Who cares about Baochong?
Old tea, new tea
For me, Tieguanyin is a good representative of the transitional times in the history of our tea world. It is one of the oldest and most beloved of tea traditions, that Iron Bodhisattva tea, always elegant and refined, with that characteristic ‘yun’ note of long lingering fragrance in the palate. It was also, for hundreds of years, a generally darker and more highly oxidized style of oolong, with a…
gold oolong jin gui
Worth its price in Yellow Gold
Yellow Gold oolong was one of the common varieties of oolong that is not Tieguanyin but grown in this region. It is not currently in fashion, and prices are not through the roof. A great Yellow Gold was often compared to being ‘reminiscient of Tieguanyin’, and hardly ever appreciated on its own. But we discovered that in fact, there were three different sub-varietals of Yellow Gold (Huang Jin Gui)…
Tea of the Bodhisattva
Experiencing tea in a farm is quite different from sitting with some overly branded tea booth in a trade fair. Fortunately for me, most of my tea experiences have been at farms, in a mountain, sitting on a rickety stool with some farmers, drinking through sometimes hundreds of slightly varying batches of the same tea. In this case, it’s Tieguanyin all the way, as we finally ended up in Siping, the…
