This Gong Ting Jin Hao Ripe Pu-erh is made from tea harvested in an area near the Myanmar border, about ten hours by car from Lincang City.
Most Ripe Pu-erh is made from plantation tea grown with modern farming methods. For this tea, however, the tea trees are owned by an ethnic minority community, and the leaves come from trees grown with natural farming.
We sorted Mao Cha made from naturally grown spring tea, collected only the buds, and compressed them. It is a very luxurious tea, with a strong richness with a sweet flavor like sugarcane.
The taste is very thick, with no astringency or bitterness at all. It can easily make you tea drunk, so we recommend it for times when you want to relax completely.
High-quality ripe Pu-erh tea is never moldy.
Some people dislike ripe tea because it smells like "old furniture," "rotten wood," or "mold," but moldy flavors indicate poor quality tea with fermentation issues. High-quality tea should evoke a certain level of emotion when tasted. HOJO conducts extensive tasting to ensure we introduce only the best quality teas.
Product Details
Gong Ting Jin Hao Ripe Pu-erh has a delicate taste with silky texture.
The taste is very thick, with no astringency or bitterness at all. It can easily make you tea drunk, so we recommend it for times when you want to relax completely.
If you like Pu-erh, you may have heard the name Gong Ting Pu-erh.
What Is Gong Ting Pu-erh?
Gong Ting means imperial, which is one category of Ripe Pu-erh after the grading process.
Books and websites often describe Gong Ting Pu-erh as the highest grade of Pu-erh, but that is not necessarily accurate.
Right after processing, the crude Ripe Pu-erh leaves are called Mao Cha, and they consist of one bud and two to 3 leaves.
Mao Cha right after fermentation
With Ripe Pu-erh, the Mao Cha is either compressed and sold as it is after removing dusts, or sifted and graded by size and part of the plant.
Left: Mao Cha. Right: after grading.
Neither is better than the other. When the tea is graded, though, it can be separated into buds, leaves, stems and so on, so a graded tea may show character that Mao Cha does not have.
Gong Ting Pu-erh is the grade made by collecting only the buds at the tips. Because it contains so many buds, the tea is a golden-orangish color before compression, and its appearance gives the impression of an exclusive tea.
Only a small amount can be obtained, and it is popular, so among the graded parts Gong Ting Pu-erh fetches the highest price.
There are exceptions depending on the producer, however. Sometimes the tea called Cha Tou, which forms naturally when tea leaves clump together, sells at the highest price.
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Of course, even among Gong Ting Pu-erh teas, there is a world of difference in quality depending on the raw material.
Tea grown with lots of fertilizer, naturally grown tea, and naturally grown tea plucked from old trees differ in the strength of their aftertaste. The soil of the tea garden also affects the body of the tea.
What matters is getting good raw material with excellent aftertaste and richness. Tea made from it is, naturally, very good to drink even as Mao Cha.
Gong Ting Pu-erh made from good raw material is naturally of good quality because it starts from a good source, and it gives you a taste that stays in your memory after a single cup.
The Gong Ting Jin Hao Ripe Pu-erh we offer at HOJO is harvested in an area near the Myanmar border, about ten hours by car from Lincang City.
The tea trees are owned by an ethnic minority community, and the tea comes from trees grown with natural farming. In fact, most Ripe Pu-erh is made from plantation tea grown with modern farming methods.
If you stop by a tea shop in Yunnan, or at any airport in China, you will find huge amounts of Pu-erh for sale, but almost all of it is plantation Ripe Pu-erh.
Plantation tea is not bad in itself. On plantations, however, the soil is modified and pesticides and fertilizers are used, so apart from safety concerns, the tea grows faster, tastes thin and lacks richness.
Ripe Pu-erh does not have a strong flavor to begin with, so richness is the key factor to enjoy drinking it. We are always looking for Ripe Pu-erh made from naturally grown old trees.
Natural farming sounds nice, but in short it means tea trees that are left alone. Left in harsh natural conditions and growing without fertilizer or human interventions, these trees adapt to many kinds of environmental stress and grow very slowly over a long time.
As a result, the tea's cells become smaller, and minerals, polyphenols and other constituents in the tea become concentrated. Tea made this way has a strong aftertaste that you won't forget once you have tried it.
Focus on Sourcing Naturally Cultivated Tea
Since 2010, we have been visiting Yunnan Province every spring. Over the years, we have built connections with many famous tea regions. However, our focus is not on a region's fame, but rather on tea with transparency and a long-lasting aftertaste. To achieve this, we focus on remote mountain villages, selecting tea gardens with ancient tea trees, high altitudes, and no fertilizers, sourcing through unique logistics channels. For more details, please visit the following page.
In Yunnan, teas claiming to be from famous regions are produced in thousands of locations using leaves from other areas, and can be found everywhere—from airports and convenience stores to supermarkets.
What complicates matters is the surprising phenomenon where imitation teas made from leaves in remote areas are of higher quality than the genuine articles. This is especially common with Pu-erh teas from Lincang, and it is a well-known fact among professionals involved in local sourcing. For more details, please visit the following page.
In Yunnan Province, there are long-established brands like Dayi and Zhongcha. These brands are renowned because their teas produced before 1990 are highly valued.
So why are these older teas considered special? Many people assume it is due to long aging, but in reality, the tea leaves used at that time were naturally grown without fertilizers, resulting in their superior quality.
Therefore, even if current teas are aged for a long time, they will not reach the same quality. For more information, please visit the following page.
