Bada Wolf Sheng

Finally got around to this tea that Togo sent between 5 and 6 years ago. Thank you!

Strong feeling tea but it’s not very dense in taste expression. Dry leaf has a foresty vibe with fruity scents like melon, citrus and goji. Warmed leaf is very sweet and rich with caramel-honey sweetness and floral fig-raisin compote. At this time, the aromas of the leaf do not come through into the taste. The rinsed leaf smells rather pungent with notes of grilled white fish meat, a big herbaceous tone, cooked green beans and green bell peppers, white grapes (reminds me of young Hekai sheng) and wood. Peach gets stuck in the nose!

The tea is full-bodied and slips down the throat leaving behind a pleasant tart aftertaste, however it also deposits a mouth-coating and very dry astringency that has me focusing all of my attention on my tongue. It feels like a separate entity. I’m very aware that the tongue is a muscle. Strange. Taste is diffuse within a strong structure. I get mostly a bitter-herbaceous-honey-hay-mineral profile.

I feel like this leaf could add some depth to a blend but on its own, it’s not too great.

I finally have a glazed gaiwan of comparable size to my young sheng clay pot, so that I can do a side by side comparison. I used this particular tea for that purpose, as I haven’t tried it in a while.

The tea itself hasn’t changed much. It is still very floral with a strong honey sweetness, a chalky mouthfeel and a green bell pepper flavour to it. The main characteristics are its incredible longetivity and huigan (given the price). In some sense, this is the perfect tea to explain what huigan is to people who are not into pu’er.

As far as the pot comparison is concerned, I found very little difference. The glazed gaiwan yielded a bit more astringency and bite initiallly, and a slightly more vegetal profile overall. On the other hand, the tea from the clay pot was less floral and a bit more brassy. All in all, the difference was negligible I would say.