Sample from an unmarked cake of 2005 YQH Yiwu gushu from LP's December tea club. Pleased to be able to try this. The pickings are quite stemmy with a mix of very young pickings and more mature leaves.
Infusions
- The wet leaf has become a bit more fruity than after the rinse. Initially it smelled like cow leather but now it's a different type of leather smell that I'm not familiar with. There's also a smoked cherry/blueberry aroma coming from the wet leaf. The mouthfeel is lightly oily, very quick to travel throughout the mouth, and a bit creamy. The finish is minty. There's a lot of fruit and wood in the body, as well as light leathery aromas - almost like a fruit leather; specifically reminiscent of the taste of 'leather' made from kombucha scoby. There's a subtle cherry tang, and some sweet hardwood notes. The finish has a medium dryness and is sustained for a few minutes. The woody tang notes stick to the finish and take on kind of a white bread aftertaste. The finish also has a slight scratchy feeling in the throat. Leaves the teeth with a chalky coated feeling.
- The wet leaf has a more damp fall leaves smell to it, a bit like decaying wood on fallen hardwood in the forest, and still leathery but not as prominent. The taste is much fuller in the body with a shiitake and woodear mushroom broth* aspect to it. Sweet hardwood with a bit of a coffee cherry flavor. A bit of an Oreo filling-like taste. The cooler it gets, the creamier and more floral this tea is - kind of like oats. I suspect it would make a fantastic iced tea with a totally different profile than serving it hot.
- Oh Jesus fuck I got real into coding and forgot this was infusing. It could've been going for 5 minutes. Please save me I hope I didn't fuck this session up. Ok doesn't look tooooo dark, and the leaves don't smell like they've been killed. Now for the taste: Yea I god damn nuked it. It's bitter as a dog, but honestly isn't bad. It shows off that cascara coffee cherry note really nicely, the varnish of the wood, and that throat feel that I'm not fond of. But interestingly brings out a bit of a smooth aged whiskey note, definitely an alcoholic taste. This definitely places the fruit as the dominant note over the wood. Kind of like punching you with the good and the bad.
- Back on track but the body is a little hollow - very likely my fault because of the above. There's a sweet lentil-like flavor now sitting squished between the fruity woody notes. The empty gong dao bei has a real nice cookie dough smell!
- Wet leaf smells like mulch. Body is sweet and fuller than previous, found the sweet spot again. Woody cascara. Tangy and sparkly on the finish with an upward swinging kind of feeling in the mouth. Fruitier aftertaste.
- Touch of a vanilla custard off the wet leaf. A bit vegetal akin to celery or a green bean of some sort, some papery notes and dark fruitiness.
- Body is a bit lacking but the fruitiness is the strongest aspect, centralizing around that dark cascara kind of cherry flavor I've been describing. That flavor is more clear whereas a lot of the other notes have been subdued.
- There's a flavor kind of like the faint aftertaste of eating sour candy, on top of some of that cherry and vegetal note. A bit creamier.
- Brewing more towards boiling reveals much more of that vegetal nature.
*I always get thrown when people describe a tea as mushroom brothy, and I think it's to be experienced before nope-ing yourself off trying it, since brothy isn't inherently a positive nor negative negative trait but is more indicative of the tea having a stronger body and more umami rather than being like you're actually drinking mushroom broth. Some of the aromatics of specific mushrooms can be there but it absolutely fits into the tea flavor universe in my experience, definitely not like someone just chopped up some shiitakes and tossed em in the pot with the tea (although there may be a pu-erh somewhere in the world that does in fact taste like mushroom stew, which would be interesting).