Aged and re-fired oolong
A finished oolong put into storage and then taken out every few years to be fired again. Ageing here is maintained rather than merely permitted, which is the opposite of how every other aged tea in the catalogue is made.
What makes this route what it is
Ageing appears in three routes in this catalogue and only here is it an active loop. The white cake and the sheng cake are put somewhere and left; this one is taken out, fired and put back, repeatedly, and the schedule of those interventions changes the product more than the years do.
The route, in order
Each note describes what the step is doing in this route. The same operation does a different job in a different chain.
The base tea's own manufacture. Almost any oolong can enter this route, and in practice roasted and strip-rolled teas do best because they have structure to lose slowly.
Ordinary shaking. Nothing in the base manufacture anticipates that the tea will be stored — an aged oolong is very often a tea that simply did not sell.
Ordinary fixation, at the depth the base style calls for.
Strip or ball according to the base style. A complete, saleable oolong exists at the end of the next step, and everything after that is the route proper.
- 5.
Drying
The base tea is finished here. This is the point a Sprint 32 route would have called the end.
Sealed storage measured in years. Unlike a pu-erh warehouse this is kept dry on purpose: the changes wanted here are slow and chemical, and any encouragement of microbial activity is a fault rather than a technique.
The operation that makes this a route. Every few years the tea is fired again — low and long — to take out moisture and move the roast on, and then returned to storage. The interval is judged by opening the container and smelling it, which is why nobody can give a schedule.
Months of rest after each firing before the tea is assessable at all, exactly as in the young roasted styles. The loop of steps six, seven and eight may run for decades and the record of how often it ran is usually lost with the seller.
How it differs from its neighbours
A route described on its own teaches very little. The useful fact is always which other route it is nearly identical to, and where it leaves it.
This route inserts an operation the other does not have. Nothing is substituted and nothing is removed.
Both routes age a finished tea for years and only one intervenes. Insert a periodic re-firing and the ageing becomes something a person is responsible for; leave it out, as the white cake does, and the result is whatever the storage did. That single difference is why an aged oolong has a maker and an aged white cake has a warehouse.
The two routes are the same tea up to a point. Everything before the divergence is shared; everything after it is not.
Identical manufacture through the drying, and then one route finishes and the other does not. Where the roasted ball route's loop closes after two or three rounds across one season, this one keeps running for twenty years — the same three operations, at a hundred times the interval.
Where it goes wrong
Damp is the whole risk, and the tell is a sour, musty note that the next firing will mask for a few months and not remove. The opposite error is a tea fired hard and often to keep it dry and saleable, which arrives at twenty years old tasting of nothing but char, and the two failures are easy to confuse because both are corrected by the same instrument used differently.
In full
An aged oolong is not an oolong that was forgotten. The route is a maintenance regime: a finished tea, usually a roasted one, is sealed and stored, and at intervals of a few years it is opened, examined and given another firing before going back. The firing is doing two things at once — taking out moisture the tea has picked up, and moving the roast character on another step — and the interval between firings is the whole craft, because a tea fired too often never develops anything and a tea left too long picks up the damp, sour note that this manufacture exists to keep out. Over a decade or two the result loses its floral top entirely and gains a dark, resinous, medicinal sweetness that the trade calls chen xiang, together with a much fuller body than the young tea had. This is worth recording as a route rather than as a storage condition precisely because it involves scheduled operations performed by a person: a cake of sheng pu-erh or a pressed white cake ages by being left alone in a suitable place, and this ages by being handled.