It's here! Our annual celebration of the joys of fresh, raw (Sheng) PuErh maocha. This year we have found a mega sweet, floral and spicy brew from 200+ year old tea trees growing in Da Zhong Shan in Lincang area of Yunnan.
Young Gushu 2023 is a stellar tea brimming with sweet, tropical florals and apples of all kinds (custard apples, crab apples, golden apples). But, there is so much more going on in this brew.
Dancing with sweet spices of holy basil, bison grass and dill seed oil. Redolent with wild honey and deep forest streams to add a darker edge to the light and bright elements. Captivating with a bitter-sweet transformation which pulls and tingles the tongue before flooding the mouth with papaya and golden apple juiciness.
All of this complexity means that I suspect that the tea will age spectacularly.
Oh and it is potent too - excitable and heady with a cheeky glint in its eye.
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What is the Young Gushu series? It's a homage to the way that farmers drink their PuErh in Yunnan - a loose leaf assamica green tea fresh from sun-drying and straight into the gaiwan. No fuss, no pressing into cakes, no fancy artwork, no ageing. We want you to experience this back-to-basics way of enjoying the finest PuErh. Another advantage is that you get to sip on immaculate PuErh without splurging money on a cake.
Why? Because there is something magical about drinking fresh and loose PuErh. Not only does it bring us back to the perfect simplicity of such a hyped tea type but, if you find the right tea, can give you a very different experience - capturing the verve and vitality of Springtime in Yunnan and the directness of the terroir since the leaf is simply dried under the sun with no further processing.
The problem is that finding candidates for the Young Gushu series is very challenging. We want ancient tea material which has richness, complexity and body. A tea which would be worthy of making into an expensive tea cake and ageing for years. Yet, we also need that tea to have the Springtime lightness and an easy sipping nature which is often hard to come by with fresh assamica maocha (they are often too astringent and 'green' which is reduced with cake-pressing and ageing).
While Young Gushu teas are chosen for drinking fresh, they will continue to age beautifully - they will certainly age differently to cake-pressed teas but in our experience they perform fabulously over the years.
