wave_code wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:51 am
this particular tea is part of a cake, so it came in a standard zip pack. interesting idea on just leaving it out in open air- a friend of mine I got an older small puck from who is Taiwanese said her mother recommended actually breaking off a piece a day before I plan to drink it and leaving it out, but it was a much heavier fermentation and had seen some wet storage at some point. maybe I'll try your suggestion, though it gets extremely dry in this part of Germany in summer, especially with years of drought now, so maybe I'll wait until later in the fall when there is more moisture in the air from the rain. having it in a small jar with a moisture pack might be equivalent here to what you are suggesting here though haha
I'm curious, for liu bao especially, but just in general, are Chinese yixing or nixing pots the main choice, or are there other local clays and pot styles unique to Malaysia?
...Part of a cake, so it's real Liu Bao,,, it's just not LB if it isn't fermented. The article posted by
@Balthazar... it's cool, it's a journal, but one can hardly call loose leaf maocha from Guangxi a raw aged LB... LB is a fermented tea. Period. In your case, the tea will benefit from resting and air, if only just to settle down. Also, water in Europe is hard... do you filter or get your water from some secret mountain spring source?... But no matter, give it some air and time and see what happens... i think it will only get stronger....
As for the clays and pots question.... LB was brought to Malaysia back in the day when human labour was imported to work the tin mines. These labourers came from Guangxi and the deal was that medicinal LB would be provided. So LB was just boiled up and kept in pots or cauldrons with easy access for the labourers.
I was born in Ipoh, Perak, Malaysia. Perak is the State, and it produced a bucket load of tin man... Jesus, everyone was profiting from it, especially the the Colonists meaning the UK... and indentured labourers from Guangxi, I tell you, if it was today, it would be GLM not BLM... but I digress... so they brewed their tea any old how...
My own grandmother would make LB every morning, as offerings to the ancestral altar as well as the Gods that we worship as a family. We are ehtnic Chinese. Malaysia is a Muslim majority country, so we exist at the pleasure of the majority, because after all, we ended up here after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and subsequent nationalistic mess which has culminated in a world leader afraid of a Cartoon Bear.... but again, I digress...
From what I can remember, she made a huge pot of LB, using a good sized chunk of leaves. The best would go to the Gods and the rest would sit in the pot in the kitchen for anyone who was thirsty. Hot water would be poured in and leaves refilled when needed. It was like water in a jar, but much much tastier.
So now we do Gongfu style... and us ethnic Chinese here in this country simply just kept using the stuff we'd been used to. Malaysian clay? who knows,... not me... there are some indigenous items made, like jars and stuff, but they don't relate to Chinese tea... I use the same small pots as I use for Pu Erh, and I also use porcelain pots for simple brews and also thermos flasks for when I play Ping Pong...