What you are about to look at is the process of a clay barrel aging experiment using an 80 proof birch beer smoked tea liquor and a ctc dianhong from Yunnan.
Short and sweet; and to the people who had said my photos are not good, I’m stepping my game up.
Peace,
Andrew / Liquid Proust
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While darker oolong teas (oxidized and roasted) are something I enjoy to see how they can improve as they go through hibernation, aka resting for a long time, there sometimes is some leaf that you have little to no hopes for anyways. That’s the case with these two teas I recently bought and found out the hard way that not all ‘rested’ oolong will be good; an obvious answer, but I though I had solid selections. Finding myself with quite a bit of 2013 da hong pao and 2010 charcoal roasted tieguanyin (I actually bought this one out, it was low in stock), I had to find something to do with them so why not experiment?
I had material that underneath its rough exterior conditions still existed what made can potentially be good. These projects go back before I went to Kansas, mid February to April, but I didn’t blog about them at the time. Now I’m going to just drop what I’m doing and some pictures.
1: 2013 da hong pao surrounded by peppermint and cinnamon. The pictures should explain what I did, but I will be slowly rotating everything around for months and seeing what happens. The goal is to get the leaf to absorb the oils from the peppermint; if you’ve ever had plain peppermint leaf, it’s quite obvious it’s strong stuff.
2: 2010 charcoal roasted tieguanyin and vanilla bean. The charcoal roast on this tea is still way too much for it to be enjoyable, even after six years.The vanilla I used is quite potent which makes me happy because it is that aspect that can help provide cream to the charcoal taste while it fades away. I’m unsure how long this one will take, but I’m planning to recheck it every 5 months.
Fresh vanilla bean looks so crazy, in a great way, when you cut into it; however, it’s this moisture content that I have to check up on every two week even though it’s in an airtight container.
Keeping this rather brief, hopefully the pictures were enjoyable and the ideas were something you found to be interesting.
-Andrew / Liquid Proust
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