This is an interesting tea that I am not sure how to rate. It has lost every vestage of it’s fermentation flavor so that if I handed you a cup you would not know it wasn’t an aged raw. Before all the aged ripe I have drank had that 1 % of the fermentation left so you could tell it was shou. This was also the most densely packed tea I have encountered in some time. It was extremely difficult to pry off a chunk. The tea itself had a spicy note that I take for aged flavor, strong at first and weak by the twelfth steep. There was also a little wet storage note although not very much. This I barely noticed. Overall I think this was a good tea but it is hard to rate because I do not have much to compare it too. It is really in a category of it’s own even when I try to compare it to the 1996 CNNP that Yunnan Sourcing sells. The 1996 shou had that last vestage of shou taste to it, this had none. Overall this was I think a good tea.
I steeped this twelve times in an 85ml Silver Teapot with 5.9g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, and 2 minutes. The tea was not done I could get a few more steeps out of it if I wanted to.
Flavors: Spicy, Wet Wood
