Aged Japanese-export Taiwan Oolong

Finding, buying, and drinking aged tea is a tricky endeavour. On one hand, there is a surprising amount of legitimately aged oolong teas in Taiwan. On the other, there is an unsurprisingly large amount of teas with vastly inflated or falsified ages and origins. It’s tricky to know what is real and what is fanciful, and there is a lot of incentive to let ages (and therefore, prices) creep up and up.

What we can definitively say of this tea is that is a) an oolong b) from Taiwan and c) very, very old. Exactly how old is impossible to verify, but it is old enough that it shows some distinctive aged characteristics — namely, a strongly aged fragrance and taste (chén wèi 陈味) reminiscent of camphor, Chinese herbal medicine, and sweet/earthy wood (think cedar). It brews very dark, very smooth, and very thick, with a cooling sensation in the back of the throat.

The storage is uncommonly clean, without a trace of any wet or dank notes, and the tea has not ever been re-roasted as is common with aged oolongs in order to boost their fragrance. The original character of the tea shines gently through the many years of aging and development.

The tea was introduced to us as being made from Qīng Xīn Dà Mǎo (青心大冇), a varietal of tea plant most popular during the time of Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan until the 1970s. The tea was produced in the Taochumiao (Táo Zhú Miáo
桃竹苗) area, or more commonly known as Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Miaoli counties —  historically the most important tea production regions of Taiwan. This style of tea was produced for export to Japan, and harvested by cutting the tea leaves from the plant by hand with big shears, which you can see upon close examination of the leaves with their angled cuts.

Our advice for brewing this tea is to make a solid go of it, rather than using too little tea resulting in a half as satisfying experience. To these ends, we recommend using a full 8 grams and 0 regrets.

Very limited availability, as there was only a little over one Taiwanese jīn (斤) [approximately 600g] for us to buy.