2018 Zhongcha ’88 Qing (7542) Raw Puer Tea

The historical “88 Qing Bing” refers to the raw Puer Tea cake recipe 7542 produced by Menghai Tea Factory from 1988 to 1992. This one has become a favourite among tea connoisseurs. In 2018, Zhongcha decided to release “88 Qing Bing” once again.

This tea uses Yunnan Big Leaf Cultivar (Dayezhong),  traditionally stoned-pressed and Sun-dried,  from Lancang Jiang River Valley. The tea was stored in a tea warehouse at an altitude of 1900 meters above sea level. I guess they are trying to say that the material was aged for some time to mellow the tea flavour. And storing it at a high altitude translates as drier storage than at sea level, before pressing.

My opinion about the return of this classic:

The woody aroma of the dried tea cake is delicious, even with the wrapper on I could smell it as it was sitting next to me while I was writing about it on my computer.

I did ten infusions 90 ml gaiwan/6 grams of tea. After the 10th infusion, the tea still had some fuel to keep going.

Two tea-notes stand out, some honey-sweetness and woodiness, the astringency and bitterness are moderate but might be more noticeable when pushing the tea. The woodiness of this tea remains in the throat for a decent amount of time.  Decent sweet huigan that causes one to produce plenty of saliva but not as thick or creamy like some Gushu teas. It has a comfortable warming body sensation to it.

 The tea remained stable throughout the tea session and gets less honey-sweet, revealing its darker base towards the last infusions, but it never gets nastily bitter like some low-quality Puer teas.

To sum up, for a modern factory tea I think they did a good job and this product is much better than some other modern factory teas I tried before I chose this one. It’s a decent tea that can be drink now. However,  I would love to age this one and try it again after ten years or more depending on the storage condition. I think this one will age well and will be worth keeping for the future.  The compression of the cake is not tight.

The tea leaves are small to medium size, couldn’t find big tea leaves but perhaps didn’t search enough. Some buds and stems too as you see in the pictures.