1980's Old Tree Raw Puerh

It's very rare to come across teas from this period that aren't from one of the big tea factories.   Since the cultural revolution in China, "GongXiaoShe" were established - cooperatives that were the official distribution points for agricultural products on behalf of the state, forming a key link between rural farmers and state-owned enterprises.   In Menghai they purchased maocha from farmers and distributed it to the state owned tea factories.

In the mid-90's as the factories were being privatised the Menghai GongXiaoShe closed down and their stocks of maocha remaining were sold freely.   This batch of tea was purchased by the owner of a small Menghai factory in the mid-90's from Menghai Gongxiaoshe, then by a Jinghong tea producer in 2005.   From tasting and asking the history from the factory owner, he estimated at the time that the tea was already around 20 years old.  It was already nicely aged.  He pressed it into these 380g cakes in 2005.

As always with these stories, we have no way to independently verify this, but we need to judge the tea based on the quality itself.

The storage in Menghai and Jinghong is drier than most cakes of a similar age, which tend to have spent some time in Hong Kong/Taiwan/Malaysia etc.   From tasting, it does share traits of well aged 80's factory teas, with nice resinous camphor notes.  The material is very nice - old tree material, that shares both nicely aged Yiwu and Menghai old tree character.  I'd guess the maocha was a blend of both.  It's thick in the mouth and throat, super clean and vibrant with nice grounding character.

This tea isn't particularly inexpensive, but compares well to factory teas of a similar period which are many times the price.  We thought it was worth to offer it for those looking for tea of this quality and period.