What Is This? Enigmatic and Potent Tea from the 1990s

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf, and welcome to the unveiling of this crazy, oddity Puerh tea. This is the 90's Enigma Sheng. I'm going to tell you the whole story around this tea, and then we're going to dive into what I think is going to be a very, very fascinating tasting, because they don't make teas like this anymore. As the name suggests, this is from the 1990's. So this is a 30-odd year old aged tea. We don't quite know the full history of this tea, which is why it's the 90's Enigma Sheng, but I'm going to give you a bit about the background about how I found this tea, and then we're going to try to piece together a little story, at least what I think has happened with this tea, so that we can understand it better. So we have, or we had, a tea in the Mei Leaf collection for many years called Black Yunnan Tor. Tor is this shape, this particular shape of compressed tea. So this Tor compressed shape, you'll find them everywhere. You've got lots of different sizes, but usually they're around between 5 and 7, or 8 grams. This is 7 grams, I think. So this Black Yunnan Tor was a 1996 ripe tea, and loved. Very popular. It was one of the sort of staples in our collection. People would come in, or people would go online, and they'd always make sure they stocked up on Black Yunnan Tor 96. Because one of the great things about these Tor teas is that they were historically sold as relatively affordable Puerh teas. Bear in mind that this is sort of before the newer trend towards very expensive Puerh teas. So these Tor teas were considered your daily drinkers, your everyday drinkers. So you had a 30-odd year old tea that was a ripe tea. So it's a Shu Cha, which means it's gone through that ripening, fermenting process. So you had this great, on paper, 30-year-old ripe, but at a decent price. A very affordable price. So it was a very popular tea. Then we sold out. We went out of stock, and we had been searching for a replacement, or a new version of a Tor tea, a ripe Tor tea. So I requested from the network that I have in China, in Yunnan, go find Tor teas. Send me Tor teas. This was about a year ago, and we'd been receiving lots and lots of Tor teas. As is the case, generally, when we're sourcing teas, most of them didn't quite meet the mark that we were looking for, for the Mei Leaf collection. Obviously, we had the standard of Black Yunnan Tor to keep up, to maintain, or at least a tea which was comparable in terms of quality. It's never going to be exactly the same taste, but you know what I mean. That comparable level of, it's got to be something that I would gift to my best friend. So I tasted lots and lots of Tor teas, and this was amongst them. So I tasted this Tor tea, and immediately, I remember it very clearly, me just thinking, this is an amazing, special, and different style of ripe Puerh tea. So I immediately double-ticked it, which means it was good enough for me to consider it to be short-listed, and on one more tasting I was like, yeah, I definitely want to purchase this tea. So it became a three-tick tea. I then reached out to the scout, and unblinded myself. What is this tea? Right? Because it's important that I taste blind as much as possible when we're doing our sampling. I then found out that it was a raw tea, not a ripe tea, a Sheng Puerh. At first, that really baffled me, because as you'll see, the color of this tea, and the taste of it, is very reminiscent of ripe teas. But once I sort of had a few minutes to think about it, I realized that what I had found so special about it was exactly that. That it straddled the line between having a fermented, ripe tea quality, but also having this unique characteristic for this kind of tea, which is that it was a raw tea, a Sheng Puerh, which is why it's called 90's Enigma Sheng. We'll quickly scope this tea. This is from season mixed pickings, apparently, from the 1990's. So it's not just one year, so mixed pickings. Then the Cultivars, the Da Ye Zhong variety. The origin is from Meng Hai in Yunnan. So again, it's very vague. Meng Hai is a big area. There's lots of mountains around there. So this is going to be mixed pickings, over mixed years, from one particular area of mountain regions around Meng Hai. The picking on this is going to be a standard raw Puerh, albeit this was in the 90's. It might have been handled slightly differently, but it's going to be essentially a sun-dried green tea. We're going to talk about what I think then happened afterwards, so bear with me on that, but it was pressed in 2003. So there was somewhere around five, possibly more, years of it being stored loose, and then it was pressed in 2003. Elevation is around 1,500 to 2,000 meters. Obviously, we don't know the exact elevation, because we don't know exactly where it came from. As I said, in the mists of time we've lost some of the provenance, in terms of understanding where it comes from. However, the person who sourced this tea is adamant that it is definitely mixed from the 90's, from the Meng Hai area, and it is definitely a Shen Puerh. Now I have tasted this tea since it's arrived. I tasted it on a vlog, so this is not my first tasting since it's arrived, but I'm still pretty fresh to this tea. So we're going to dive in and get to know it a little bit more. You can take a look at the actual Tor itself, and I would suggest that if anybody saw that that they would think that that was a Hei Cha, or a ripened tea. If you don't know the difference, Hei Cha just basically means it has been fermented by humans. So it's been stored in a particular way to accelerate fermentation in many parts of China. They will use a wet-piling method, so they'll take the leaves and they'll cover it with water so that it brings about fermentation with natural microbes in the leaf. Sometimes they seed the floor with old ferments from previous years, so fermented tea. So it sort of like kick-starts the right culture of microbes to ferment. So it's a combination of fungi, and also microbes, to just bacterial fermentation. So you have this fermentation process. Different areas will have different approaches, but Hei Cha is just the broad term for it's been fermented in the processing of the tea. Raw tea means that it's been fermented, but it's just naturally fermented over time. As we'll see, as we dive into this tea, I think that this tea is technically a raw tea, but there is an element of accelerated fermentation. This is my guess, and we'll talk about it. But let's first dive into the sensory appreciation of the tea. I've got a little elephant here. Oops! Well, that was a mess. I've got a little elephant here. I'm lucky I've got a table that drains perfectly, so I don't have to worry about that. If you want to get one of these tables then I'll stick a link in the description below, and you can contact Merrick and get your own custom-made one, perfect for your home. Okay. Here we go. Now, it's a tour tea, which means it's compressed, which means that I'm not going to get like a huge amount of aroma from the dry leaf, because it is compressed, but we will see what we can get. Here we go. I'm brewing it in Ni Xing clay. I know they're that effective, but I have tasted it in porcelain, so I can give you a little bit of the pointers of the difference. Here we go. So it has a Liu Bao quality. I am getting betel nuts. I'm getting leather. It's got the classic ripe Puerh smell, or Hei Cha smell, of wet caverns. Oh no, more dry caverns. So leather, betel nuts, dry caverns. I'm picking up some celeriac, which always, for me, links to Chinese herbal apothecaries. The smell of it is a slightly celery smell, as in cellar. Celery, not cellars, but celery. You know, the sticks. But it's more earthy, and more root, more of a root smell. It reminds me of Chinese herbs like Dang Gui, Angelica root. I'm not going to put loads of pictures of Chinese herbs. I'll just throw Chinese herbs up. But there's a certain sort of smell. It's earthy, it's rooty, it's slightly spicy. I'm also picking up a creamy note that would be something that I wouldn't normally note with ripe Puerh. I'm getting chocolate. I'm getting a creamy, milky quality to it. But also iron, and fortified, dark beers, or stout. In fact, there's something which you may or may not have tried called Guinness Punch. So it's like you're taking stout, and you're mixing it with condensed milk, and it has that. It's not so sweet like condensed milk, but it's got that sweet quality. Guinness chocolate cake. So it's got that chocolatey note. So it's actually pretty strong in terms of an aroma for the dry leaf. Let's smell the wet leaf. With Tortise, leave it a little bit. It needs some time to just open up a little bit. Not too long, obviously. Elephant. Gets first try, and immediately I'm smelling the aromatics here. So we've got Chinese herbs, got celeriac, got caverns, got leather, a touch of clay, reams of paper. Very classic, ripe Puerh HR notes. The leather's there. The milkiness is there as well. For me, leather and apple skins, I always imagine like cellars. Imagine like a cellar, in this case, a cellar. So underground, a cellar, or a storage area where you've got lots of these heritage, russet, gnarly, knobbly, natural apples that still have like burnished skin. You know, that sort of earthier, real earthier apple. So it's still fruity, but definitely more in the subterranean quality. So yeah, it's extremely... it smells extremely like a ripe Puerh tea, albeit kind of mixed with Lü Bao. Now Lü Bao teas, the way that the Lü Bao tea is traditionally fermented is not using wet piling. I know it's changing, and there's lots of changes that are probably happening within fermentation of Lü Bao, and there's different styles of Lü Bao. But generally, it's more about just sort of residual moisture. So it has more of a raw quality to it, or a lighter ferment quality to it. As it cools I'm picking up more of those condensed milks. Evaporated milk, maybe. But we'll keep it under that Guinness punch. This tea actually opens up very, very quickly. You can see that yes, it's still tall-shaped, but if I prod it you can see it breaks up very, very quickly and easily. Okay. So let's give this a brew. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to brew it a little bit more in a flash style. Not completely flash style. What I mean by that is flash style means you literally pour it in and you pour it out. So I'd have been pouring it out by now. But I don't want to brew it too long. This is not necessarily how you should brew it, but I just want to start to show you how your brewing it is going to bring out different characteristics. So on the next infusion I'll brew it longer, and you'll see the color difference. So you can see the color here. Now would you describe that as a ripe tea, or a raw tea? I think to most people's eyes that would be described as a very aged raw tea. Okay? So this is the taste of it, and the color of it, as representing more of its raw tea taste. I think that what's interesting is if you brew it longer it brings out all of those ripened teas. It's a fascinating tea. It really is. It covers two things in one tea, and that's very unusual. Or it's something that you might not necessarily want. You might go, like, I want a very ripe tea experience, or a very raw tea experience. But what I found is that the combination here works as a cohesive whole, and that's what's so really interesting about this tea. Okay, let's focus on texture, which I would say is medium-thick. So you're representing the raw a little bit more, but very soft, and extremely smooth, and extremely sweet. I shouldn't talk about aftertaste, but extremely sweet immediately. So it has the luxurious quality of a very fine-aged raw, or a ripe tea. Very, very soft. Very silky. Very, very smooth. I mean, I'm noting some of the minerality that's there as well. It's crazy, because normally you wouldn't put those two things together. Very smooth, but also quite mineral. But in this case I feel like you can. Like, the start is medium, and then it moves in the sort of opening textural quality into this very smooth, soft, luxury liquor. But then it starts to reveal these little mineral points that pop out, like little crystalline mineral points that pop out. Very clean, very clear. Very, very clean. No mustiness, no fermented taste, or the residual notes of fermentation. This is super, super clean. Like, if you tasted this as a ripe or a raw you'd go, Wow! This is a super well-aged tea. Wow! Okay. Taste. Leather. Clay. Apple skins. Moving to... What should we focus on first? Let's focus on the sweeter stuff. It's got like a carbohydrate quality. We talked about apple skins. I'm sort of tempted to say potato, but I know that puts people off a lot. I don't mean... I mean just the sweet carbiness, sweet starchiness of roots, like potatoes, celeriac, parsnips, those kinds of root vegetables. The sweetness. It reminds me of, actually, Chinese herbs. If you have had experience with Chinese herbs then you'll know that there are certain roots that are used that are very sweet and starchy. The one that springs to mind is the creeping lily turf root, which has a very particular sweet, starchy note. So it's very sweet and starchy. I'm also picking up the creamy notes. Buttery. It's like got a slightly salty, sort of salted butter quality to it. Beautiful. Again, now if I close my eyes and I try to blank everything I know about this tea, and taste it... Let's try. Am I thinking this is a ripe or a raw? It's so hard. It straddles it. I would say I would lean towards ripe, though. I would say, Oh! This is a beautifully, lightly fermented ripe tea. Lightly fermented ripe teas are sort of more in vogue these days. I mean, people like their heavy, dark, ripe teas, of course, but I've noted that a lot of people are moving towards lighter ferment teas. Yeah. I guess this is a sort of trend that you might compare to natural wines. There's sort of a little bit of a lighter quality to them, although I don't know if that analogy fits that well. But it's more about expressing the quality of the leaf, rather than expressing too much of the fermentation. So in general, there tends to be a trend towards people more appreciating, because everyone's going to always appreciate the dark stuff, but there's more of an appreciation by some people towards lighter ferments, like old-school-style Yu Bao teas, and lighter ferment Puerh teas. This really is in that zone. I would taste that tea and go, This is a lighter ferment, ripe Puerh. So I'm going to brew it a little bit longer now, and we're going to see the color, and you'll see why I was so baffled by this tea when I was first told that it was a Shang Puerh. What this actually demonstrates, or reveals, in many ways is there's this sort of old adage, which I always say is not quite right, and I still stand by the fact it's not quite right, which is this old marketing technique which is used by people, which is to say, Oh, they invented ripened tea, or fermented tea, because they wanted to mimic aged, raw tea. That's just not true. Aged raw tea is not something that is historic, whereas ripe tea is. So ripe tea came first. The idea that people were like aging raw teas, and they go, Oh, if only we can mimic that amazing taste. Oh, we figured out a way to ferment it to make it taste the same. No, that's not the case. However, what's interesting is when you take a very long-aged raw tea it starts to taste very similar, or have a lot of similarities, with ripe tea. You can see the color of this liquor. Hopefully, I'll put it in the cup so you can see it. Now, if that was presented to you I would say that 99 percent of people would say that that is a ripe tea in terms of color. I mean, it's inky, dark, dark brown. Okay. You can see it's got this sort of lighter rim to it, right? You can see there's something a little bit different about it. It's got this oxidized orange-brown rim to it, so it's definitely got the signs of a really good aged tea. But I think at first glance you'd say that's a ripe. Okay. Let's give it a taste. Yeah. I mean, brew it longer, I'm getting more brown breads, butter, just those Guinness-y chocolate notes. It's amazing. It's like a great, great, great ripe Puerh. When I first tasted it that's what I thought. I was like, this is it. This is our Black Yunnan Tour replacement. It's amazing. It's got these beautiful, light, bright notes. Incredible. Obviously, this is now not our replacement, or new iteration of that tea, because it is a raw tea. But the rawness starts to show. When I say rawness it's obviously a very well-aged raw. So when I say the word rawness it makes it feel like it's raw. I'm saying the Xiong character, the raw character, the fact that it wasn't a fermented tea, a fully fermented tea, comes out in it's floral nature. So I'm picking up violet, and when I tasted it a few nights ago I picked up this Crème de Violette, this like violet liquor taste to it. It's a bright, high violet note, and also this minerality. It's almost got a Yan Cha, kind of slightly metallic, crystalline minerality, that then transforms to a fruity note. But the fruits are, again, like almost preserved, or in alcohol. I'm getting like fruit liquors, or preserved plums, or preserved bayberries. I tasted some preserved bayberries about a week ago, and it reminds me that bayberries have this slightly piney, resinous, or quite noticeable piney, resinous quality within the fruity sweetness of it. So if you've ever had a bayberry you'll know what I mean. It's got this lovely, foresty quality to it, in terms of the resinous pine trees. So I'm picking up that. It's fruity, but it's got this resinous, piney quality to it as well. But when you first sip it you're just thinking, this is a ripe tea. It's so sweet, it's so smooth, it's so rounded, it's so soft. So you're getting this lovely show of ripe moving to raw, in the mouth, with every sip. It's just how incredible is that? That you get that in one tea. I just find it such a unique tea because of that. Now what do I think has happened here? Because I do not think that this is simply comparable with a 35 year old raw tea. I don't think that this is comparable to taking a raw tea, a Sheng Puerh, compressing it into a cake, and then letting it age for 30 odd years. What I think has happened here is this. Oh! This violet and bayberry, and preserved plum note is amazing. What I think has happened is this. This was a mixed bag of raw Puerh that was produced. I don't know the age of the tea trees. No idea. My guess would be, from tasting it, and it is purely a guess, would be that these are not Gu Shu, but these are in the old tea territory, 80 to 120 year old. That would be my guess, because of this enduring sweetness in my mouth, and the length of the finish, and the juiciness is beautiful. What I think has happened is they've picked from these older bushes and tea trees from the Meng Hai region. They've sort of brought it into a place. They've processed it as Puerh tea. They've done that over some years, and they've sort of kept it, and they've blended it as a batch. Then they've left it for six years, ten years, who knows. But in 2003 what they then decided to do was, let's make Tuo batch of raw tea. In order to make it into Tuo tea you've got to break it, because if you had like larger leaf you could never compress it into that little puck. You'd be making those dragon ball teas instead. Now this was in 2003. Yes, Puerh was sort of happening, but it was probably less considered to be sort of sacrilege to take this tea and then mulch it a bit. So they've crushed it. What they've done is they've increased, again, all of these are guesses, but I think this is what happened. They've increased the surface area for fermentation, and then they've steamed the leaf, because they needed to compress it into these pucks, into these Tuo shape. So they've taken a larger surface area, they've added water, and then they've pressed it so it's locked in that humidity. So in essence, therefore, they have then started a new fermentation phase, where they're allowing the... whilst these Tuo teas are drying they are fermenting at a much faster rate. So I think what you have here is, yes, technically it's a raw tea, because it hasn't gone through an official fermentation phase, but I think that there has been accelerated fermentation during the time when it was pressed into Tuo teas. Again, all of this is just my guess from tasting it, so I don't know if that's true, but I think that's what's happened. It's an enigma, which is why we call it an enigma, because I do not think you can get this level of ripeness in a raw tea unless there was some level of extra push that happened there. I'm so, so thankful that however this was made it was made, because it is gorgeous in the way that it straddles the tea types. Okay. Let's talk about finish. Lovely, bright, creme de violette, floral, mineral, crystalline quality. Moves to vaporous. I'm getting the brown bread and butter. I'm getting the Guinness. But again, these very, very sweet, purple flower notes, like violets or irises. Then I'm getting the piney, resinous, babery note. Smell the empty Gong Dao Bei. Okay. So I'm getting that Chinese herbal note, but I'm also getting like chocolate chip cookies. Yeah, chocolate chip cookies, and like a jammy quality. Like, okay, we'll put it under sort of a light cherry jam, chocolate chip cookies, Chinese herbs, a touch of like mushroom, forest floor, mushroomy note, like button mushrooms. So like it's fresh, it's clean, it's not like a rotten wood kind of smell. It's like you've taken fresh picked button mushrooms and you've cut them in half. That's the smell of the white flesh, and a touch of cask as well, like wood and charred woods, but very light. So it's a combination of different things. It's very, very complex. Actually, the nose. Chocolate chip cookies, charred woods, brown bread, Chinese herbs, and a little bit of a jammy note to it as well. I'm going to do one more infusion before I leave you to drink through more infusions. I haven't done a completely virgin, blank tasting of this tea until now, where I feel like I'm ready to really understand the body sensation. But what I can say is it's definitely already heating. It's definitely making me perspire. It's definitely got some good activity to it, in terms of whether or not the body sensation is more representative of a raw tea, or a ripe tea. That's going to be interesting. So stick around. We're going to brew one more, taste it, and then I'm going to go off and have a full session. The finish is just this, again, dried cherries, preserved plums, preserved bayberries. Really, really cool. So now it's that choice. Should I make it shorter? Let's make it a shorter one. Let's see. Again, very dark, but we're starting to get a bit lighter than the previous infusion. Cheers everybody. Yeah. I mean, amazing. This lovely combo. Oh! The leather, and the brighter notes of the leather, and the zinginess of the preserved bayberries. I'm getting more of a distinct zinginess on the sides of my tongue. Very, very juicy. Wow! I keep on asking myself the question, would I think this is a raw, or would I think this is ripe? If I had this infusion I would think that that was a very, very, very aged raw, of which it is. But it's beautiful how you've got that flexibility in how you brew, and what characteristics you bring out. Obviously, that's the case with all brewing, but in this case it's even more pronounced. All right. I'm going to go away, go through a few more infusions, and then I'll come back with body sensation. Wow! Okay. I can't speak. I have had eight infusions of this tea, and then I've stacked a few more. This is sort of 9, 10, 11. I've stacked it so you can really just see the color of the liquor, hopefully. Now it really is starting to look like a very well-aged Sheng Puerh, albeit probably infusion 9 and 10 of an aged raw Puerh would be lighter than that. So it's still exhibiting more of a darker color liquor. Wow! Caught me by surprise, the body sensation. I was going to say something, but now I might change it up. Hold on. Let's see. What I was going to say is that this has a very digestive and settling quality to it, and it does very reminiscent of ripe Puerh teas. But then when I turn the cameras on I'm finding it's suddenly quite... I'm feeling quite high suddenly. That kind of took me by surprise. It's definitely got this very light, rising, light, airy, cooling, because I'm sweating, so feeling fresh energy to it. But I'm also feeling quite drunk. Quite drunk indeed, actually. Obviously, I drunk it quite quickly, so if you took your time it would be more of a gentle... It wouldn't be so noticeable, this feeling, but when you drink like this, whoa! It hits you quite hard. Okay. Taste-wise, definitely more exhibiting the Sheng Puerh, the raw quality. It just tastes like a smooth, sweet, aged raw Puerh tea. So I'm getting leathers, I'm getting like rock sugars, I'm getting the preserved cherries and dried cherries sweetness. One of the great things about a really good, aged raw Puerh is that you just keep drinking it. I mean, you just keep drinking it. Even like 15, 18 infusions in. Because what happens is it just becomes this most sweet, nectar-y water afterwards, right? It never stops being more enjoyable than water. You know? Does that make any sense? It never stops being enjoyable. I'm really losing it. I'm feeling very, very out of it right now. It really has taken me by surprise, this tea. Wow. Okay. But yes, that is the quality of the taste, and once again, I'm losing it. I don't know what I'm saying. My brain is evaporating. What's going on? What was I going to say? Anyway, the point is, it's strong. I've just found out. The second point is that you get this lovely transition towards more of a representation of the Sheng Puerh nature, the raw nature of this tea, as you brew into it. So if you wanted to start to express more of the ripe tea then brew a bit longer at the beginning to get those darker, inky brews that are very comforting and digesting, and then it can become your Sheng Puerh afterwards. But it's entirely up to you. There's so many options with this tea, in terms of the experience, and yes, it definitely will get you there too. Have I covered everything? I think so. 90's Enigma Sheng. Also, I have to say, remarkably affordable. Again, like I said at the beginning, because these teas weren't produced as a sort of very expensive Puerh tea, you get to experience a very aged Puerh tea, high quality Puerh tea, at a very, very good price point, and we haven't jacked it up because of the fact that it's such an unusual and special tea that has been aged for so long. I'm rabbiting on. I'm going to leave you. I'm going to go and enjoy this high now. That's it teaheads. Check out other videos, taste our teas wherever you are in the world by browsing Mei Leaf dot com, and come visit us if you're ever in London. Other than that, I am a spaced out Don from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from those tea bags, keep drinking the odd stuff that is just glorious, and spread the word, because nobody deserves bad tea. Bye. That was hard.