2014 Spring Silver Needle Cake Raw Pu-erh tea 100 gram

I put this in my gaiwan today
A rather busy
No time for tea kind of day
And I drank it
Heedlessly
Perhaps cruelly
(especially as it was a gift)
But at the end of the day
I looked back on the tea I had drank
And I smiled

I’ve had this for a year, and tasted several times, so shame on me for waiting so long to post a review.

This style of puerh is unusual. Comparing this to most puerh teas is like comparing Champagne to Cabernet Sauvignon. This is a very light, delicate tea, with flavors of straw and light tropical fruit and/or melon. Really closer in flavor to a white tea than it is to most puerh. However, it does have a depth of flavor and mouth feel similar to a high-quality puerh. The taste was light straw and tropical fruits, but with a hint of bitterness in the finish in later steeps, which caused me to drop my rating by a point.

I got the bright idea of tasting this side-by-side with a similar tea:
http://steepster.com/teas/tuochatea-dot-com/56676-yubang-silver-bud
Turns out this was a bad idea. The yubang made this tea taste weak, while this tea made the yubang taste crude and inelegant. Either alone was much better by itself. Kind of like Champagne and cabernet.

A note on storage: This tea is so subtle that I worried about storing it in my pumidor. I have 4 teas of this style that I keep in a zip-locked bag inside the pumidor, periodically airing it out. This seems like a reasonable compromise between drying out and losing that subtle flavor. The teas did spend a few months in the pumidor, which may have caused them to lose their freshness, though that may just be age. I also steep at a lower temperature (190 F vs 200F).

The cake itself fragrant. The fuzzy silvery buds are mostly intact, quite attractive, and can be easily picked off the cake. The tea has distinct notes of ripe Korean pear and honey. Later steeps reveal more interesting textures and subtle sweet/savory/nutty flavors. It’s very flowery and light with a velvety texture that may evolve with age.

gaiwan way:

1st steep 20s: tastes floral and chalky (in a good way)

2nd steep (Best/final) 40s: it tastes even stronger of the above tastes.

then I got hungry for matcha pancakes so I cut this one short for today

when I smell the leaves dry, I smell nothing.

when I smell the leaves wet. it smells flowery and chalky (in a good way)

many thanks to scott Wilson and Yunnan sourcing for this lovely tea