1990's Hong Kong Style Storage Raw Puer

Drinking a 90s HK stored puer. It’s not labeled ripe or raw, but I’m pretty sure it’s a ripe because of it’s amazing creaminess. School has been extrememly busy lately, I come home at 7 everyday and just fall asleep, so the only time I have for tea is on the weekends and friday.

But this tea just made my morning, it’s so great. It’s like a warm hug, or sitting in a grampa chair next to the fireplace with a kitten in your lap. Yeah, that kind of warmness, haha. It’s colour is so great too. I normally don’t talk about colour, but my word is this one beautiful. It’s like a deep dark red, but when the morning light hit it the red colour started to shine.

It starts out just like a ripe, without too much flavour, but a lot of creaminess, and you get some storage flavour. Except that it starts out at like the pinnacle of most ripes with the mustiness of an aged tea of course. If you’ve ever drank a ripe, you know what I mean. At around the 3rd steeping, it’s just pure smooth creamy mushroominess. If you haven’t tried a ripe yet, it’s deffinately worth a try. Anyways, after the first steep, it brewed pretty consistently up until the 3rd steep where I am now. I don’t have time to review the tea after I’m finished, as I’ll be working for the rest of the say.

But it’s super smooth, thick, and with an oily like texture at the top of your mouth. It dried your mouth leaving it with the great taste of aged puer until you’re compelled to take another sip. Hm, as I read above I don’t think I did a good enough job, so let me explain further haha. It has a chocolaty taste to it, like not milk chocolate but like a sweet cacao bean, with a mushroomy taste afterwards, it’s so calming. When I smell the tea the aged puer note is all I smell, but it has a grape taste to it as well. the aged note is such a great compliment to all the flavours I discussed before, it’s like the bitterness that I wish young ripes had.

Well, I think I’ve summarised it pretty well, this ripe or raw, but probably ripe HK stored tea is probably the best go-to tea if you’ve been working hard all week. I’d recommend this tea if you’d love to start off your day great.

Have a great day!

Oh wow, this is a raw? Haha, this tea is just too good.

WHOA dirt! or is that ‘earth’…Either way, not much sweetness.

95ml F1 shuiping yixing, 6g

It started to make me tea drunk so I backed off. But otherwise, not much kuwei or chaqi, and the taste I just couldn’t get past. all-in-all this wasn’t my cup of tea. I just didn’t enjoy it. But if earth is your profile this is a decent tea…but its sold out…so this review is kind of useless and I could say blah blah blah here and it wouldn’t matter anyway. I guess I’ll hang onto the remaining sample as a good reference tea of HK storage.

Warm, super smooth and slightly woody without the basement note of some traditional stored Shengs.
Images and more at https://puerh.blog/teanotes/1990-hong-kong-style-sheng-w2t

Been looking forward to trying this one. Was glad to be able to get some of this from JWhisk’s stash. Steeped it at work to produce a nice, dark, thick smooth liquor and I had to come back to this one after a couple of days because I just couldn’t finish the session in one day. I got sweetness out of this one right from the start, but it took a few steeps for more flavor to really start emerging, after which point the taste of the storage became very apparent. The sweetness persisted and I started to get some mustiness and wet soil, along with lingering camphor. I found there to be so much depth to the flavor that it was hard to put words to some of it, and I look forward to another session with this one.

What better tea could you want to go with the grand finale of The Princess Bride? Well, I don’t know but this is pretty darn good for it. It’s a thick dark soup with a strong woody smell. The liquor tastes woody and leathery with a hint of camphor and old books. The aftertaste is sweet and peppery on the edges of my tongue, although it also made my tongue go slightly numb along with my legs. “Hello, tea drunk.” This was a good choice for this evening’s tea and movies session and I look forward to finishing it off tomorrow.

Thank you TwoDog for this sample.

Pu’erh TTB 2015 Tea #1
This was the first tea that I tried because I figured getting home from work that this would last a good two hours while I go through the box, sure enough it did.
Drinking it here: https://instagram.com/p/9mclSPxYHl/
This is smooth with what I call the ‘aged vegetable sweetness’. While drinking this I have one constant thought throughout the 18 steepings of this tea, other than ‘this gets darker with each steep’, being that this tea taste very similar to the 1999 Golden Bud tea I bought from Royal Tea Bay. I’m not sure if that is good or bad because the price difference per cake is $150 which is a pretty big difference. Unfortunately this is one of the first times that I can comment on price holding me back from purchasing a sheng, but we shall see when I buy a sample of Last Thoughts :)

Very woody tea with notes of leather. A slight sweetness persisting in the later steeps. Not a tea that I would seek out, but a pleasant experience.

Talk about an underpriced tea- this is real, quality aged sheng stored in a traditional environment. Soup is thick and dark, with intense sweetness and enduring aftertaste. It is suggestive of sweet dried dates, antique leather and ginseng. This would make a valuable addition to any puerh aficionado’s library.

This is one manly tea. Strong, deep flavors, intense longevity (easily goes past 15 steeps with only ~6gs in a standard gaiwan for me) earthy as hell like dry aged beets, viscous, and slightly astringent in just the right way. I GUESS I could understand why SOME PEOPLE dont get it. Maybe it’s just too deeply earthy, but i think that hobbes summed it up very nicely "It’s not “haute cuisine” but it is darned satisfying."

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.