23 October, 2007

Modern New Pu'er Ingredients

A yummy modern pu'er ingredient, as found by Lei in her gaiwan while brewing an ornately carved block of "tourist" shupu:

(A cigarette butt)

11 comments:

David Lesseps said...

uggghhh!!!! Gag!!!

Hobbes said...

Some more Zen commentary from Dave there? :)

小 約翰 said...

could be source of "my favourite, tobacco-style shengpu" or just a lazy worker. .. john

MarshalN said...

There are many reasons I don't like shupu. This is one of them.

It's also the kind of thing that's really ironic... so many people in the mainland HATE wetstored teas, thinking they're bad for you. But they'll drink the nastiest shupu.

ankitlochan said...

amazing discovery... i m still a bit shocked..

Anonymous said...

Dear Hobbes,

It reminded me a bit of one of your recent entry about the sheng Geotheborg cake from Yibang Chamasi. I am a proud owner of the shu version of that cake.
Brewing it one day, I was delighted to find a sunflower seed in my tea, but after further investigations, it appeared to be a dead bug :(
Yet, exactly as you pointed out about the sheng, this shu is reasonably ok (especially for $7), so well, I removed the bug, and drunk my tea.
Would I have done that if it had been a cigarette butt? Well well...I am not so sure :)

MarshalN said...

Come to think of it, Hobbes, you liked tobacco notes in your tea, no? :)

Hobbes said...

Dear Iwii,

Dead bugs... a little extra nutrition can't go amiss, surely? I remember seeing a small spider crawling out of one shupu cake a while back!


Dear MarshalN,

You're right, what am I complaining about? I should be grinding dirty Marlboro into my tea regularly. :)

I love the way the Chinese cigarette that Lei found is totally unfiltered, for an even dirtier effect.


Toodlepip,

Hobbes

MarshalN said...

I regularly see bugs in pu that I bought. In fact, I just discovered a little white bug in the tong of Fuxing cakes. They're quite normal -- no harm done. From what I understand they eat the paper and not the tea itself.

Anonymous said...

Of course, they eat the paper, that is... if they are alive. I wouldn't mind that either. But when they are compressed with my tea, that is a different matter...
Though I agree these are still better than a cigarette butt ... huuurk :(
There is something that I am finding a bit surprising: while I am hardly a shu drinker, I noticed most of the time, sheng cakes are a lot "cleaner" in that respect than shu ones. Less seeds of all sort, less hairs of any kind, etc... I wonder why shu cakes should be inherently dirtier than sheng ones... It doesn't sound logical to me but there is probably a reason.

Steven Dodd said...

I see the comment has already been made, but I read your notes on Changtai then read this. Instantly I thought, "wait a second..."

"The aroma is really rather good, being sweetly leatherlike, with tobacco. I love tobacco pu'er."

I couldn't help but laugh at the irony. I think irony is the correct term in this case.

This has me thinking, though. I wonder what it would be like to mix a little pu'er with some tobacco leaf. Add a little more buzz to the pu's caffeine. I have some pipe tobacco laying about...