Brewing: 6g/100ml, 100°C, flash rinse, 30s, 20s, +5s.
Warmed-up dry leaves smell of stone fruit, spices and wood. When wet, the wood intensifies.
The liquor tastes of old wood, stone fruit and caramel. A very complex, yet smooth and clear taste.
Compared to the red label version of this tea, this cake was much drier, suggesting different storage conditions. The first session was underwhelming, so I broke the cake and let the pieces rest for a couple of weeks in a cardboard box, inside a slightly ventilated cupboard. That did the trick and the tea woke up and became spectacular.
It maintains much more woodiness than the red label, where that was converted almost completely into fruitiness, resulting in a different taste profile. It's fascinating that these two teas were produced from the same (or very similar?) batch of loose leaves, at the same factory, in the same year.
It's also nice to see this trend of higher-quality aged shou pu-erh, with clear, smooth and complex taste. I hope the market for it develops enough that more high-quality "big leaf" material gets processed as shou instead of all of it ending up as sheng.
