One Bulang cake, three cellars, one storage manager
This is the cleanest demonstration Liu Shenyang has of what his job actually changes. In 2014 a single 2014 Bulang cake, pressed by a family workshop high above the Myanmar border from fierce, mineral maocha, was split at the source into three lots before any storage decision was made. One lot went to his Kunming facility. One travelled to his continental cellar, where winter cold and low humidity slow everything to a crawl. One went to his Foshan site, where the subtropical Pearl River delta air pushes fermentation hard and fast.
For a decade he has visited each lot, tasted, and logged the drift. The Kunming sample stayed bright and tightly wound, still holding a trace of its mountain youth. The continental sample underwent the slowest transformation of the three: velvet and resin, deepened by real seasonal freeze-thaw cycles rather than steady mild air. The Foshan sample is the most extreme, tasting a decade older than its years, all plum and camphor.
Same leaf, same picking day, same original hands at the wok. What separates these three cups is nothing but the storage decision Liu Shenyang made and then held to for ten years. Brewed side by side, it’s less a tasting than a demonstration: geography, humidity, and time, isolated and poured into three cups at once.