Tea: Motorbike 2023 Spring Huazhuliangzi Raw Puer Type: Raw Puer (生普洱） Harvest: April 2023 Press Date: April 2023 Region: Boatang, Huazhuliangzi, Mengsong, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan 2023 Tasting Notes: passionfruit, spirulina, cedar wood, rose This tea is a 1 to 1 blend of Huazhuliangzi Gushu with Huazhuliangzi Old Arbor tea tree material. What this means is that while it has the deep backbone of mineral rich ancient tree material, the younger leaf material packs a fruity floral punch that wakes up fast and fades into a sweet soup towards the end of the session. Although this tea is young, it coats the mouth and leaves a tingling sweetness behind on the tongue for a long time after the session. As a common feature of the terroir of this area (the Huazhuliangzi ridge is just one mountain valley away from the beloved Naka region), this tea has an ever so slight saline quality in the brew, which undoubtably comes from its unique mineral-rich growing environment. This tea was grown and produced by our friend Tan up in the Boating village. Tan has been making teas for the past few decades and also makes white teas, wild raw honey, and stores a lot of the gushu and old arbor teas as maocha in his production facility of the Baotang Village. Tan's Qiaomu, or taller tea trees, are a blend of very big dashu and zhongshu as featured in the photos. While these trees are not gushu, they are certainly not small tea bushes! 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. Never bought a cake before, learn how to break it up with a tea pick on our YouTube.
