Citrus-stuffed dark tea
A finished shou pu-erh is packed into a hollowed mandarin and the fruit is dried around it. The container is not packaging: it is an ingredient that ages alongside the tea for as long as the object exists.
What makes this route what it is
The aromatic material is a permanent ingredient rather than a removed tool, and it is also the vessel. Every other route in the catalogue ends with tea; this one ends with an object that is part tea and part something else, both of which are still changing, and neither of which can be separated from the other without destroying the product.
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 Yunnan base tea's fixation, run cool and deliberately incomplete as for any pu-erh maocha. Nothing at this stage anticipates the fruit.
As for any maocha destined for a pile. Loose grades are what this route needs, since the leaf has to be poured into a fruit through a hole a few centimetres across.
Sun-dried maocha, and the last step this route shares with the raw side of the pu-erh family.
The pile that makes the base a shou. Everything through here is the shou route and the tea that comes out of it could have been pressed into a cake and sold as one.
- 5.
Drying
The heap is opened out and dried, ending the fermentation. A complete, saleable tea exists at this point, which this route and the jasmine route have in common and almost nothing else does.
The fruit is opened, emptied, filled with the finished tea, capped with its own lid, and the whole object dried — in the sun over days, in a low oven, or over gentle heat, each giving a different result. The peel is not removed afterwards and is not intended to be.
Both materials keep changing, in contact, for as long as the object is kept. Unusually for the catalogue this is the step the product is bought for rather than a storage note appended to it: the citrus character is held to deepen and mellow over years rather than fading, and an aged peel is a graded commodity independently of what is inside it.
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.
The two routes are the same tea up to a point. Everything before the divergence is shared; everything after it is not.
Five steps of ordinary shou manufacture, and then the tea goes into a fruit instead of into a press. The divergence is unusually clean because what arrives at step six is not a half-made tea but a finished one, which means the route could be applied to any shou on the market and frequently is.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
Both routes take a completed tea and put an aromatic material against it. The jasmine route then screens the flowers out after every round and counts the top grades by how little blossom remains; this one seals the peel around the leaf and never separates them again. Tool versus ingredient, in the same slot, and it is why one product is sold by round count and the other by year.
Where it goes wrong
Drying is where it is decided and there is no way back. Dried too fast or too hot, the peel case hardens and cracks and the tea inside picks up a scorched note it keeps; dried too slowly in humid weather, the interior never gets down to a keeping moisture and the fruit spoils around the leaf. The commercial failure is different and more common: cheap flavoured peel, or a base tea so poor that the citrus is doing all the work — which is easy to hide for the first two or three infusions and impossible to hide by the fifth.
In full
This route begins where the shou route ends, and that is the second thing about it worth noticing. The first is that its defining operation was in the catalogue for two sprints with no route naming it — the only genuine case of that this sprint found. A Xinhui mandarin is opened at the top, emptied, filled with loose shou pu-erh, capped with its own lid and dried, and from that moment the two materials are in contact permanently. Oils in the peel migrate into the leaf and the leaf takes on the peel's bitterness and perfume, and both of them go on changing for as long as the object is kept. It is brewed whole or in pieces, peel and all. The reason it is a route rather than a packaging note is the comparison with jasmine: in a scented green tea the flowers are a tool and the top grades contain none of them at all, whereas here the scenting material is never removed and is not meant to be. The peel is a Guangdong commodity in its own right, aged and traded on its own account, so what is actually being made is one object out of two ageing goods from the same province — which is a thing no other route in the catalogue produces.