and that’s great. I’m happy to sit at their tea tables and they brew great tea. No judgment from me. But for myself, I keep it fairly simple.
But my blog-coma didn’t just come about from changing life circumstances. I honestly just stopped buying tea. Why post tea reviews for teas that no one can buy anymore? Not only that, but most seasoned puerh drinkers will agree that the same tea will taste, smell and feel sometimes (oftentimes) surprisingly different from session to session. It could be any number of factors at play – brewing method, infusion times, what part of the cake you get the leaves from, what kind of mood you’re in that day, changes in weather and barometric pressure, changes in one’s health, the type of vessel you’re brewing or drinking from, on and on. I would venture to guess that one’s psychological response to the current political/cultural shitshow climate will affect how things taste and smell, either heightening or dampening one’s ability to detect levels of nuance. The more I came to learn about the fleeting “in the moment” nature of trying to nail down specificity in tea tastings, the more silly these tea reviews came to feel. But there are consistencies, too. After 15 years of tasting the same teas over and over, I’ve come to learn a thing or two.
I have an embarrassingly large collection of cakes (plus a handful of tuochas, bricks, the odd melon here and there), a truly gross example of overconsumption. I ashamed to admit it. Thankfully I nipped it in the bud. Or I guess, not the bud so much as the aged rogue cane that should have been chopped off years before. But it was nipped at some point, leaving me with an unwieldly stash in need of good management. Like every naïve new puerh drinker I bought a lot of tea “to age myself.” Yes, this is largely folly in many ways but not completely impossible. Teas will age but it takes a very long time, and the quality and direction of the aging is entirely dependent upon the conditions in which the aging takes place. The obvious ones are humidity and temperature but there are also factors like storage space, air flow, even microbes and yeasts present in the environment, whether that’s the micro environment of the storage space or the macro environment of place on the planet you happen to live... not to mention the ultimate importance of starting with good quality leaf.
Once I stopped buying new teas my tea life has been focused on two things only – fiddling with storage and tasting the teas throughout to track changes in flavor, aroma and energy. Many years ago (13 years to be exact) I built a large, solidly insulated pumidor (you can read about it in older posts here). I equipped it with a humidifying system purchased from Aristocrat Humidors. It included two 1.5 qt sized evaporative humidifiers, a digital controller and a couple of tiny 2”x2” fans, plus a few extra hygrometers placed throughout different areas of the cabinet. I placed it in the warmest room in my house which averages 75+ degrees Fahrenheit year round. I played around with humidity levels (see previous posts on some of those experiments) and eventually found the need to install a couple of larger 5”x5” computer fans. Also early on, I purchased a manual impulse sealer and a big roll of food-grade sealing plastic so I could seal up my teas like many vendors do. For the most part I’ve kept the cakes sealed in this way, even while storing them in the humidified cabinet. The plastic does have some small degree of permeability.
A few years ago, from May 2021 to July 2022, I tried another experiment (which I haven’t written about here yet). I really wanted to deeply infuse the cakes with a good amount of moisture by bumping up the heat so I could push the humidity levels even higher. I wanted to see if that would make any difference to the cakes, and I wanted to sustain it as long as possible (because age only comes with time). So I removed the plastic seals from all the cakes and stuffed them back into the (*very* well-stuffed) cabinet. At the base of the cabinet I installed a heat mat and set the parameters to 63%RH and 90+F temperature (keeping a careful eye on dewpoint), and arranged the cakes on the shelves to allow for a specific guided air flow aided by the fans. The cakes stayed in this environment for 14 months during which I checked them roughly every week for moisture buildup. The experiment ended at 14 months because that’s when I discovered some dampness developing on a few cakes in a particular corner of the cabinet which clearly wasn’t getting enough air flow like the rest of the cabinet. I removed the cakes one by one to inspect each for signs of mold, re-sealing them in plastic once they passed inspection to lock in that life-activating moisture, and returning them to be stored in the cabinet without any added humidity or heat (though the room is always around 75 degrees).
Of the roughly 400 cakes that took part in that experiment only 5 – all of which were located in that corner -- had signs of mold, and only a minor amount along a small portion of the edge that was facing the airflow-challenged spot. But there was one cake of the 5 which was fully covered in mold, far more than the rest, and which had been sandwiched between the other 4. It was a cake I’d purchased from a fly-by-night vendor that had been advertised as a ’97 Tong Qing Hao, though after purchasing and tasting I knew it was a fake. My first tasting notes on this cake simply say “this is clearly a shou." It seems that whatever treatment it had been given to fake some age on it had left it riddled with mold spores. In hindsight, I should have returned it or tossed it, and definitely should not have placed it in a humidified cabinet full of sheng. Although the lessened air flow in that corner of the cabinet was definitely the root of the problem I can’t help but wonder how much that shady ’97 cake contributed to the spread of the problem to those cakes just above and below it.
That was almost 3 years ago now and since that time I’ve been going through my usual routine of removing cakes from the (currently unhumidified) cabinet to taste and make notes, then resealing to return to the cabinet. In all my years of tasting and storing cakes in various conditions I can say without a doubt that those 14 months of high heat and humidity did wonderful things for my teas overall. Most notably, it intensified aromas considerably and for many cakes seemed to awaken dormant aromatic notes that had never been detected before, bringing terrific complexity to those teas that had it in them. I’m not a chemist but “activating volatile compounds” makes a lot of sense here. Did it turn every cake into a "wow?" No, but it elevated the clear majority of them.
The most encouraging result of that 14-month experiment was how it demonstrably moved the bar closer to that fundamentally woody aged profile I love most. My top favorite puerh teas are those that have aged into a sweet woody profile, ideally also with great energy and a super mellowing qi. The energy and qi part is wholly dependent on the quality of the leaf - no amount of storage can make that happen. But that fundamentally woody profile is where the storage conditions can really make a difference. For some of my teas, those 14 months really kicked them solidly into the start of their ‘wood years’. For others (generally younger teas), it advanced those aromas typically associated with younger teas into clearly deeper, more mature profiles. Honestly, tasting through all these teas has really opened my eyes (nose and tongue) to the many permutations of the progression of age on a tea. This has been the greatest advantage of tasting the same teas over and over again, year after year (and keeping careful notes).
I am so impressed with what those 14 months of high heat and humidity did to my teas I’m currently in the process of setting up a whole new storage system. I’m purchasing new equipment that can be controlled and monitored via wifi and will be paying particular attention to air flow and the arrangement and spacing of the cakes inside the unit. I’ll save the details of all this for future posts but really look forward to perfecting what, in my experience, is the best possible storage for my situation.
