2012 Jinhua Fuzhuan Raw Puer

Name: 2012 Jinhua Fuzhuan Raw Puer

Year: 2012

Material:  Arbor tree Raw Puer tea

Harvest: Autumn

Area: Menghai County

Weight: The tea comes as broken bricks pieces since we purchased it like this.  

(2012 Jinhua Fuzhuan Raw Puer)

This tea is not the typical 金花 （Golden Flowers）Heicha compared to the classic An Hua Jin Hua Heicha. Since the tea material it uses is high-quality sun-dried Raw Puer from Menghai County so it is rarer.

This is a small factory in Hunan founded in 2010. They processed their teas in the traditional manner and have high-quality production standards.

The factory fermented the tea using the wet-piling special techniques used to make Heicha in Hunan, then compressed them into bricks where the golden flowers flourished.

I used 6.7 grams of tea in a 100 ml Gaiwan and did 11 infusions.

What I found interesting about this tea is that the Golden Flowers character and the Sheng Puer character coexist harmoniously. The Jin Hua character is not dominant so you can taste the Puer tea character. 

The Puer tea leaves show themselves with some cooling honey-like aroma/taste, sweet huigan and thick mouthfeel of proper tea. The Golden flowers also counterbalanced some of the astringency and mild bitterness of the tea.

 The first bre[[[w after the rinse is light but already shows an astoundingly sweet huigan.

 The tea gets a much stronger taste in the following infusions as it opens up. I felt dominant honey and cooling tasting notes in the mouth/aroma along with the golden flower ones.

The soup remains very sweet with an umami taste and causes one to produce profuse salivation at the sides of the tongue until the last infusion.   

 The mouthfeel is very thick and creamy. The aftertaste remains for an acceptable amount of time in the mouth and throat. The tea has a moderate astringency.

If you want more bitterness, for some reason, you need to push the tea a little.

Moderate body sensation, more soothing than stimulating and warming too.

Note: The Golden Flowers’s scientific name is Eurotium cristatum. It is a fungus with some health benefits. That aside, there is something that you can experiment with while brewing teas with Golden Flowers. They make teas sweeter and smoother due to various chemical reactions produced by them. 

Brewing tip: You can brew the usual way in a ceramic, porcelain, clay teapot or gaiwan. If you want a more pungent flavour (bitterness will be stronger this way), you can boil it in one of those kettles designed for Heicha or just boil it in a cooking pot or any other setup.