Highlights:
- Taiwan dry storage
- Good smells, bright colour
- Thick and complex taste
I like the storage of this tea a lot: the tea soup has a pretty bright red-brown colour which is the telltale of good dry storage (as opposed to dull colour).
As a result, there’s a good complexity to go together with sweetness which in the second half of the session turns into very sweet and thick.
The leaves material have nice strength and together with the excellent storage it makes for a very interesting complex brew. I don’t know much about this tea origin, from tasting it appears to be mid 90s to very early 2000s.
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.
Nick M. (verified owner) –
This feels like good value to me. Crystal clear mid-amber soup. Fruity aromas front up, with a touch of camphor and late autumn hay rolls. There’s a sweet persistence, full of developed tertiary flavours in the early running, milky and sweetening as the session progresses followed by a mildly cooling, cleansing mouthfeel. Over the first 6 or so brews, there’s a mid palate intensity that makes it a lively, layered soup despite its fully mature stage of life. There’s comfortably 11-12 steeps from a 90ml clay pot, with slightly longer than average brew times according to preference. Comforting and very enjoyable.