2007 Guoyan Classics 88

This review is long overdue. I've had this cake for almost a year and it's time I make a record of how it is now.



When I first got this bing I wasn't enthused. It was harsh, smoky, and bitter. Back then I was using a big kitchen knife to break off leaf which probably accounted more than a little to my bad experience. Now, using my tuocha pick (my preferred tool for tightly compressed pu-erh), I can hunk off nice whole chunks.




I still used a lot of leaf for this tasting, enough to mostly fill the gaiwan when wet. The color of the liquor is a golden amber. The aroma is sharp with hay. The taste is clean, not sharp, starting with a smokiness followed as delicately floral with lots of hay. The infusion has a high tone of lightly sweet and is quite quenching.


Supposedly following the 7548 recipe, the tea is well-rounded and has served as my model for the "young sheng" taste. Although quenching at first, over the steeps the tea is somewhat drying. The same sequence happens in every steep, the taste starts with a kick of smoke, then follows with much hay and delicate floral. A bitterness lays in wait, pronouncing itself if the infusion is any longer than a flash, as well as when the tea cools off.


I feel that nothing has changed over the past 9 months with this one (good!). Jittery energy and a slight headache surfacing... I add some Teriyaki Oberto turkey jerky to the mix and am again revitalized. I implore everyone to try this jerky with their sheng. It is the most excellent tea and food combination I have had the pleasure of finding. It's especially good if you feel bad about imbibing large amounts of young sheng. Hmm... I wonder if TCM has anything to say about that.


I have high hopes for the future of (what's left of) this bing.

Finding Good Pu-erh

How to find good pu-erh? Negotiating through the plethora of pu-erh is not an easy task. There are many teas out there that we must taste to determine whether or not they are worthy of our money. Price and opinions of other cannot always be trusted, and even good teas are wasted on us at times.

The best way to understand pu-erh, and develop a palate is to sample. Sample a lot. Never stop sampling! In my endless sampling, I rarely find a piece that I deem worth buying. When I do, they're rarely the $3/tuo kind. More often, they're the $30-40/bing. Even more often, they're the $100+/per bing. The truth is, I can't afford bings in the $100+ range. I can afford many in the $35 range, so when I find one I like in the $35 range, I get real excited! However, when I find the golden taste in a $3 tuocha (which I don't really expect others to like), I become ecstatic because I can buy as many of them as I want! I have discovered in my samplings that while price can be a good determinant, it accords only very slightly with how much I will enjoy a tea. To only try samples of the more expensive pu-erhs is naive. There are good, and bad, pu-erhs in all the price ranges. So while sampling for a good pu-erh to buy, why not get samples from all ranges?

Now, there is a reason for starting with cheap stuff. The truth is, that an undeveloped palate can not notice much difference between the quality of pu-erhs. When I first started drinking, if you handed me a $1000 long-aged sheng, and a relatively good shu, I probably wouldn't be able to notice much difference. Sure, I'd probably pick the $1000 aged sheng on taste alone, but maybe I wouldn't. I might have thought it to be too earthy. In fact, when I was starting out in pu-erh, I liked the young shengs more than the aged stuff. It wasn't until after I drank a lot of young sheng, that I had another go with an aged sheng and loved it. I had an epiphany where I said to myself, "This is amazing tea! This is definitely what pu-erh is all about!" Such a tea would have been wasted on me earlier on.

Concerning tea blogs, the reviews that are posted are not an extension of one's own palate! Some people like some things, some people hate those same things, it is simple truth. The best way to use blogged reviews is to get the samples, and taste them while reading the review. This can help one find flavors and aromas one wouldn't have alone. Sometimes one can find a reviewer with very similar tastes to one's own, and only then be able to trust the opinions they give on tea. Even if the reviewers don't have similar tastes to oneself, experienced tasters can still give some very interesting information such as factory and tea-region quirks and trademarks.

So, sample, sample, sample! Never stop sampling! There are diamonds in the rough, diamonds in the smooth, and tasting is the only way to find these. Not every diamond in the smooth is worth getting either. Without a developed palate, better teas are often wasted on people who don't understand what is actually making these teas good. Once one has a good understanding, one can really get every pennies-worth out of a great tea. To find the diamonds of tea, one can't trust reviews blindly. Reviewers can be found that have similar tastes to oneself, and experienced reviewers have a plethora of information to give. The world of pu-erh is vast and ancient, and we get to delve into it with freshly-found interest.

Subjectivity of Taste

I wrote this in response to Hobbes' recent post in which he gives humble words, which I will summarize as a suggestion to take his reviews with a grain of salt, and to sample teas for oneself to find what the truth of a tea is for you. It is a nice perspective, very humble.

It really is amazing how different people can experience the same teas in entirely different ways. "Oh, you must have brewed it too long," the pretentious will say. But is it really so simple as determining brewing factors?


To analogize with food, two people can taste the same thing, for example cheese, or even fish. While these two people are consuming identical substances, the ways they perceive those tastes differ. They can differ so greatly as to reflect one person's disgust at the taste of cheese or fish, while the other person adores the tastes. If people can have opposite perceptions of a taste, then can there not be a middle route where, for example, certain tastes in a tea might fluctuate between wood and tobacco depending on the person?

The most interesting thing I've found in my tastings is that I can often find a note of something in a tea if I simply look for it: tobacco or woodsiness in a sheng, leather or pondiness in a shu, melon in a sencha. My greatest tool is to hunt for these flavors for which I already associate with a certain kind of tea, then find the degree to which they are present. When I put into words this style of analysis, I say things like: "Wet lumber covered by a cloud of must, with a low note of swamp in the distance." It is very hard to clearly deliver these perceptions through words. This varying "presentness" of flavors is more ideal for numerical percentages (ex. 60% fresh lumber, 30% pond, 5% cinnamon, 5% chemical), but being so hard to quantify accurately in such a way, I stick to the words.


Accurately describing sensations for people to understand is no walk in the park. I hope this post has helped to show some of the problems, and will cause you to look at the tasting notes of myself and others as extremely subjective perceptions.

Wes