Tea: Skinny Chicken 2024 Spring Kuashan Raw Puer Type: Raw Puer (生普洱） Harvest: April 2024 Press Date: April 2024 Region: Kuashan, Lincang, Yunnan 2024 Tasting Notes: Powderd doughnuts, Rosehips, Sugar Cane, Wild Orchid, Lemon Cake Kuashan is a relatively recently discovered region with a large amount of old growth trees. While the gushu are not plentiful enough to do entire gushu batches, the dashu and old arbor (trees several meters tall with trunks as large as streetlight poles) still achieve the desired goal of reaching deep through the sandy earth and into the deeper clay soil rich with minerals. These teas are distinctively sweeter than many other teas in the area, barring of course real from the legendary Bingdao regions. We first fell in love with tea from the Kuashan region last year, the Hummingbird tea cake is sugary sweet and endlessly forgiving. The 2024 tea from the same garden, picked and processed by the same family is noticeably different. As this is the second year of a deep spring drought in yunnan, this tea has grown more mineral rich, with a great deal more depth than the 2023 Hummingbird offered. In its early stages, it has traded a lot of fruity sweetness for this newfound depth. The dry leaves in the warm gaiwan give off fragrances of rock sugar, while the wet leaves open up into the old juicy fragrances we love to find in the Xigui and last year's Kuashan tea cake. One thing we noticed that the 2023 Kuashan did not have is the intense floral notes at the end of the wet-leaf fragrance, we get orchids and irises and other spring flowers. The brews are a clear gold which thicken up throughout the session, starting a little light and building toward the sixth or seventh infusion. This tea is still one of the most drinkable and forgiving raw puer teas we sourced this season, and it is a pleasure to sit and drink it, for while the session doesn't demand one's full attention, it has the depth if one is slowly consciously brewing it. This year we are getting much more rock sugar and saline notes from this tea, reminding us more of the Huazhu Liangzi teas more than other Lincang offerings, with regard to their mineral depths. We offer this tea in 25 gram samples (chunks lovingly pried off the cake), whole 200 gram cakes, and a set of 5 cake tongs wrapped in bamboo leaves and totaling 1000 grams. If you're interested in sampling this year's full flight of puer pressings, check out the Yunnan Flight, a set of 6 dragon balls from different regions each pressed in 7 gram balls for convenient brewing. We recommend brewing this tea gongfu style in a gaiwan or Chinese teapot. We use 6 grams of tea in a 100ml brewing vessel with boiling water, steeping 5 second for the first few infusions and adding 5 seconds after ever subsequent infusion. Most of these puer teas can be re-infused over 15 times, when brewing in this gongfu style. Curious about these Chinese puer tea terms, check out our growing appendix of Chinese - pinyin - English translated terms here. If you have never bought a cake before, learn how to break it up with a tea pick on our YouTube.
