I found a decent-sized chunk of this in my sample stash, and thought I would give it another taste. I had a little over 7g, which made a leaf-heavy session with my 90ml pot. Whether my taste has become more educated, or the tea changed, or my technique has improved, or all of the above, I have a better appreciation of this and am removing my “not recommended” reaction.
I recalled this tea as having overwhelming humid storage taste and aroma, and also as being powerfully astringent after not-too-many steeps. In fact I remember thinking something like “Gack! This is dry storage?” I found this session a lot smoother, and while I could still taste the humid storage it seemed a lot less noticeable than I remembered.
I didn’t count or precisely time my infusions because I don’t really do that anymore. I know that I started with the shortest rinses and steeps I could manage with the pot, and was getting red soup by the second steep. I noticed some sweet cold-cup aroma, which I generally don’t with older humid-stored tea (though to be sure, this is “dry HK storage” according to the vendor). I kept waiting for the cotton-mouthed drying effect and it never came. I wound up using over 1.5l of water and was steeping for minutes at a time at the end, so I got probably around 20 steeps altogether.
The soup did feel a little weaker than I would expect with the leaf ratio, but maybe that is down to the grade 7 material.
This brick seems to be a fairly fancy grade of leaf. There was not a lot of small chop. It was almost all larger pieces of leaf with little to no stemmy stuff or sticks.
