2004 Nan Jian Jia Ji Tuo Raw

This one wasn’t bad if you could forgive the lingering smoker’s breath taste of Eau de Ashtray that lurked in the background of every cup of this. It started off promising, although odd, with a smoked meatiness that faded into a camphor-like cooling cup of tobacco with a surprising brightness at the end, but quickly settled into more of an ashy, used tobacco with shifts into campfire after the first couple of steeps.

To its credit, the ash tray taste is not intensely strong in this tea, but it was just enough to be off putting for those of us who may really dislike that taste (it was enough I decided to stop drinking it by steep 7 and try something else when it didn’t go away, but I really hate cigarette ash smell/taste). Shame, because everything else was pretty solid and I really like camphor notes and the mid aged taste to my pu erh.

Picked this one up from YS and immediately fell in love. Strangely, it’s almost identical to a ‘2006 Changtai Yichanghao’ (more than likely fake) that I picked up for cheap on ebay. So similar, in fact, that I’m just going to copy a part of my review for that tea here:

“It’s a sharp and pungent tea, with a smoky/spicy/woody/shroomy flavor, and great qi. This is my energizing tea when I’m feeling run down. It’s also comforting and makes me feel warm and fuzzy (quite literally). "

I find all these attributes and more in this tuo. The leaf quality is a bit better than my ebay cake and it just brews on and on. This tea just checks all the right boxes for me in what I am looking for in a raw puerh and it just seems to harmonize with me if that makes any sense. I feel right at home drinking it.

I finally opened a tuo of this. It’s a pretty good aged sheng. Brews up light and has a mix of notes that I identify as tobacco, mesquite smoke, sweetness, and a hint of fruit (like a plum flavor?). This holds up for a multitude of steeps and is a very smooth drinker. It’ll be good to age my other tuos and see how it progresses.

This is an excellent semi aged sheng. It is well on its way to being fermented and is quite tasty. I steeped this nine times in a 3 oz teapot. It was bitter in the early infusions and bittersweet in later infusions. It had lost all of the young sheng flavor. I brewed it without sugar and it was not too bitter. It had a strong mouthfeel to it and some Cha Qi.