Highlights:
- Taiwan natural storage (clean)
- Deep aged taste
- Some calming Qi
Nice sweet-thickness and aged flavours, some calming Qi, reminds me of Mr Chen’s Yellow Mark but smoother and less bitter.
Smooth, comforting, easy to drink, but with good depth in the taste to keep one interested, a classic 80s-90s (80s or early 90s probably) aged taste that one can drink quite a lot of without any ill effects. If you like this taste, the price here is pretty good considering the storage is clean. Thick, sweet, deep.
Tong Qing Hao is one of the names of the old tea shops, but for tea of this age it doesn’t help very much identifying the tea as different people made tea under this name over the years.
* It appears this tea vintage is more likely the 1980s (not 1990s) so I’ve edited the page accordingly. I’ve even seen this tea sold as 1970s in Taiwan.
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. Cakes packed naked in a tong, we’ll wrap them in a white wrapper for you.
Nick M. (verified owner) –
Sweet aromatics, wet leaves in pot smell of mahogany and woody perfume. Very sweet burst of flavour, persistently sweet. It’s upfront and tasty. The soup is dark amber to start with, before lightening a bit, when it also starts to further thicken. Mid session it needs to be pushed more and woody notes come to the fore. Super clean processing and lovely transparent broth. There’s a nice solidity to it as the session progresses along with a mild milkiness that develops. Overall it’s an enjoyable, fun, fully resolved Puerh, with a sweet immediacy.
Robert Clarke (verified owner) –
This one caught me out a little .. It is one of few samples I have got and the last of it .
Warm leaf is arromatic , when wet I get some tobacco , but still sweet.
The thing that caught me was the char chi ? Do I believe in Char chi ? Not sure , but I found myself becoming more calm , my breath becoming a little slower .
A little drying to me but still a pleasure to drink .. a 5 star rating would be hard as I measure it against other tea from here .