Old tree Menghai Ripe PuErh roasted in aromatic bamboo for a smooth sipping, sweet nuts and candied fruit character. Fudge, chocolate, dried cherries and almond butter.
The tradition of roasting tea in aromatic bamboo dates back thousands of years.
The Dai and Bulang minority group in Yunnan are especially known for this technique which first involves cutting fragrant, green bamboo and cutting it into sections. These are then stuffed with finished tea and roasted over fire which steams in bamboo fragrance and softens the leaves. The soft leaves are stuffed deeper into the bamboo and the sections are topped up with more leaves.
The roasting/steaming and stuffing process continues until the bamboo is filled and the bamboo has had adequate roasting. They are then sealed and left for a month or two to dry completely.
Bamboo roasting adds a warm and toasted note to the tea while dialling up the sweetness, smoothness and texture. The aromatic bamboo also imparts a candied fruity character to the taste and finish.
The problem with most Bamboo roasted tea is that there is a tendency for the raw material to be lower quality than the PuErh pressed into cakes. This makes sense - save the high grade pickings for sellers who want to make premium tea cakes and use the 'other' tea to roast in bamboo to soften, sweeten and smooth for the tribes themselves.
This is why we have not selected any bamboo-roasted tea before - they all tasted a bit rough.
So, this year we decided to commission our own bamboo-roasted tea from scratch. We sampled multiple PuErh teas to choose our own raw material.
The goal was to select a Maocha (loose raw tea) which we would love to press into Mei Leaf cakes - a pinnacle tea which would suit the unique roast and candied fruit notes of bamboo roasting.
This Da Shu (estimated 80-year-old trees) Menghai Ripe PuErh hit the spot for us - fudge and caramel with dried cherries. We thought that it would work well in bamboo so we asked for a test roast to be made for us. The result was love-at-first-sip.
The fudge and caramel became darker, creamier and nutty as if blended with roasted almond butter. The cherry frutiness was complemented by new notes of candied papaya, dried persimmon (hoshigaki) and glace chestnuts. The thickness, softness and sweetness were all accentuated beautifully by the Dai Bamboo process.
This is the best bamboo roasted tea that we have ever tasted (by quite a long way) - soft, sweet, thick and aromatic with warmth, spice, fruits, creams and confectionary indulgence. It also packs a little woozy punch if you drink through the infusions in one sitting.
If you have ever tried a bamboo roasted tea before then you may have already experienced the nightmare of trying to break into the bamboo tubes - fraught with the dangers of slipping sharp edges and splinters. We have made sure that you don't have to deal with all of that nonsense by pre-cutting the bamboo - just slide off the sleeve cover and the bamboo section pulls out to reveal all of the tea for you to break off and then re-seal. Easy peasy.
The video below shows the tasting of the sample roast and I promised that I would update you of any differences in the production batch. There are hardly any differences except that the production has a slightly richer warmth from the roast and this means that the changes through the infusions happens more slowly giving you even more luxurious infusions to enjoy!
Hip Cuddler is one of Celine's favourite teas of the year:
