Thank You Liquid Proust for this sample. This is a tasty tea with a most unusual brewing method. I did my best to follow the directions on the Yunomi website. You basically boil the hell out of this tea on a stove top for ten minutes. SO that’s what I did. I was expecting something bitter but there was no bitterness to this tea. This is quite good. I would order this the next time I put in an order with Yunomi. It had a natural sweet flavor to it but I added sugar anyway. It is incredibly smooth. I am basically at a loss for why this tea didn’t turn bitter. Normally boiling water will turn some teas bitter and this was not boiling water that you were allowing to begin cooling. This was steeping at a rolling boil. I don’t know more about how to describe this so I think I’m going to give up trying.
I have heard that this is a Japanese version of puerh but to me it is vastly different, except that I guess it is fermented in a manner similar to ripe puerh. The taste, however is nothing like ripe puerh so a comparison can’t be made in reality.
Another crucial difference in the way this is brewed in comparison to gongfu brewing is I only used 2.8g of leaf for 500ml of water. For a small 180ml teapot and puerh I would use 10g. I do not know if this can be resteeped.
I went and resteeped this tea, boiling it for 15 minutes and got a surprisingly good result.
This is probably a heicha similar to Tibetan border tea. It is probably somewhat oxidized and has sticks. Tibetan leaf looks just like this and it too is boiled.