Grandness Tea

So this is related to below

https://steepster.com/teas/chawangshop/97178-2011-china-tea-hunan-hei-jing-zhuan-200g

Reason – nearly sure I asked grandnesstea to list it on eBay, obviously since pandemic/ PayPal, standoff no longer there.

But eBay wasn’t great for tags, so I would type Chinese characters in Google images and get listing from taobao. To me, it looked a premium version of no-logo chocolate type. Symbol is universal, however there are some mythological as well semi-criminal connotations.

Nearly sure it was sub-brand wooden house century

The beauty of this it has code, again c4 is paramilitary. But you can find other digits mostly related to size. C7 comes to mind. And Nirvana’s cover of “dimension seven”

But it was two thinner bricks so could break with fingers and fit into thermos. It was way smokier than the other one. Glad I had it in my collection. Kind of arrived at conclusion, the smaller offering is, the more refined it is likely to be. Meaning, 50g brick is probably exclusive. Most are 400g though. So it is not always about weight to value ration. I mean, probably larger brick would age in more interesting way. But there is a market, limited ageing potential for single wrap tuocha which explains the excellent value as well less risk when blind buying.

Gongfu Sipdown (795)!

My dad really impressed me this year by doing a lot of research into straight teas/compressed teas and tried very hard to find something that I wouldn’t have tried that would still interest me; this resulted in him buying a 500g compressed ball of Dian Hong from a Chinese tea vendor on Aliexpress. I haven’t broken into that massive orb yet so the quality is still to be determined but is does smell really good!

This little tuocha was slipped in with the package as a free sample – it’s definitely shou but even after a deep dive of the vendor’s website I couldn’t identify exactly what it is. So, it’s a bit of a mystery shou! Still, I steeped it up one of the afternoons I was there and the resulting session was actually pretty damn lovely.

The tea leaf was very broken up and mulchy – really the quality of it in terms of appearance was quite shoddy even for a tuocha. To be fair, it was a free sample so I’m not expecting insane levels of quality – but still, after the rinse it all but instantly became pu’erh mush in my gaiwan.

But with all of that said, it still produced a thick and syrupy liquor that had a very lovely mouthfeel – minus the occasional tea leaf that wasn’t strained out – I hadn’t brought a strainer with me to catch those little fly away leaves. It was very tasty too; with notes of heavily roasted black coffee and oak wood. Dense, earthy and robust – it was a peaceful session as well as a surprising one!

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/B6ozp4kAUH3/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_sADbvPmzE