Thank you Marcus Reed for this sample. This is an impressive tea, I will give it that. It also has a lot of strong flavors. It started out with a strong taste of wet wood or bamboo, depending on how you want to describe it. This taste is undoubtedly from the humid storage this tea underwent for more than twenty years. It took quite a few steeps for this storage taste to begin to go away, I would say eight. By the tenth steep it was gone. While I respect the age of this tea I didn’t like it as much as many younger teas. Only after ten steeps would I say I really began to enjoy the tea. I gave it twelve steeps and that is pretty much my limit. I will say that there is little doubt of the actual age of this tea. It had a dark brown color, darker than some shous in the first steep.
I steeped this tea twelve times in a 180ml teapot with 10.7g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 sec rinse and a 10 minute rest. I was not patient enough to let the tea rest longer. I steeped it for 10 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min and 2 min. I think that this tea would easily go another three or four steeps but I am basically done at twelve.
Flavors: Wet Wood
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Since you have a steep/caffeine limit, maybe throw out the first 5 or 6 steeps and then start drinking. Especially these humid teas, get rid of all the storage, or most of it.
That would have been a good idea had I thought of it. Yesterday was one of those rare days when I was not watching my caffeine limit.
Since you have a steep/caffeine limit, maybe throw out the first 5 or 6 steeps and then start drinking. Especially these humid teas, get rid of all the storage, or most of it.
That would have been a good idea had I thought of it. Yesterday was one of those rare days when I was not watching my caffeine limit.