1988 Puerh

AllanK provided me with a bit of this in our swap and it interested me because it’s not often you get a tea that is older than yourself. This was an absolutely strange tea. For starters, I’m not sure if this was an odd ripe or an odd raw. A pretty strong smoke smell comes off of this tea, but the brew doesn’t have much in its taste (I’m fine with that). As I try to figure the leaf out, this has to be an aged smoked sheng of a wild variant. However, I may be quite wrong. My session lasted hours which was great. I ended up playing with the steeping dimensions by trying 3 minutes and then back to 12 seconds to 1 minute. Overall I found this leaf to produce under all circumstances quite well with no overwhelming astringent notes. This is a fun tea, but it isn’t as subtle or pure as I like my sheng… and again, darn you (in a good way) White2Tea for Repave and Mandela for Wild Monk; forever spoiled my sheng taste buds.