Highlights:
- Mr Chen’s Home Taiwan excellent dry storage
- Reference aged taste: dark and clean
- Sweet, thick, good huigan
- Comfortable calming Qi
A great example of aged taste, can even be considered a reference of what 80s sheng puerh should be like: thick, sweet, deep, dark, good huigan, noticeable Qi, yet stored cleanly.
To the best of our research (and tasting), this should be from 1988 (anyway definitely mid or late 80s), made from leaves from Fengqing (not Thai or border tea as it could seem by the “Yeun Neun” label).
For tea this old, storage is everything, and this cake is a great example of proper dry storage. Brew it really strong to get the most out of it, if you’re a normal person without deep connections in asian tea circles, it’s probably unlike anything you’ve brewed before.
This is the real deal for aged sheng puerh: strong leaves material stored exceptionally well, there’s very little of these left in the world (and they’re generally priced much higher than this).
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.
357g cakes nominal, weight loss over the years because of aging.
nickm –
First tried at one of Paolo’s Slow Tea events. Learned to use a high proportion of leaves to water. Dark thick soup. Aged flavours with a hit of caraway. @Elton got carrots. Determinedly savoury for sure. The aromas are sweet (vegetal sweet rather than honey) and so is the palate. Yet the flavours are also clean, complex and without any hint of processing. I prefer to not brew too hard initially (which you can do given how resolved the tea is) because the umami flavours tend to muddy when you do, but leaving it brew a touch longer brings into play very dark caramel notes, ‘dry’ like 100% chocolate. It’s super-durable tea, and that’s particularly impressive: a tea that’s so mature yet also has the strength that this has. Imbues me with well-being. Great tea!
Nicholas (verified owner) –
Very clean old storage. Definitely a tea to get if you want something well aged. Many complex flavors to explore in this one. Very warming Qi