Bought a young sheng cake on a recommendation and it is aggressive: bitter, drying, and it gives me a strange hollow feeling if I drink it before lunch. Everyone says it mellows with age. Are we talking one year, ten, or is this simply a tea I do not like?
Storage matters more than the number of years. A cake in a dry flat at 18C ages very slowly, and people quoting five years are usually assuming somewhere warmer and more humid. In a cold dry place, budget longer.
My flat is 17C most of the year, so I am probably not the right person to be storing anything for a decade.
Then buy already-aged cakes and let somebody in a warmer climate carry the risk. It costs more per gram and far less in disappointment.
Buy a sample of a ten year old sheng from a similar region before you commit to storing anything for a decade. Then you know whether the destination is somewhere you want to go.
It is also perfectly fine to drink shou and already-aged sheng and let other people do the waiting.
@petra_lindqvist · last mo. · 3 replies
Realistically five to ten years of decent storage for a meaningful change, and a young sheng you dislike now is not guaranteed to become one you like later. Age changes character, it does not fix material.
That said, a lot of what you describe is brewing. Young sheng punishes long steeps and full boiling water far more than shou does. Try 5g in 120ml, water rested a minute off the boil, flash steeps of about five seconds. It is a completely different tea brewed gently.
The hollow feeling before lunch is worth taking seriously - young sheng on an empty stomach does that to a lot of people, including me. Eat something first. If it still does it afterwards, this is not your category and there is no shame in that.
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@interval_ida · last mo.
Eating first sounds obvious now that somebody has said it out loud.
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@braise_brenda · last mo.
Young sheng before breakfast is a rite of passage that everyone regrets exactly once.
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