Alex digy.com9/23/04


If the knife shreads and tears, it's not a good instrument to pry at the
Pu-erh, IMO. The idea is to wedge, wriggle, and wiggle from an edge so as
not to harm the leaves.

Mike,

I have a feeling that if a puerh is not a whole leaf variety but rather a
broken leaf (Like Dai bamboo) it is better not to further break the
break-off piece. It actually prolongs the extraction during the coarse of
several steeps and makes them less contrast. To my surprise it stayed intact
(more or less) through 4 steeps and fell apart only later. That made my
first steeps less intense and my late steeps stronger and more consistent
with the earlier. To break it off I carefilly insert a sharp knife couple of
times along the line that I want to break it off and carefully detach the
piece. It comes off the cake pretty solid. I also noticed that this way it
is also less sensitive to hotter steeps probably because the inner part is
not getting skolded right away.
I guess the whole leaf cakes do not require this for obvious reasons. Also
the whole leaf cake won't hold on in one piece for a long time anyway.

Just an observation.

And a good one, I'd say. I did a similar thing yesterday, noting that the
HKbtC pieces waited until later steeps to come apart completely. Speaking of
which I'm not entirely sure that I'm not harming my teas' potential by using
the particular pot I dedicated to Pu-erh. While the tea tastes good and
smells fine in cup, there is a "funky" smell from the pot itself sometimes
that disturbs me. This pot is about 8 ounces, and is made of what appears to
be rather porous clay, probably at a lower firing, judging from the "clunk"
as opposed to "clink" of the tapped surface. It's a factory production. I
had bought it new and used it for Pu-erhs most of its life. This is a bit
discouraging.

Michael