Spring 2011 Mangjing

I visited my friend Ai Gong in Mangjing village. We've known each other for over ten years, he set up his tea factory in his parent's house in Mangjing at the same time as we did in Jingmai. We've shared our tea and business experiences over the years.

Last time I visited him, we talked about our early days of tea making, and that's when he left the tabel and went to his storage room. He brought some of his earliest cakes, made in 2011.

They were stored quite wet, especially at the early stage, because the traditional houses were not well insulated. Since he has built his new house, he has a storage room with dryer and more consistent conditions.

You can taste the story of this tea in the cup. It opens with a semi-wet bouquet of complex fragrances. The tea feels very clean and goes down the throat easily. You get the hints of wet-storage by the fragrance and also by a slight characteristic bitterness that shows up in wet-stored teas.

It was his second year of tea making, and yet, the processing is very decent, quite on the green side, just as we like them. A couple of cups will bring out the quality of the material used. It is hard to find aged cakes with good leaves nowadays, and you can clearly feel they got good Mangjing material at the time, probably from the ancient gardens of Aileng mountain, just above the village.

This tea will give you a long tasting session with a medium Huigan, good aged mouthfeel and nice Qi.