Highlights:
- Big/old tree early 80s cake: dark, thick, sweet full flavour
- Rich fully aged complex puerh taste profile
- Mr Chen’s Home Taiwan excellent dry storage
- Strong grounding Qi and durability
- A very rare old tea connoisseur dream find
Ever since most of the 50s-70s puerh has been drank up and gone forever, cakes like this (early 1980s, with good strength material and dry storage) are the next best thing to get that fully aged (and clean) puerh experience. The tea soup is so rich (yet dark it’s really textbook fully aged puerh. There’s really very little of this kind of tea left in the world, and most of it is at much higher pricing than this.
Both from our research and tasting this cake appears to use big/old tree leaves from Yiwu, and they definitely had good strength that has not faded but transformed perfectly. This cake seems to have had some mild shou processing, of the early/light fermentation kind (not “heavy”/full fermentation modern shou processing), which doesn’t impact the quality at all, in the sense that it’s rich like sheng of this age would be and indeed unless you pay attention to the wet leaves, you would think it’s sheng puerh.
For tea this old, besides leaves strength (very good here), storage is everything, and this cake is a great example of dry storage. This cake with dry storage is sold in China for about 2-3 times as much as our price. Wet storage versions could be cheaper, but we find there’s little point in this very old teas with wet and even traditional/natural storage, they lose most of their beauty and value this way.
Brew it really strong to get the most out of it.
Note: there are cakes with similar looking wrappers, this version (very faded ink) is by far the one with the best leaves material.
Mr Chen’s introduction
There’s actually a lot of old tea in Taiwan at much more reasonable prices than in mainland China, unfortunately most of what is found in Taiwan is too wet stored. Mr Chen, a personal friend of ours, old time collector, bought a few tongs of various teas during the 90s and early 2000s (before prices skyrocketed), and has been storing them in his home (dryly) since.
This kind of tea in China sells for crazy money, it’s very lucky we’ve access to these at all, Mr Chen has sold them to us at a very generous price and we pass the great deal on to you.
380-390g cakes nominal, weight loss over the years because of aging. Cakes packed naked in a tong, we’ll wrap them in a white wrapper for you.
nickm –
From the pot aromas of wet stone, composting leaves, hot embers and a delicate pot pourri. Darkly coloured and powerful, with immediately grounding qi. Enveloping body feeling, deep yet saline. Thickly textured, mouth coating to the point of tackiness, and completely resolved, with residual sweetness that blooms mid session. Notably the floral character is present throughout. Amazingly patient and pretty much old tea perfection. There had been just a whiff of ash processing that had been evident in the early going of my first session, yet the leaves having rested, I didn’t get it in the second session. The obvious question is, is it worth the money, and the answer is yes, the depth and durability of the tea is amazing given its age.
Guillaume C. (verified owner) –
Humbling depth, great patience.
Colin-M –
A very kind friend gave me a sample of this and I tried it today.
It tasted and felt like everything Paolo said in his intro.
I had a challenging morning but found myself getting channelled and focused by cup 2. That was the point I shut my laptop down and took time to truly savour this. How many other chunks of this are being carefully hoarded, now it’s no longer available?