2018 Zhongcha “88 Qing” Raw Puer Tea

The story about the name “88 Qing” may be a bit confusing. Many said the name comes from the 7542 Sheng Puer Tea produced by the Menghai Tea Factory from 1988 to 1992. But in fact, the actual name of that tea is just 7542, not 88 Qing.
The name 88 Qing came from a Hong Kong seller, Chen Guo Yi, who bought a whole batch of high-quality Sheng Puer Tea in 1992. He named this tea “88 Qing” (八八青). At the time, in Hong Kong, Shu Puer was known to everyone, so to differentiate it from Shu Puer Tea, he named this tea “88 Qing,” Qing meaning green Puer tea in this context.

The price of this tea rose in popularity over time. Sellers who had the Dayi 7542 (from 1988 to 1993) saw a marketing opportunity and started calling it “88 Qing”. This is what caused the misinterpretation that the Dayi 7542 was called “88 Qing”.

The original “88 Qing” dates back to the late 1980s. And to clarify, there are no “88 Qing” teas from the 1990s.

In 2018, Zhongcha released “88 Qing Bing” once again. There are previous versions before 2018 too.

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 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.

In addition, 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 salivae but is not as thick or creamy as 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 you could drink now. However, depending on the storage condition, I would love to try this one after ten years or more. 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, I couldn’t find big tea leaves but perhaps didn’t search enough. Some buds and stems too as you see in the pictures.