Mansong Gushu 2013 Spring

This is by far the best young tea I’ve ever had…and at $5 a gram it should be. Being an Yiwu fanatic I had to see what all the rage about Mansong is so I steeped the whole 10g sample. I’m immediately greeted by a strong oily background and notes of cedar and fennel. No astringency. It tastes older than the stated 6 years and has had clearly impeccable storage. A wave of relaxation washes over me halfway through the first steep and continues to grow throughout the session. The flavors remain fairly constant through the steepings which is fine because they’re great and I get 20 steeps from this. While the flavors are awesome, the real winner here is the qi. The muscle relaxing euphoric effect rivals that of 1950s Pu Tian Gong. If scientists isolated the agents in this tea and learned how to manufacture it I think they could produce a great safe painkiller/antidepressant. After drinking this I remembered that I needed to take a 2hr drive to Pittsburgh to pickup some speakers, which was a bummer because I just wanted to stay home and meditate or sit beside the local waterfall as this tea put me in a very meditative mood already. Now being a country boy I get easily agitated by Pittsburgh traffic but this tea caused me to laugh instead of curse at it. 12 hours after consuming this tea the calm meditative mood persisted and I still had zero neck pain. (Neck pain from a bicycle wreck is a constant in my life). If I had Bill Gates’s (the computer guy, not my grandfather the diesel mechanic) money this would be a daily drinker. As it is I’m grateful to have sampled probably the finest Yiwu tea that a westerner can get his hands on.