Autumn 2017 Jingmai Shengtai

We started the 2017 season a month earlier than last year. The rain was light but almost continuous, yet, we managed to get decent material from the natural tea gardens. Since there are a lot of yellow flakes during Autumn, we sourced a lot of 1 bud/2 leaves material, which is more expensive than standard picking, but gives a dried tea with almost no yellow flakes.

When there are no yellow flakes, you need 5kg of fresh leaves to get 1kg of maocha, but during the autumn season, if you need as much as 7kg of fresh leaves to get 1kg of sorted maocha. Getting high grade material is therefore a good option for the tea maker, because it will avoid the tedious sorting work. We also sourced the more commonly picked 1 bud/3-4 leaves, this is why the cake looks tippy, but not as much as if it had been pure 1 bud/2 leaves.

The taste is thinner than the spring version of our natural tea garden productions, but its fragrance is very enjoyable. Autumn tea tends to be redder than Spring tea because the tea stems are naturally thicker and harder to cook in the wok, it's normal to get red stems in autumn tea and very hard to avoid them. However, we adjusted our processing parameters to avoid having too red a tea.

You will enjoy this tea's endurance and sustained fragrance and sweetness. Just like its gushu counterpart, astringency is a bit high, which is probably due to the weather conditions we got in autumn 2017. In anyway, it makes a good daily drinker and will hopefully age decently.