Yunnan Pu Er Cha Zhuan 2000 CNNP

This 2000 cooked brick was a sample sneaked into my last order from Stéphane at Teamasters. It was a good sized sample, the pic below shows the chunk minus my first attack.

First of all I'd like to copy and paste from Teamasters, hoping that Stéphane will not mind too much, as I'd like to keep this blog as a repository of information and not just a reminder of my brain farts:

"This Yunnan Pu Er Cha Zhuan was made in the year 2000. It contains cooked pu er leaves of grade 5. After 5 years of rest, it starts to be drinkable, says my pu er importer. We tasted it together on the very same day and I found it still has a very strong camphor taste (but without the freshness). The taste of fermentation is still very much there, which I don't find very pleasant. But the astringency is completely gone. It is very round and becomes mellow. I guess it will improve as it ages further, but can also already be drunk now in a large teapot. The low price makes it also quite attractive to start with cooked puer."

The most notable thing about this tea was the aroma from the moment the water hit the gaiwan. It was not so much that the aroma was far better or more pleasing than other teas, it was the fact that it seemed to engulf the room and my olfactory factory within seconds. I'm not a huge fan of shu pu but this really raised my expectations. The olfactory assault was very pleasant if not hugely interestingThe tea itself I found very comforting to drink. More akin to drinking a rick, sweet milky chai than the red wine experience I usually associate with shu. I did not encounter many off tastes or scents but to be honest I wasn't really paying too much attention. This is a tea to be enjoyed and gulped not, i suspect, over analysed.

Drinking this has nudged me one step closer to investing in a cheap yixing for shu. If it rounds and smooths something like this even more then it could be worth a few dollars over at Yunnan Sourcing. I get the feeling the small, white gaiwan is a little clinical for this kind of tea.

Anyway, I'm a little further along the road of appreciating shu which could potentially make my tea habit just a little more affordable.

Cheers Stéphane.