We carried a woven bamboo case of these mini-tea cakes back with us from Hong Kong on the advice of our tea friend Steve at the Sun Sing Tea Co. You can see the beautiful woven bamboo ‘case’ in the photograph – it is a simple but effective container made of hand-woven bamboo strapping. It is custom made to hold 12 tongs of tea ( each tong contains 5 beeng cha ) securely in place for easy transport and carrying. One by one, we take out a new tong and open it as we need more cakes to sell.
Steve knows tea and he selected this Pu-erh from his extensive collection for us to introduce to our tea enthusiast customers. The cake is from Yiwu Mt. in Xishuangbanna ( one of our favorite Pu-erh tastes ) and is comprised of large leaf Yiwu material that was pressed in 2009. The cake has plenty of silvery tip and the clean, woodsy aroma associated with Yiwu Pu-erh. These cakes are stone pressed with a light compression, so they can easily be pulled apart with your hands. (You can hear the ‘voice’ of the tea when you carefully bend the tea back and forth.) Put this cake away so that it has at least 1 more year of aging before you begin to drink it. Steve says so.
We feel three times fortunate to have this tea: fortunate that the cakes were not taken away at customs; fortunate that the tea was not damaged in transit, and lastly, fortunate that Steve recommended these cakes to us.