This is a certified organic, ISO-9001 certified Changtai cake from 2006! This cake is made with wild material, but the exact origin isn’t known to me at this time: the nei piao (inner ticket in the cake) indicates the material is from a southern ice forest, which sounds like either Bingdao-area material or a high mountain area somewhere in the south of Yunnan. Regardless of origin, this is a very interesting cake that I was very surprised by!
After the rinse, the leaves smelled similar to the 2006 Changtai Tianxia Tong’An (regular version) I offer here at TeaLife: aged Guangdong dry/natural storage aromatics from good wild Bulang material. While this tea had more fruit notes when it first arrived, I now get sweet sarsaparilla and sandalwood aromatics, which I enjoy greatly. The cha qi from this tea is always a surprise: it only takes a few sips for the cha qi to hit me hard, and at the time of writing I have to focus to stop my eyes from blurring! This tea was nice and easy to break up, as with many 2006 Guangdong-stored Changtai cakes at the correct humidity.
The first time I tried this tea, in the later infusions, I detected an almost blueberry-like aromatic, which was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. The sweet aromatics from this tea weren’t at all what I thought I’d get! This cake reminded me of the 2006 Changtai Jiangcheng, but this tea was already more lively than the Jiangcheng was when it first arrived.
This is an exciting recipe, and well worth trying if you’ve enjoyed the other mid-2000s Changtais I carry. This might be my favorite one of all because of the interesting aromatics and powerful cha qi.
I have eight cakes of this tea on hand for sale (in total) that I have held since October 2019. My natural storage environment really does great things for pu erh and I often find tea turns around incredibly in a matter of months, and the change at the two-year mark can be astonishing, regardless of earlier storage!
