Haven’t reviewed a tea in a long time, now.
Mostly because I’ve been just drinking the same old leaves that I love. Life has been far too complex to try new teas.
But pu-erh is a fickle world and what you can get changes all the time so you always find yourself moving on.
This tocha is packed very, very tightly and is a somewhat awkward medium size. It makes picking it very tricky. But, I have a well seasoned yixing for sweet shou pu-erh so we’ll get good results, regardless. I used a long rinse (even though I rarely do rinse at all) because the leaf is so densely packed it needed time to open up.
There’s nothing I’d call unexpected here in terms of flavor, but this isn’t a 1990 Kumming, is it. The tea shows its relative age in the long finish and pronounced hui gan.
I definitely remember finding the previously available 1999 much more exciting. At 23 cents a gram this is an excellent daily drinking tea provided you have a good system for picking apart tea this tightly packed.
I admit, as the world of sheng seems to explode, I lament how increasingly difficult it seems to be to find top shelf shou. The sheng snobbery seems to be squeezing out any apparent market.
Flavors: Dark Bittersweet, Loam, Molasses, Wet Wood
