Aged Black Tea. Wakoucha Tasting Tea N°20: Miyazaki Kanayamidori Wakoucha, 2013, The Teacrane

For many beginning tealovers this is a strange concept: haven't we learned to drink our tea as young a possible ? There is the obvious exception of Pu'Erh, but we have all been confronted with teas in our collection that lost their fragrance and taste and had to be reduced to material for composting. However, just like wine, tea is a natural product, it is alive and this means evolution does not stop when the production process does. Lots of teas need a rest after production or transport, and some new teas are blended with rested teas to achieve a more complex taste pattern. Some people even prefer the softer taste of a rested tea that had a few months or a year to 'cool down'.

Aged teas however fall into another category. The most famous ones are of course the fermented teas of China, the Pu'er cakes, that can become very old and keep changing with age. They are usually called by their Pu'er name, and come from a few well defined regions. When we talk about aged teas this is usually leaf tea, mostly oolong or black, that has been aged on purpose, usually for 5 years or longer. These teas are usually kept in well closed containers and regularly tested to see the evolution. Some producers will roast these teas at certain intervals to keep humidity under control, or keep the tea in caves where their evolution is influenced by the environment.

What usually happens is that taste components start melting together, and the tea will become richer and deeper, often also more complex, and the taste experience goes into the direction of an aged wine. It is not an easy thing to do, and your tea has to be of excellent quality, and the teamaster or his family needs a lot of experience. Drinking it can be compared with tasting the great wines of the Bordeaux, and the taste profiles that when young were more separated have now melted together into a complex aroma.

Miyazaki Kanayamidori Wakoche, 2013, The Teacrane:

Harvested 8 september 2013 in Gokase, that wonderful tea-village in Miyazaki, from gardens at 650m height. Produced by Akira Miyazaki on the Miyazaki Sabou teafarm and than stacked for ageing. 90 euro per 100 gram excl import taxes, so this is already a quite expensive tea. The cultivar is Kanayamidori, a crossing between Yabukita and a Shizuoka Zairai.

https://www.the-tea-crane.com/manufacturers/akira-miyazaki/

15th of August, 2019, in the morning, a root day, windy and rainy and quite cold for the time of year. The dry leaf is broken into small brown fragments. The wet leaf offers an extremely complex scale of taste impressions with spices, honey and fruit. It is very fragmented, mostly light brown with some snippets of green. The infusion has a nice amber colour with a greenish hue. The smell is extremely complex, with fruit and spices but blended and melted into each other. In the taste the same complexity comes back and all elements have melted together into something unique. Not overly bold, and with a small background bitter note (not astrigent, bitter). In a previous tasting I also had citrus-tones and an interesting sourness, this seems to be gone in this tasting.

A second brew was pleasant and complex, beautiful and long, and in the echo a strong taste of abricot showed up. The two next brews were also pleasant.

😊😊😊😊

This tea is no longer available but came from The Teacrane.