Exclusive experimental and tiny batch PuErh. Old Tree Bulang Sheng roasted by a Dancong Oolong master over fruitwood charcoal. Densely sweet and fruity jams blend with toffee warmth, rice starch, lily flowers and bitter orange.
This tea was over a year in the making. It is by far the most involved process that we have ever undertaken for any tea release. I will detail it all out below but here's the short version.
Source Projector is an Old Tree (estimated 150 year old) Bulang PueErh harvested and produced in Padian village. It has been produced as a Sheng (Raw) PuErh and then was sent to Fenghuang (Phoenix) Mountain in Guangdong province to be baked in the style of Dancong Oolong by a master roaster over fruitwood charcoal. It was then sent back to Yunnan to be pressed into cakes.
The results are mesmerising.
Fruits, flowers, starchy sweetness, fudgy confection, nutty warmth and bitter sweet punch all unite in the most incredible PuErh experience. There is simply no fresh PuErh which can match this complexity.
The thickness of the tea is maxed out - soft, viscous and starchy.
The aromatics are bustling with personalities all competing for your attention.
The carbohydrate comfort of cooked banana, steamed rice and sweet tofu pudding marry perfectly with toffees, fudges and brown butter. All of this warmth is brought into focus by the roast - gentle yet sustained throughout the whole tea session.
Then come the mouthful of fruits and flowers - strawberry, pears and hawthorn candy provide the concentrated, jammy midnotes which underpin an ambrosial bouquet of magnolia, jasmine and lily.
And finally you have the necessary bite to make this a proper PuErh experience. Citrus oil notes like calamansi, pomelo and bitter orange dance alongside green apple and yoghurt brightness, all held in step by the roast which softens and intensifies in equal measure.
The aftertaste is gorgeous - like you have a pomelo lozenge stuck in your throat which releases a zesty sweetness for hours.
THE FULL STORY
In previous years we have released some legendary roasted PuErh starting with Psychic Stream Seeker and, more recently, Fractal Fate Finder.
These Raw PuErh's were roasted in London after the cake pressing which meant that we had to push the roast to an extreme in order to penetrate the whole cake and create a uniform taste. We love these teas for their bold, burnt sugar taste and heat-giving character.
But we wanted to do something a little more refined and subtle, so, at the end of 2022 we decided that we would commission a roast of loose PuErh Maocha. This would allow us to taste a gentler and longer roast with the addition of the fruitwood charcoal taste.
First things first, we needed to find a roaster who would be willing to take on the challenge of roasting PuErh - a practice which is almost never done.
We basically had a few choices of roast style - Wuyi (Yancha), Fujian (Tie Guan Yin) and Guangdong (Dancong).
Given the fruity notes of a good Raw PuErh plus our love of Dancong, we opted for a Guangdong style roast and asked around our Dancong sources to try to find a roaster.
Eventually we found a master Dancong producer who agreed to take on the roasting challenge.
Spring 2023 rolled around and we were tasting many hundreds of teas and I was searching for that one Maocha which would suit a roast - it had to be delicious, complex, fruity and lively with enough punch to stand up to a long baking.
This Padian Bulang Dashu fit the bill perfectly - the maocha was bright and buzzy with a starchiness that would match the warmth of roasting and fruitiness which I had hoped would be supercharged by the Dancong style roasting.
A few kilos were sent to the roaster in Guangdong and he worked in the roasting room to devise the test roasts.
The process turned out to be much harder than he had expected because the young PuErh leaves have a very different texture compared with the Oolong that he was used to roasting. All of the hairy trichomes made the possibility of a smoked note developing in the tea harder to avoid as the fine hairs could easily fall into the charcoal. But, he developed his techniques and sent us the test roasts.
We were smitten with one particular roast - 11 hours at 100 degrees over longan fruit wood charcoal. We sent all of the remaining tea to the roaster in Fenghuang and the arduous work began.
After about a month of roasting and resting we had to ship all of the tea back to Yunnan for pressing into cakes. This is not a simple task as there are strict rules forbidding large quantities of tea being sent to Yunnan for fear of fakery (you could then sell some other province's tea as Yunnan tea).
Cake pressing began but the unique quality of this roasted PuErh caused more issues with the pressing factory finding the tea harder to set in cake form. Eventually it all came together in October and we couriered the whole batch to London.
Then the stress began.
UPS lost the parcels and for over a month we spent hours on hold with UPS customer services. We begged, cajoled and complained but after a month we were told by UPS that the parcels have gone missing and they will no longer investigate them, instead we were told to just make a claim for lost goods (and receive a pitiful compensation).
We were devastated - the whole year of work by our whole team, the efforts of the producers, roasters, pressers and wrappers, the artwork by Celine and the immense work creating the Reality Carousel game of 2023 - they all relied on this tea.
We spent a few weeks in a daze, trying to accept that we would never see or taste this tea which had occupied so much of our time and attention.
Then, out of the blue, a delivery turned up at the warehouse....... and, somehow, they are here - a tiny batch of the most sublime and unique PuErh.
We have just 350 cakes of Source Projector so don't miss out on this one-off, experimental tea. It will be talked about for years to come and is already one of the most valuable cakes in my collection.
