/ck/ - Food & Cooking

really digging this 2008 Xizi tuo. tastes like a wood cabin soaked with fine cigar smoke. astringency is in that pleasant "licked an oak barrel" range, it's well-aged and surprisingly easy to brew. some nice plums if brewed lighter. perfect tea for fall.

>>19816655
>>19816608
since anon was interested, here's my first impressions from the purple Xiaguan aka 2008 Xizi Happy Tuo. first session with a Xiaguan, so sorry if I'm ignorant:
smoke is clearly present, but not overwhelming or annoying, a bit reminiscent of a campfire. flavor is mostly woody-smoky with some prunes, a bit of mushrooms and pine resin maybe. has a bit of upfront sweetness, bit of astringency and dries out the mouth a bit, but not getting much bitterness. not much of a huigan either though. body seems to be medium

overall, tasty smoky forest prunes type of deal, more or less what I expected. bit of a rougher drying finish reveals that this is not expensive, but the tea has certainly mellowed out a lot already. what I didn't expect was that the tuo would be quite easy to break apart. I heard many people complain about rock-hard Xiaguan tuos, but this one seems to be medium compression, comes apart much easier than, for example, the 2002 6FTM ripe tuo I have, or the 2006 Dayi Spring of Menghai cake.
I can compare it to the 2005 Jia Ji and the aforementioned Spring of Menghai at some point if anyone is interested