Tea: Gatekeeper 2022 Gongmei Type: Gongmei (贡眉) Harvest: Spring 2022Press Date: August 2025Region: Diantou, Fuding, ChinaProducer: QiuTasting Notes: Sweet Grass, Honey, Butter, Toasted Pecans, Fresh Coconut This cake is the welcome return of the all-heirloom cultivar tea cake we pressed last year called the Gate Keeper. Gongmei is the original tea plant found out around Fuding, and it is the ancestor of the modern Dabai tea cultivar. While it has largely fallen out of popularity, shouldered aside by the beautiful and bountiful Dabai tea plant, it holds a special place in our hearts for being the first of the Fuding white teas. When compared to the Dabaihao cultivar (see the Smuggler’s Cove for comparison), the Gatekeeper Gongmei is all vegetation, spices, and less of the fruity sweetness found in the shoumei tea cakes of a similar age. This tea also has a few years of age on it, meaning that it is already on its way from transforming from a fresh white tea to an aged white tea. When the dry leaves are placed in a warmed gaiwan, the fragrance is startlingly different from other white teas, it is spicy and vegetal, with notes of toasted pecans and burnt sweet grass. These vegetal notes subside slightly when infused, resulting in something much sweeter, creamier, and redolent of honey and the lightly aged melon notes found in a lot of these 3+ year old shoumei and gongmei teas. The brew is a bright gold that is noticeably thick on the tongue, tasting of cream and butter, while delivering a pleasantly surprising huigan. The taste of this tea on the tongue remains distinctly vegetal, hoarding its sweetnesses unlike the more sugary shoumei made of the Dabai cultivar. This is a more hardy white tea, brothy, and filling. As with all our white teas, we brew 6 grams in a 100-120ml gaiwan with water right off the boil. You can experiment with different water temperatures, cooler temps give the tea a little more floral nots, higher temps bring our more umami. This is a 7 gram micro pressing of the larger 200 gram Gatekeeper tea cake.
