Highlights:
- Stored by Bi Yun Hao’s Mr Chen for 20+ years
- HK storage followed by Taiwan extra-dry storage
- Clean, complex, sweet, smooth taste and long (sweet) aftertaste
- Very comfortable Qi
This comes from the house of a famous tea producer, who stored it for the last 20 years and really captures what his storage philosophy is (and how it influences his tea making). You can see how light it brews in the pictures, tastes clean but quite smooth, has just a hint of drying as can be expected from tea with this light colour.
This tea should be from year 1999-2000 (otherwise, between 1998 and 2002). Bought from Hong Kong in 2003-2004 and kept extra-dry (well wrapped in plastic and on upper floors of a city house) in Taiwan since.
The storage makes it a really unique tea, although the humidity has been similarly low, this tea is much smoother than Kunming dry storage (because in Kunming is not as warm as Taiwan).
To be clear, it’s not just unique: taste and Qi are good in their own right. If you like the complexity of aged dry storage puerh, this is a great example.
357g cakes nominal, some weight loss due to aging. The picture is from one of the worst cakes, most have less bug bites.
Nick M. (verified owner) –
Gorgeous! Thick and sweet from the first steep, no rinse, beautifully translucent mahogany broth, just enough structure and acidity to give the tea a circle of light and lift, and acts as a counterpoint to the more mature characteristics of this already very complex broth. I feel lucky to have a cake of this and wish I had 2!
Guillaume C. (verified owner) –
A very good surprise for me. This is not the first yellow mark cake from this period (and roughly in this price range) for me, but it’s undoubtedly the best. Good material and excellent storage give this cake a rich flavour and a complexity you wouldn’t expect from this kind of product. Top mark. It’s excellent as it is, I hope it will improve in the coming years.
Tim Pearce (verified owner) –
[Substituted by Cang Feng] An interesting comparator for the Cang YI – good, slightly honeyed, fruit flavours, though even more about feeling than flavour, and with a stronger qi and persistence over a greater number of infusions.