TGFOP Tea Reviews (c) Silverneedles est.2005

Puerhshop.com (review) from the Year of Green Tasting Kit (store link).
Year of Green review: 2006 Arbor tuo, 2004 CNNP Old Tree, 2007 Mengsa, 2007 Old Banzhang, 2007 Menghai Crab.

Dry leaf: very tightly compressed. I don’t have a puer knife so i tried to stab it with my sharpest tip food knife …that didn’t work… it would just cut-break into the area it was penetrating- so i didn’t go on with that and just put muscle to work and used my hands to break off some better pieces from the tuocha. It took a minute or two and broke some.

the color was pretty dark when infused, and got darker quick if left around, but
these pics seem a bit more saturated and maybe a tad darker than i remember.

Method:
200F filtered water, wash 30s, then drank the next 30,30,30s (pictured).

Taste:

some interesting flavors, some similar to King of Pu-Erh,

but then its hard to infuse & enjoy because the “astringency” comes on pretty quick and strong.

one plus is sometimes it goes into a sweet-tingly? feeling aftertaste on the tongue, but also frequent dry-throat sensation if astringency reaches strength. there’s a very distant medicinal feeling(to me), also something like aged? no pond/fishy.

all these flavors show up (so far) when astringency/tannin is also high.

i’ve infused it shorter or more water, but it comes out watery = the flavors and astringency are diluted.

Wet leaf: chopped up, also seems like alot of young leaf which probably contribute to the high astringency/strong tannin. theres a couple real black pieces which look like burned leaf.

Overall: this tuocha has something interesting in there…but there’s lots of astringency. Not sure what aging does to it. not for me in current form.