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“Finishing this, today. I have to say, these two Xingyang sheng offerings have really changed the way I think about sheng. I’m starting to think that I may simply have, early on, leapt into far deep...” Read full tasting note
Xingyang is a small team of twenty people in Pu’er city that work with farmers in Honghe, Sanjiacun, and occasionally several other mountain villages in Xishuangbanna. They are the first and only collection we are featuring where the picking and production are done by different people. We reached out to Xingyang because their point of view, their skill, and their integrity are singular among pu’er blenders.
Most pu’er brands are truly just brands: pretty labels slapped onto white-label cakes made to spec. Xingyang takes blending seriously. You can think of them like a small, independent scotch blending house, or a small wine maker. They have close relationships with a handful of farmers and stockpile maocha to suit their needs. They have a small collection of “recipes” that strive for a specific and ideal flavor. To achieve this flavor, Xingyang presses cakes from a blend of maocha engineered to create a complex and complementary integrated whole. If they can’t source the maocha in a given year, they just don’t produce that recipe.
Xingyang’s sheng pu’er is carefully constructed to follow the classic Chinese ideal of sweet, smooth flavor with intense aromatics and long aftertaste. Their shu pu’er is a point of view we have never seen from any other producer. It is perfectly clean, and sparkling. They achieve a clean, sweet flavor unlike any other through a painstakingly slow and careful fermentation before drying and finishing the tea.
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Finishing this, today.
I have to say, these two Xingyang sheng offerings have really changed the way I think about sheng.
I’m starting to think that I may simply have, early on, leapt into far deep of the end of the pool and tasted a lot of highly challenging sheng without realizing it didn’t have to be that way.
Which I realize maybe creates the impression that these sheng are unimpressive or unremarkable or something like that, but that’s not what I intend to say. What I intend to say is that perhaps some of the flavors I experienced in the past were less about being a challenging mature tea and more about being something undesirable that had crept in.
While recognizing that I don’t want to be one of these people who goes down the sheng rabbit hole and never comes out, I may need to do some additional exploration to learn more.
