Food Pairing – Fruits and Puerh Tea (Be Aware, Be Warned)

Thailand produces exceptional fruits. The above picture shows but a fraction of the bounty of local fruits that are available in a given year. These wonderful summer fruits are a pleasure to enjoy but I would advise not together with puerh tea.

Piecing Together The Big Picture

Like a jigsaw puzzle each tea is a puzzle waiting to be put together. Each piece may be formed from a memory or a moment of revelation that comes from a tea session, discussion or research. To complete your jigsaw puzzle you will need to collect all the pieces you seek and put them together.

There is something special about drinking the same tea for over 10 years. It changes the way you look at tea. Such a journey provides a familiarity and time for reflection and thought that allows you to develop new dimensions, deeper perceptions and appreciation for the tea you have. Each tea session in the moment feels unique but over time becomes distant memories. The real treasure lays in the infinite wisdom accumulated at the end of the journey when you have piece by piece put together and created for yourself what I like to call - The Big Picture.

A Comparative Pictorial of Age - 2004 Premium White Puerh Tea

This picture of the 2004 Premium White Puerh Tea was taken in 2007.

In the past few weeks I have been revisiting this interesting genre of white puerh tea. Having not brewed white puerh tea for some time it took me a few sessions to recalibrate the ideal temperature and brewing time to optimize the preparation of the brew to my satisfaction. I use boiling hot water that is left to cool for a few minutes together with a yixing teapot. 8g to approx 100ml with 1 rinse my brewing time varies from 20 to 40 seconds for initial steeps. Adjustments to higher temperatures and longer steeping times come after the initial 4 to 5 steeps.

1990s Ying Kee (Old Tin Carton)

This tea was given to me by a friend over the weekend. It is an old tin carton containing loose leaf puerh tea from Ying Kee Tea House based in Hong Kong. The tea has been kept for what is believed to be well over 10 years… its history, original ownership, date of purchased, etc long forgotten with the passage of time. As my friend has a preference for other types of tea I became the fortunate recipient of this tea.