Naked Yiwu 001

// Published October 4, 2018 by mgualt

Thanks to Wooju and Pedro for curating this tea for Teas We Like, a project I am co-organizing which hopes to provide a small but solid collection of teas at a good price.  We just started, so this is in a very experimental phase and we are open to suggestions.

Dry leaf is quite pungent, with a touch of smoke. Deep charcoaly and incense aroma on wet leaf. Unique aroma, somewhat like early Wistaria style smoke and also somewhat similar to Xiaguan 03 8653 QC aroma.  Very pungent though, probably more resinous than those.

I have had six sessions with this tea, and these are some of the consistent impressions I get:

1. Gentle charcoal together with sweet, pungent perfume. Strikes me as a classic old fashioned processing. Tingle in the back of the neck, beginning inspiration. Sweet in the aftertaste.
2. Pungent sweet tar aroma on liquor. Strong juicy astringency on the top of mouth. Resinous.  Opens the throat and feel a downward pressure.  Heat in the center of chest and lower ribs.
3. Darker orange now. Deep low-register pungent perfume, very attractive, not high florals but more dark honey. Extreme juiciness now.  Quite inspiring.
4. Thick now, with increasing astringency. Striking pungency with a sugary aftertaste. Potent, with heating in the lower ribs as well as inspiration.
5. Can have a strong relaxing/downer impact, but not in all sessions. Always at least grounding and relaxing with a downward flow.
6. Complex bitterness in the late steeps. Empty cup aroma continues to have a beautiful resin.
7. Long test steep is still good, with plenty of tibetan musk incense, good thickness and a long-lasting pressure on rear tongue.
8. Late steeps taste very much of lightly peated whisky. Something like Talisker.

This tea is very cleanly stored, no storage odors, no off taste, no geosmin or funk.  It has not seen as agressive a storage as YQH, for example, or even BYH or Wistaria.  So, despite the age (late 90s to 2002) it retains a lot of pungency and power.  Key for me is the strong resinous content, ample sweet aftertaste, and relaxing energy/downer effect.

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