2003 JingMai Ancient tree Crab feet (Special grade)

Highlights:

• Old and ancient tree Jingmai!
• Great Malaysian dry storage
• Very sweet with good huigan and aftertaste, smooth and rich
• Calming, comfortable Qi

So this was a stroke of luck, I saw this cake in a Chinese medicine shop in KL and asked to try it and it was so sweet, fresh and clean. I’ve seen cakes like this before but was never interested (they’re usually poor quality), but this is probably the single best version of these cakes (has the “special grade” stamp on it as well). Forget about the crab feet for a moment, there’s ancient tree Jingmai leaves in there! (Most of the cake is puerh, the crab feet is only a little bit). And some tea trees in Jingmai are very ancient (the millenium bit might not be an exaggeration).

The taste of this tea is extremely similar (actually, better/sweeter) to that 2003 “Jingmai Millenium old tree” cake by He Shihua that I see sells for almost $1k online on some website (about $500 at Wisteria tea house? Can’t remember exactly). The great malaysian storage and the added crab feet help to make this tea even sweeter and smother than you can expect from normal Jingmai gushu, it’s really a very pleasant tea.

To be clear, Jingmai ancient tree is nowhere as good as Yiwu/Menghai, but still it gives other areas (like Lincang) a run for their money, and this cake is really cheap given the quality. Fresh harvest gushu Jingmai sells for more than this price, while this has 20+ years of excellent storage on it already.

Pang Xie Jiao (“Crab feet”) are parasitic plants that grow on older trees (the little red sticks you can see in the cake, for example in the top right corner of the front picture) and they are a good chinese medicine tonic in their own right. It appears to be about 5-10% of the volume only so you can even have the tea without it (just remove it). It seems to make the tea a bit sweeter still and it’s overall very harmonius to drink together, it doesn’t have weird tastes either (just sweet). I suspect it’s also good for you (at least in this clearly wild and high quality version) but exactly how I can’t quite tell you, Chinese medicine doctors are welcome to write me and I’ll report your opinion here.

357g cakes nominal, some weight loss due to aging.