Autumnal Stability

Week-ends are a thing of beauty: each seems to feel like a little holiday, lately.  What better way to open the two-day break than with a new Yiwu from Pu-erh.sk?  With thanks to Peter for the sample, we explore a "guhua" tea from the general Yiwushan area.

Little seems to be known about this tea; it is generic Yiwu in name, but looks rather attractive.  I could not find the tea for sale at Peter's web-site, even though it is mentioned in some marketing text at the top of the page, but I see that the 2012 Autumnal Yiwu (which I rather enjoyed) sells for 48 euro per 250g.

This cake, it must be said, is not quite up to the level of the tea that I had before.  This is a "workhorse" - a stable, reliable, unchanging Yiwu cake that ploughs a furrow of dark sweetness without bothering the more poetical adjectives that we might otherwise be tempted to consider.  Perhaps it is best in its initial scent - the wenxiangbei is buttery, sweet, and very heavy.  By comparison, the tea is merely "decent".  This is not a bad thing, of course, and I had a most enjoyable session, but there are (very) many Yiwushan cakes that have qualities similar to those on offer today.

Perhaps surprisingly, this cake eventually wheedles its way into my affections, by remaining unchanging and strong for some fifteen or so infusions.  This is a virtue in an autumnal tea, which are not known for their strength and constancy.  It reminds me that I am looking forward to trying the new 2014 season from Pu-erh.sk, which, as regular readers may reasonably conclude, has become one of my favourite suppliers over the past year or so.