Thursday, January 6, 2011

Chuan Cheng Yin Hao Tuocha

Today I'm reviewing a 100 gram, 2004, sheng puer tuocha (生普洱沱茶) that I purchased several years ago from Silk Road Tea. It is called Chuan Cheng Yin Hao (傳承銀毫) (Inheritance Silver Tip).

Here's the wrapper.
(I'm betting that symbol in the middle represents a leaf bud.)


And here's the tuo!


The compression is very tight but I still managed to flake off a reasonable amount of dry leaf using my puer knife. As I often find with similar tuo-cha, I ended up with a mix of small broken leaves and little leaf clumps. I used very short steeps at first (5 to 10 seconds) in hopes that they would balance the potential astringency of so many tiny broken leaves.

I covered the bottom of a small gaiwan with leaf and began my session with the customary (though not mandatory) short rinse. The now steaming leaves had a familiar camphor and incense aroma.



My first infusion was 5 seconds long and poured orange and fragrant. Because the resulting liquor's surface had tons of sparkly oils and many long lasting bubbles floating upon it, I gave this tea an A+ for appearance.

I prepared my palate for astringency and took a sip. It was smooth... and it had an amazing ripe cherry note that really lingered.

All ten of my infusions tasted nice (even the ones I slightly over-steeped) and the tea had consistently good body and complexity. The smooth start and the pleasant cherry note transformed into some drier champagne- and Darjeeling-like flavors. Still quite enjoyable.

This puer tea gave me a very focused, high-vibration energy. I felt a little buzzed and my feet and hands kept tapping or shaking. I have found that I'll often get this feeling when drinking a lot of sheng puer made with lots of silver or white buds. It's time for some food.

4 comments:

Petr Novák said...

Nice description. Especially your end with "shaking hands" make me smile- having the same "problem" right now:)

One of my favorite ShengPu I have is also Tou from Yin Hao – but on the box is written Lin Hao (with same logo of tea buds). Please, do you know if it means the same (Yin-Lin)?

Best
Petr

Brett said...

Hi Petr! Thanks for the great comment.

I'm sorry I can't be too sure about your question without taking a look at the tea. Does it have the Chinese for Yin (銀)(silver) and Hao (毫)(usually translated as "tip") printed on the label? It may be a typo and they had meant to right Y instead of L... but it could be a totally different word. Feel free to email me a photo and I'll take a look. (blackdragontea@gmail.com)

Petr Novák said...

Thank you Brett for your responce. I have uplouded few pictures of the tea to my picasa here http://picasaweb.google.com/keramikakcaji/LinHao?authkey=Gv1sRgCPXQ2LqYnvSvsQE#

hope it works:)

Thanks
Petr

Brett said...

Hi Petr, They did mean Lin Hao the Chinese is 临毫. Here is a similar tuocha on Taobao http://item.taobao.com/auction/item_detail-0db1-19150d5d9e6f8a70a263c9d4f1bc7437.htm