Highlights:
- Mid 90s dry storage sheng puerh
- Thick and clean aged taste
- Powerful calming Qi
- Good durability, aroma and aftertaste, well preserved despite the age
Perfect aged taste puerh like it’s nowadays impossible to find (at anywhere this price): good quality leaves, about 30 years of great storage, even good processing and compression all contribute to a refined experience.
With a profile halfway between savoury and sweet, very pleasant refined calming Qi, this has no significant faults, super satisfying and ready to drink now. All this for a very affordable price for genuine mid-90s puerh.
Some excerpts from a review from puerh.blog (emphasis mine):
“The first thing you notice is that the leaf is beautifully dark (almost black), shows no signs of white frost or anything similar (dry storage FTW) and is surprisingly beautiful/intact, especially for a brick […] The infusion color is beautifully dark and the small bubbles remain for a long time – usually a good sign, which the first sip also confirms: the texture of the tea is super soft and with enough weight to really be the highlight of the tea for me”
“Thanks to the dry storage, there are also many different facets in the woody-sweet-earthy spectrum, which, depending on the infusion and type of infusion (duration, temperature, etc.), can sometimes even be complemented by a touch of bitterness, thus ensuring sufficient tension/complexity on the taste level. I was also very positively surprised that the tea still shows a good degree of depth despite its age, which speaks for the good quality of the material, and a subtle but clearly perceptible Qi ensures a super relaxed character of the tea.”
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.
250g bricks nominal, weight loss over the years because of aging.
Nick M. –
Solid depth, very clean, mature profile. There’s no imprint of processing on this brick, leaving an enveloping savoury warmth and a feel good state of mind. Excellent persistence and patience. The ageing is really excellent, whilst the wet sheng leaves are pillowy soft in the pot throughout the session. Nixe. It’s not the most complex tea ever, for sure, that’s not what it gets 5 stars for – whereas it is a comforting, impeccably processed benchmark value tea, perfectly stored and aged, that isn’t easy to find. There’s one minor cosmetic fault which is that the soup is a little opaque. Just look at the value price ratio for this age of tea, however. It’s a buy.