2018 Yunnan Sourcing Nanpo Autumn
Definitely among my more enjoyable sessions with Yunnan Sourcing’s young sheng, this Autumn production from Mengku area near Bingdao is closer to a Spring harvest style. The dry leaf is nice looking, proper colour, and very pungent. Warmed, it has a pungent honey-perfume which is not as sweet as it is pungent.
- Yellow-beige colour, sweet, slightly watery, resinous, not harsh, not bitter, not astringent, and quite savoury-green. Some sweet sencha taste.
- It has green notes but probably isn’t too green- it seems to have a proper young sheng profile. Not much roughness. Only slight astringency. The empty cup aroma is quite nice, Tibetan style incense, not very strong but nice.
- Gets quite bitter when cold. Calming, slowing energy, enhanced eyesight.
- Slightly bitter, but perfumed and with some oiliness. Long steep has quite a lot of astringency, bitterness, but there is quite a lot of sweetness.
- The pungency of the aftertaste stays for a very long time. It’s not so much as a sweetness but rather a resinous residue. Quite enjoyable.
I could only find a couple of woody stems indicating autumn material – the taste is certainly not typical autumn, and the wet leaves seem to be very good material, with large midrib and a medium amount of small hairs on the underside of leaf. The processing is firmly on the green side, but not extreme in this regard. The wet leaf struck me as being unusually flexible and gets full of water/soggy if that makes sense. I will have to compare the material with that from my Nanmei cake to see if there are any similarities.
The tea has a good amount of sweetness but not to the degree that a good Yiwu has. On the other hand, it has a lot of resinous pungency, which I appreciate. The astringency and bitterness are of an interesting and refined sort, I can easily believe this is gushu material, as opposed to the Hekai I recently reviewed, which is much rougher. My main criticism is that it could be more concentrated in taste, it can be a tad watery at times. Finally, the energy is clear, not overwhelmingly strong, but nice, in that it is focusing, calming, and gives the enhanced vision effect.