Tea: Brown Shoumei (xingongyi shoumei - 新工艺寿眉)
Harvest: Autumn 2021
Region: Ganyang, Fuding, China
Producers: Wu Family
Tasting Notes: old books, brown sugar, cocao
What we call ‘Brown Shoumei’ the tea makers here in China call ‘New Processing Method’ shoumei. The idea here is that since the market has grown to love aged shoumei, the makers have created a way to mimic aged tea. Similar to the creation of Cooked Puer when aged puer became too popular, this is a means to meet a market demand without having to wait 10 of 15 years to properly age a tea.
While the resultant tea tastes precisely what most people think shoumei should taste like, we find this method to be an inadequate facsimile to the properly aged shoumei. The taste and flavor however tend to meet people’s expectations for shoumei much better than the properly produced ‘green shoumei’ which is made in the older more traditional processing method.
