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Tea: NYC Tapwater 2024 Spring Bangdong Gushu Raw Puer Type: Raw Puer (生普洱） Harvest: April 2024 Press Date: April 2024 Region: Bangdong, Lincang, Yunnan Producer: Meng Family 2024 Tasting Notes: Blood Orange, Toasted Seaweed, Rock Sugar, Tobacco Leaf, Popcorn We're very excited to release this pure Spring tea made from exclusively ancient trees in the mineral-rich terroir of the Bangdong Village, just across a mountain valley from our beloved Xigui. We first visited these sandy slopes in Spring of 2023 and were utterly astounded by the incredible number of ancient trees in these hills. Thier thick trunks and roots that reach around boulders through the red earth, the way Sister Meng hopped from rock to rock across dry ravines, here old broken-roofed home in the mountains with the ancient tea trees providing shade, really all feeds into our wonder of this tea, and our excitement to do this region the honor it desrves by showcasing their gushu. The leaves are surprisingly beautiful (gushu tends to be a little ugly) with a large amount of silver white buds peeking out between the darker green leaves. When placed into a warmed gaiwan, there is an unquestionably fruity fragrance that arises with hints of something more saline beneath. As is typical with a lot of pure Gushu teas, this is not a fragrance-forward tea, but rather one that is better understood in the realm of body sensations and mouthfeel. The brew is thirst quenching, rather sweet, with savory notes redolent of Japanese nori. The modest yellow brew coats the mouth in an oily fashion leaving a lot left over to taste between infusions. The dominant expression of this tea in the early infusions is its intense minerality. This sweetens up through the session creating a good dozen infusions of rock-sugar sweet water in the teas later half. For us, the true joy comes in this second half of the session, wherein this tea becomes sweeter and sweeter as we refill the kettle with another 1.5 liters of water and continue on, really long-lasting session if you're present for it. The Bangdong village is famous for its deep mineralogy, in fact the makers call their teas Yancha or Rock Teas, which to those literate in Chinese oolongs is a name that's already taken by the Wuyi Oolongs. This name however is a true reflection of their boulder-strewn sandy side of the mountain, and is readily apparent in the taste of the tea itself. 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 that total some 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.
