Yiwu Qing Bing 1999

For lovers of elegance and maturity.

This tea is a bit of an outlier for Nannuoshan. Usually, we make a point to provide as much information about our teas as possible—who produced it, when it was harvested, what kind of tea it is, and much more. This time, we know very little: it’s a Sheng Pu’er from Yiwu, it was harvested in 1999, it’s been stored in Taiwan since 2002. While its wrapper is as much of a blank slate as our fact sheet, its content is anything but. This tea has layers upon layers that are peeled away and revealed from steep to steep while retaining a sweet and gentle core. Its dark, long leaves and golden buds exude a resinous fragrance when dry, turning towards earthy and dulcid notes once hot water gets involved. The tea soup is a dark amber hue with remarkable clarity and a good sense of weight. Its taste is a cornucopia of flavours one would expect from an aged tea; earthy with a strong sweetness reminiscent of forest floors and sweetwood with a strong medicinal fragrance that recalls herbal cough syrup. It feels a bit sticky in the mouth at first with a slight lingering astringency on the first couple of steeps that quickly makes way for a tea that can only be described as smooth and quaffable, coating mouth and throat before leaving behind a long-lasting aftertaste. It gently relaxes and warms the body from the inside after swallowing. A complete package that nourishes body and soul while hitting every note one would expect from a premium aged tea.

We only have a single bing cha of this tea available. We chose to split it into 20-gram pouches, so that more of you can enjoy this rare Yiwu Sheng from the previous millenium.

Written by Sigi