2003/4 Brown Chang Tai Hao
An enigma. Absolutely mysterious. Why would Chang Tai create 6 “similar” cakes over 2 years? Are they the first puerh tea company to use the principle of security by obscurity by having unintelligible neifei stamps? Why Cloud’s Tea House call this “successor to 88 Qing Bing”? Even Ulumochi bothers enough to write about this tea twice and nearly 20 forum pages was dedicated to the discussion of this tea.
This particular version I’m reviewing is the 2004 Single Stamped with Barcode version of Brown Chang Tai. It was said to have been made in 2003 using combination of Menghai wild tree and older Jinggu tree leaves but was only delivered a year later with barcoded wrapper. The first batch was single stamped too but uses no barcode wrapper.
Tea leaves appear to be thick and mostly intact. Dry leaves carries a bit of sandalwood incense fragrance.
The shape of the cake gave semblance of stone molded cakes. It is loose everywhere except the beeng hole. In the whole tong that I dismantled, none of the cakes really looked identical in shape or thickness; testament to what we call in modern days “artisanal” :D
Tea fragrance has the base note of mild old books and hay. No smoke. The top notes consist of sweet sour pitted fruits scent like that of peach.
When brewed, the chalky sandalwood-y / incense taste will be more obvious. I find this almost a giveaway that it’s Jinggu proper. Having been mixed with some wild tree leaves, it will be tinged sourish notes in the middle of the tongue. I find that sourish notes does cause good salivation. The common grouse across most reviewers is that it tasted thin. But despite of that, I find the tea clinging onto my mouth cavity for a bit and turning sweet slowly.
Spent leaves looks mostly whole. They are still quite tensile despite being 15 years old. As usual, I ate some of the tea leaves when I finished consuming them. They still have plenty of taste in them that maybe finally boiling it will do it some justice. But that leaves me to question if it could have been better rolled during initial stage of production.
