1998-2003 Mr Chen’s Superior Leaf sheng brick

Highlights:

• Perfect pure hot+dry storage
• Excellent quality/price ratio
• Complex flavours and aroma
• Good depth, durability, aftertaste and balanced sweetness

Really refined leaf + immaculate storage = a tea to rival most famous factory cakes of the period, at a fraction of the price.

Tea soup has brilliant hue (indicating dry storage), feels clean, thick, minimal astringency and overall balanced taste with good power and depth.

Most Mr Chen’s teas have been stored in HK for a few years but this one was in his house in Taiwan throughout and as a result is extremely dry Taiwan storage, it displays excellently what the best Taiwan storage (hot and dry) is capable of.

Good to drink now for a highly refined experience, also excellent to age further. I can’t stress enough how rare it is to have 20+ years old stored so well, and how even rare and more amazing it’ll be in another 5-10 years in a typical western home.

Based on taste profile this is likely around year 2000 sheng puerh, I’ve asked another senior collector to validate this for me and he confirmed but it’s pretty obvious from the aromas alone how this is 20+ years old sheng. Don’t be fooled by it being a brick, the leaf quality is very high.

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.