2004 6 Famous Mountain Silver Bud Tuo

 

I had blogged about a 2004 6 Famous Mountain tea cake last month. This was a mellow and aged tea with lightest hint of smoke.  

Today's blog post is a tuo, also a 6 Famous Mountain production.  This is a 2004 vintage and is 100g in weight.  This raw pu erh tuo is composed of silver buds.  'Silver buds' is a term used by the pu erh industry to describe the use of very young pu erh leaves in the production of pu erh tea.   It would also suggest that the harvesting of these silver buds would be slightly more labour intensive, which in turn would explain for the slightly higher prices of 'silver bud' pu erh tea.

I am no expert in silver bud pu erh tea. This tuo's taste and aroma has a unique dried sweet berry taste and aroma with  light notes of freshly baked pastries.  Long and sweet aftertaste.  Quite addictive in that I finished the entire tuo in about a month. 

An Interesting tea. 

Drainage Hole

 

I bought another tea tray.  Actually, Chinese tea drinkers would tell you you only need one tray.    This new acquisition  is visually quite unique. You see a stone tray to place your teapot and quite a wide space to position a few teacups and even a fairness cup. You will also notice, on the side of the tray where the teapot is, a knob like thing that is sticking out from the tray.  This is the drainage hole.

This drainage hole is where all the tea waste water will 'exit' when waste water is poured onto the tea tray.  I was supplied with quite a long plastic hose where I need to attached one end of the hose to the drainage hole and having the other end of the hose directed to a container or pail at the bottom leg of the table.  Users even use cable-tie to secure the hose to a leg of a table.  

You will often see such set up In a tea shop where Chinese tea is brewed all day long and the amount of tea waste water may be quite substantial. 

If you are brewing tea at home, you may not need to have a 'hose to pail' set up.  Reasons being that if you are brewing tea yourself, the amount of waste water may be minimal and you are better off using a tea waste bowl instead.  There are some teashops I had visited that do not use such set up either. They used a tea waste bowl, and are more deliberate in their tea brewing (more careful with less spills). They employ a tea towel to wipe off any water that is spilled onto the tea tray.   

I noticed there are now, very pretty tea waste bowls and they can even make nice conversation pieces when you are brewing tea with friends. 

I am interested to know to see my readers' tea brewing set up.  Do send pix to me and I will have a page to show off your setups.