Smoke journey

Some tea you can steep a few times before it becomes something you don’t want to put in your face. Some you can’t. Don’t steep malty assam multiple times. Don’t steep hojicha multiple times. Sencha you can, but you’re kind of missing the point.

Darjeeling can go further. You can get three steeps out of gyokuro easy. Lapsang souchong can last. And then there is pu-erh.

Pu-erh is a cosmic-grade aberration that I am attempting to barely understand enough to be dangerous with it. It is smoky and aged, sometimes for a very long time, and pressed into cakes that can also last for a very long time. When I visited Hong Kong in 2017, I went to a tea museum(!) and brought home a large cake of aged pu-erh. Then I went through it very slowly for six years. Now it is gone. And so there is a need.

I know most forms of tea very well, but I know almost nothing about pu-erh. You grind some off the edge of a large disc-shaped cake with a pick, throw the leaves into a small clay teapot, add boiling water (15g per gram of tea, usually around 7-8g of tea), immediately dump it to rinse any dust or impurities off the leaves, and then you add another batch of water and steep it for about five seconds. It is extremely strong; in my home, the ritual starts early and ends late. Pu-erh typically lasts about 10 steeps. Ten. Ten steeps. It is also considerably more expensive than all teas I know of except for the finest possible gyuokuro; 200g cakes start around $80 and go rapidly north from there.