Our best chance at achieving the taste of the 1950s Red Mark (Hong Yin)

Click here to open infographic in bigger size if you can’t see it well.

Over the last few years when I tried very old (40+ years) puerh I always wondered: “How can I get the same taste in the future?” This question has occupied my mind a lot, with some general principles but no clear answer in terms of which exact teas to actually age, until the last 2 years where drinking intensively a succession of excellent and not-so-excellent old teas made things click together.

In my early 2024 trip to Malaysia I tasted a particularly well stored 50s red mark. Just wow. I had tried other red marks before but none like this one. My notes at the time:

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The 50s red mark was a particularly strong batch (eg: more selected leaves, older trees) puerh which is widely understood to be old tree Yiwu (I see no reasons to think otherwise and neither do the teachers I’ve consulted) and there’s a reason it’s the benchmark for all masterpiece era puerh: it’s that good, it’s overly dominant over anything made later in the “dark ages” of 1960s-1990s plantation factory tea.

In short, from the late 50s and the communist takeover and big factory age (60s-90s), nearly all factory tea is made from plantation leaves and it’s just not that satisfying: it might be dark, rich and sweet but has little durability, not much aftertaste and comparatively little Qi and depth. I’ve tried so many of these and always with this kind of results, one quickly comes to the conclusion that the only reason these teas have really high pricing (see infographic) is not quality but marketing from HK/Taiwanese merchants trying to sell off their too-wet-stored teas. Of course for there to be speculation there needs to be enough stock and indeed all the plantation big factory cake are perfect for this: they were made in large quantity and can be traded like stocks precisely because of their being so common. In comparison, the ’95-’02 teas we will talk about below are much rarer (there’s not that much gushu leaf in Yiwu) and were not even known to many until a few years ago so their price has not increased beyond proportion to quality and represent excellent value in comparison to big factory cakes.

Finally, in the mid 90s there’s the renaissance of making pure uncultivated old tree Yiwu started by Lu Li Zhen, Chen Huay Yuan and others in 1994 as prototype and 1995 as serious production (the first wave is until 2002). Of course I’ve drank quite a few of these too, including the legendary 96 Zhen Chun Ya Hao (ZCYH), the immediate successor Shun Shi Xing Hao (SXXH) and almost a full cake of 01 and 02 Chen Yuan Hao (CYH) Yiwu in the space of 3 months.

At the beginning it’s hard to say what has better leaf material between the 50s Red mark and these ’95-’02 because the Red mark it’s so aged. But by drinking a lot of factory old cakes (60s-80s) and a lot of these ’95-’02 it’s pretty clear that the ’95-’02 have better leaf quality than both (a bit better than 50s Red mark and massively better than the big factory cakes, see infographic at the top). The material for these ‘95-’02s was picked on purpose to be 100% pure old/ancient tree only as opposed to ‘it happens to have a lot of old tree in it but leaves aren’t very selected’ like the 1950s Red mark (and the best of the antique era teas like Tong Qing Hao, Song Pin Hao, Fu Yuan Chang).

While the immediate taste is hard to compare because of age difference, with the ’95-’02s the aftertaste left in the mouth 30 minutes later it’s much deeper (despite the age disadvantage) then all big factory cakes of 60s-90s and the ChaQi is also stronger.

To recap, so far I’ve introduced the cakes that led me to this understanding:

and really drinking all of them over and over is what made the ‘mental map’ clear in my mind, once you drink them all it becomes very clear that the 50s Red mark and the ’95-’02s are the same thing being transformed over time by aging (aftertaste and Qi experience as very similar), unlike the big factory cakes of the 60s-90s which just can’t keep up with them.

Therefore the early gushu teas (’95-’02) by ZCYH, SXXH and CYH are our best bet to achieve a taste/qi/experience like the 50s Red mark. Here’s why:

It’s hard to say with 100% certainty because the Red mark is just that much older and of course will keep on aging! But they will certainly (in my conviction and again in the conviction of all teachers and experts I’ve talked to) soon be better than other old cakes from the 60s-80s, whose prices are also astronomical (see infographic).

These 97-99 Yiwu and 01 Manzhuan are 100% pure Yiwu/6FTM ancient tree at a quality that’s by far the highest for the early 2000s period. Clearly today even better quality cakes are made, but the prices are higher and of course it’s not yet aged.

These 97/99-01 are the sweet spot between already being very well aged (both in terms of time and of storage) and price not being that high. And of course the aging so far proves that they can age well (they drink older than late 80s-early 90s in many ways, the balance of smooth and strong is great), the processing was not messed up in any way which is another concern we can have with more recent cakes particularly in the mid-late 2000s (some won’t age that well because of processing).

We have two such cakes available, one closer to traditional factory processing (the 97/99 SXXH Yiwu) and one closer to more modern gushu/boutique processing (the 01 Manzhuan). The storage is perfect, same luscious beautiful dark shiny leaves as the 2001/2002 CYH Yiwu we sold earlier, well aged and pure dry storage (always kept dry, in Taiwan). Both teas are sold at well below their market price!