Let’s drink my birthday cake

An annual tradition with increasingly old tea.

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Every year around my birthday, I set aside a few hours to drink this pressed cake of tea that’s as old as I am. I only brew it once a year, and if all goes well, it should last about as long as I do. I call it my birthday cake, and as someone who’s allergic to any kind of ballyhoo about my trips around the sun, it’s one tradition I can get behind.

My birthday cake is an aged puer allegedly produced in 1989. I say ‘allegedly’ because there are few guarantees that a vintage tea is the actual age on the label. Tea sellers often fib about a product’s age, either to goose up its value or because they’ve been misinformed, so all you really have to go on is your palate, your gut, and your trust in who’s selling to you. I am reasonably confident in Fang Gourmet, a New York boutique I’ve been buying from for a decade, so when they say this tea is from 1989, I’m inclined to believe them. We’ll overlook the fact that I was born in 1988. The exact year is less important than the tea being good. And the older the tea and I get, the less it matters anyway.

The tea’s aroma spills out as soon as I remove it from its zip-top bag. Its large leaves smell of resin and mysterious herbs, with an antique quality that belies genuine aging. My contacts at Fang Gourmet tell me it’s from Bulang, a region of Yunnan associated with punchy, burly teas. As I rinse the leaves with boiling water, I get notes of gasoline and smoke. Puer is an acquired taste. Once you learn to love it, these smells can become appetizing in the extreme. My mouth waters before I take my first sip.

What does 30-something-year-old tea taste like? There are less individual flavors than deep impressions. It’s full and rich in my mouth, jumping between savory and sweet. Vibrant. Energizing. I feel a halo of tingly warmth around my temples that spreads to my earlobes and down my cheeks. Some teas get mellow and sleepy in old age. Not this one. After a few steeps I feel ready to box a grizzly bear. Notes of camphor, toasted marshmallow, and smoked meat linger in my mouth and the empty cup.

Despite all the vigor, I’m struck by how cozy and comfortable the tea feels. It’s strong but never too astringent or bitter. The more I drink, the warmer I feel. The high builds slow and steady. You need a potent tea to facilitate flavor development during aging. But it also must show a capacity to gain complexity and richness with time. Otherwise all that muscle has nowhere to go—no way to grow and change.

Sometimes I share my birthday cake with a buddy. We discuss what we’ve done in the past year, how we’ve grown and changed. Of course this is prompted by the occasion for drinking the tea, but good tea can also inspire such conversations. It encourages a reflective mood.

Most years I drink my birthday cake on my own. I return to it as if catching up with an old friend. I tell it that in 2024, I fell in love. I adopted a dog. I figured out some better ways to do things that tripped me up in the past. I gained a client and lost a client. I went to two weddings and one funeral. I stopped buying bonsai trees to focus on developing the ones I already have. I started a newsletter to write about tea, which felt like reuniting with an old flame after years apart. Each year, I tell the tea new stories. It holds on to them until I dust it off the following November, when the leaves tell them back to me.

After 12 intense steeps, the birthday cake’s power begins to fade. It’s told old stories and listened to new ones. I empty the leaves from my teapot into a thermos to eek a few more cups with hour-long infusions. Then the tea is done. I dump the spent leaves into my compost bin so they can decompose and become something new. Drinking tea is, among everything else, a good way to pass the time, across minutes or decades. I like to know I’ll see this cake again next year.

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If you’d like to try this tea, Fang Gourmet sells it in 10-gram sample packs as part of a raw puer sampler with two other 10-gram samples for $89. The sampler isn’t on their website, so you’ll need to place your order over the phone.