Gongfu Sipdown (599)!
Ya’ know, I think moving might have been a really good thing for my tea stash. It’s really forced me to very heavily consider purchasing new teas, and really driven me to finish off stuff I already own. Like this tea, which was a free sample that I received from BLT probably years ago. I can tell it’s old because it was packaged in BLT’s old style of sample package that had the cardboard label “taped” to the front with the tea info before they started putting sticker versions of the tea’s packaging on the front…
If that makes sense, heh…
Anyway; there was no logical reason for me to wait so long to try this one – I mean I love orange/mandarin shou. A lot, actually. It was just one where I didn’t feel guilty putting it off because I knew, since it was pu’erh, it wouldn’t really go stale over time like white/green/oolong tea might have. So that was the logic there.
I brewed this one out yesterday before work; more of a relaxes session without heavily measured out infusion times. I did track the number of total infusions though just out of curiosity, and not counting my rinse I steeped this one eleven times. I also chose to leave the mandarin peel/husk in the gaiwan for added/extra amounts of yummy chenpi flavor! Of which there was a lot of it! Mmm, yummy!
This one really is a very full bodied and smooth profile though; right off the bat it was a very robust profile. Obviously super strong chenpi/orange/mandarin notes throughout the whole session but especially right at the start with the first three/four(ish) steeps. After that it waned a little bit and was perhaps more balanced with the notes of the shou itself. I found that it had a bit of a menthol-ish note to it, not sure if that was more because of the orange or the shou itself or a combo of the two. Also lots of wood-y notes, but less of that “damp/wet” wet quality and more of a mahogany/sawdust sort of thing!? I do find that shou from Menghai does tend to taste especially wood-y to me though. It’s a quality I greatly enjoy, though. And then there was also kind of a mossy type of earthy note. The whole cup felt very heavy and rich, with a lot of “oomph” to each steep – it took a very long time for me to feel like I was beginning to brew out the leaves because they just felt like they were continually offering up more and more.
Only criticism is that because they mandarin is backed with very small, loose leaves there was a lot of small dust/fannings that, even after my rinse, kept getting into my cup/pitcher. I mean, I know that I usually don’t use a strainer at all with my Gong Fu sessions (and that’s on me; just a personal preference there) so I can’t expect perfection/there not to be ANY sediment making its way into my cups but it just felt like a lot was getting through and I don’t think it was my pouring at all…
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZZCyYUJVH0&index=69&list=LL1M1wDjmJD4SJr_CwzXAGuQ
