Salutations in the New Year of 2015! Remarkably, everyone is looking a year younger, while the pu’er has gotten a year tastier. You might like to know of our Winter Tea Extravaganzaa to be held on the 24th of this month, Jan, starting at 3:00 pm. Included will be a dish I’m calling Chinese Turkistani…
Despite a number of last-minute cancellations the Winter Tea Extravaganzaa was dandy. The 1938 performed with its usual acumen, while the Bamboo Jing-mai seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. The obvious star imho was the 2007 Wuliang Shen Yun by Yapu Ancient Tree Tea Co, which I may feature in a future…
The 2011 Wafting Banzhang is a surprisingly smoky ripe pu’er that conjures scenes from around the campfire with the ole harmonica. We’ll be having it for the February convening of Bamboo and Loquat, the pu’er enthusiast Meet-up that is now in its second year. This occasion will also serve double for marking of the Chinese…
Let’s start out as we customarily do with some news on the pu’er tea front. The Bamboo & Loquat Meetup convened last night to imbibe in some of the recent aquisitions and stored treasures. The Wafting Banzhang, the featured offering, was well received as well as the spicy Korean noodles soup. Next month’s featured pu’er…
Saturday the 26th at 3:00 will be the monthly Pu’er Enthusiast Meetup. Pu’er tea is considered the king of tea. This is because it gets better with age and because it is the source from which all other teas are born. Pu’er is a universe unto itself and during the monthly Meetups we seek to…
Thanks all to those who made for an enjoyable gathering of the Bamboo and Loquat pu’er tasting yesterday. Raw pu’ers are so temperamental. Initial quality of the raw material will be greatly affected by water temperature, time, and storage conditions, not to mention the accompanying foods. These are the subjects we dialog upon, in addition…
After a wait of what seemed to have been forever, the latest shipment came in. This was an adventurous order in which I thought I’d try some old raw pu’ers from the 90s, allegedly. I knew they’d be fake, but I never imagined that they could be this atrocious. On the brighter side, however, I…
The April Tea-Gong Meet-up session was awesome. Instead of having the Yi-wu/Bu-lang face-ff as originally advertised, a last minute executive decision had us drinking Bu-langs exclusively, starting with an 07 Bulang Yang Shan that I had started in on the night before. The really good teas tend to be slow in developing, so it really…
Often the question emerges, “why tea?” Fair enough. Tea offers a simple means by which to learn some of the principles of Chinese herbalism. Primary among them is that food has properties that affect the body to its benefit or detriment. These properties aren’t so much the technicalities offered by nutritional science, such as proteins,…
Hope the summer is treating you well. That rain was certainly a pleasant surprise, no? There’s a couple of up-coming activities that you might like to attend. This Friday 31 Jul at 1:00, I’ll be hosting the July session of Bamboo & Loquat: Pu’er Enthusiasts of Los Angeles. We’ll be featuring raw Dragon Pearls from…