1992 Tibetan Kang Brick Tea

Hey everybody, back again for another session of just some teas that we offer and today I want to do something a little bit different, drink a tea that I purchased in stock, quite a large stock of back in I think 2005 or 2006 and at the time this tea was very, just really unique to me and really cool. It's the 1992 Tibetan Kong brick and this is actually a tea from Sichuan and these teas have been produced for hundreds of years and in Sichuan, in Yunnan, in Guizhou and they're Hei Cha and they were sent up to Tibet along with Puerhs as well on the Tea Horse Road and these teas are used to make yak butter tea in Tibet and they're also drank without yak butter as well and these teas are actually used as legal tinder in Tibet for centuries. So really interesting teas, this one again from 1992, back in 2005 or 2006 I purchased several hundred of these because I just, I saw an opportunity to get them. They were at the time relatively affordable and I still have some today, not a ton, not a bunch left but I still have some. Let's open this up here and they're 500 grams per brick and they come in these crazy long like hand woven bamboo baskets. There are 20 of them and they're really long and they used to put these on horseback and they also carried them. You'll see people carrying them with like the strap over their head and they're carrying like many many bundles of these and they literally just would walk all day long on the Tea Horse Road to bring these from Sichuan up into Tibet and up into the Tibetan areas in Sichuan. You can see here when they pressed into each other, the original paper which is really degraded is like a bright yellow color which is really kind of cool and then the ticket, there's each one of these has a ticket and yeah and this says kang zhuan or kang is also has a lot of meanings, means like health. Yeah and then this one's actually, yeah. So anyways, I'll read the description as well because I think it's interesting. Oh and I'm sorry, these particular ones that I'm offering are from Guizhou so they're produced in the province of Guizhou. These kong bricks were produced in a small tea factory in the province of Guizhou and then sent to Tibet where they were stored in a family home for more than 10 years. These are packaged in long one meter bamboo baskets, 20 to each length, so there's 20 in a basket which is roughly going to be 10 kilos. Traditionally, these were carried on the backs of Sherpas or horses for thousands of kilometers. Not so long ago, teas like this were legal tender in Tibetan areas and were given as payment, were given in payment for a dowry, a horse, etc. The tea is boiled with yak butter to produce a form of yak butter tea. I prefer to drink it all by itself, washing the first infusion, one or two infusions like pour and drinking later infusions and this is a 1992 brick and the listing also has a little segment where Stephen Colbert of The Late Show cups this tea in his Tea for Tuesday episode which is pretty amusing. But anyways, yeah, let's get to it. I think this is definitely an interesting tea. Maybe not for everybody but very cool. So we'll cup it and I'll make some comments here, heat the water again. I still have these in their original baskets. If you look at the listing of the site, you can also add a picture to the video showing these teas in their original baskets. I still have them like that. And so these were purchased, these were stored for 10 plus years in Tibet then brought back to Kunming where I purchased them and then they've been stored since then. So now 1992, we're looking at about 26 years old. So probably older than some of you watching. Pretty incredible. Of course, pour of that age like a sheng pour would just be astronomically expensive. This tea is still, I think, under $100, I believe. Let's see, how much is it now? Yeah, it's, oh, it's on 80 bucks. So not bad. And this is a tea that definitely likes heat. You can see the tea's coming out. I've got, you know, there's a lot of stems and other things like that. It's just the style of the tea. You know, this tea is, this tea is kind of more, I think of it more as like a raw material than I do anything else. And that it serves like this really like key function in the diet of people that live in Tibet and some of these other high up areas in Yunnan and Sichuan, which is to really provide them with a way to help them digest the, you know, primarily animal, you know, meat diets that they have or, you know, dairy from yak butter, meat and other things like that. So, and it also provides them with, you know, antioxidants and a lot of the other kind of like things that they might not get in their diet traditionally, being in this high altitude where they can't really grow crops. This is a very, as you can see the colors, you know, looks, this is what a 26 year old Pu'er would look like. The tea soup would look like if it was stored in Kunming. So this has a similarly dark kind of, you know, not super dark, but definitely like a reddish. It's kind of almost looks like a Hong Chao. Yeah, so, yeah, anyways, so these teas were really, are really produced for that. And for people who, like I said, otherwise wouldn't, I'm actually gonna drink a little bit of the wash. It's so rich and smooth. When I bought this tea, it was still extremely medicinal and didn't, you know, it was like kind of drinking grass, the dried grass. And it wasn't bad, but it was definitely more, had a more of a medicinal and a vegetal kind of taste to it. Now it's just like, it's almost just entirely sweet. There's still a little bit of medicinal spiciness to it. But I say, I don't, medicine not in the sense of like bitter or something like that. It's very sweet and it's very smooth. And it's unlike, the aroma is really nice as well. And this is a tea, although, you know, I don't know that anything about whether it had pesticides used or not. But I mean, it's from 1992. And the fact that when it was purchased, probably at that time in the early nineties, you know, wholesalers and things like that, these bricks would have cost well less than a dollar at that time. Even less than that, maybe half a dollar or something like that. So very inexpensive teas to begin with. I don't imagine that, you know, and given the complete lack of emphasis on the appearance, you know, like compared to like green teas or things like that, you know, fine green teas, where the appearance of the leaf is super important. No, this, the appearance of this has nothing to do with anything. So I'd say this tea was probably just, you know, I mean, literally just, it wasn't worth their time or their effort to put pesticides on tea like this. They just had large swaths of land where they're growing this tea. And literally for centuries. And yeah, so I would say this tea is definitely really pure and clean as well. The storage has been really excellent as well. It's dry stored, but because of that, there's no molds or anything like that. You can see a nice dark, the tea soup's even just a little bit darker than the wash that we did. But so hard to describe this tea because it's so not like any other tea that I've ever had. It's almost got this like caramelly sweetness. Maybe I'm picking up caramel because of the color. There's no real like burnt, it's not like burnt caramel or anything like that. There's just like a little bit of like kind of spiciness to it. Almost like a five spice, like an anise, camphor taste. There's a real sweetness as well. And there's kind of almost like a, I don't want to say fruity, but almost like a fruit aspect to it or like a dried, you know, plum. I've really used a decent amount of tea as well. Seven grams. I like to use quite a bit of this and I keep the stevia time short. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you're drinking tea like this and it's 26 years old and it's been produced in Guizhou, probably transited from Guizhou through the Yunnan or Sichuan up into Tibet. And then, you know, eventually after 10 years or so in Tibet, it was brought back to Kunming by a friend of ours who's a tea dealer. In Kunming at the time, there's nobody selling tea like this, period. So they thought, well, you know, we can bring it to Kunming and we'll sit on it and sell it and see if people like it. So it's interesting. I mean, the history behind this tea, not just the long history in terms of its tradition and things like that, but in terms of just this actual tea produced in 1992, what it's, you know, where it's been and whatnot, I think is quite fascinating as well. And that we're able to drink it. You know, most things that were, quote unquote, born in 1992, you don't want to drink or eat. I suppose there's some wines and other, you know, whiskeys and things like that. But just sweet and there still is that kind of grassiness to it. Just the very slightest bit of astringency that immediately transforms into sweetness, right when you hit it, right in this front part of your tongue, you get a little bit of that astringency. And you could easily moderate that by using a lesser amount of this tea as well. But it's interesting to think that these teas, you know, in Tibet, sometimes they're stored for several years before they're used. But often they were just, you know, they were brought up to Tibet or into Tibetan areas, Yunnan and Sichuan, and they were used to make yak butter tea without really having been aged. And I do kind of remember what this tea was like when it was younger, and it was quite a bit more medicinal, but certainly not unpleasantly so. I think the presence of a lot of twigs and what they would say like huangpian or a large, more mature leaf in here tends to make it a little bit more of a subdued tea as opposed to the tea that if it somehow were composed of just, you know, one leaf, one bud sets or something like that, it would be very, very overpoweringly strong in its young age. But I don't know if you all have ever had like real yak butter tea. Those of you who have traveled to Yunnan or Tibet or Sichuan may have had the opportunity to have had real yak butter tea made with either pu'er or probably hei cha. This is probably the most more popular traditional choice. Although some yak butter teas are made with the xia guan, the baoyan brick, which we also sell. And that's a very inexpensive, rough kind of pu'er tea that is also used for making yak butter tea. But yak butter tea is really, really good when it's cold and dry or you're tired or you've been hiking all day at high altitudes, which I've done a few times. And when you come across, you know, along the way, a lot of these areas, you know, we were hiking up near Meili Xueshan in Yunnan in that area. And there was like a little hut off to the side. It wasn't even a road. It was just a trail. There were no roads there at all, just trails, horse trails and people walking, doing a pilgrimage around Meili Xueshan. And there's some, you know, just Tibetan people there who have set up little areas, you know, just a little covered area or whatever. And you just go and you sit down and you drink. You can drink a couple of bowls. You usually get a big pot. They come out and it's a salty yak butter tea. You just sit there and you drink it. And, you know, the cost is always very, very inexpensive. But man, I think that salt really too helps, really helps the body at high altitudes, getting that salt and all that. And the fats and the protein from the yak butter as well and the caffeine. And it's just all this, it's kind of really this perfect blend. And when you drink it in that environment, it's just, you really understand. It's not about the taste. It's about the experience. And it's about fortifying your body to deal with the rather harsh environment there. It's just so pleasant. You drink a tea like this. You just feel that you're drinking like something totally natural and something that has just had the low, kind of the lowest amount of, you know, processing. I don't believe that this is processed in any other way other than picked and sun-dried. It may be rolled. I think it's picked. I don't know if it's, I don't think that this tea is fried. And then it's rolled and then it's sun-dried. So it's really, really basic processing. And again, I really strongly believe, especially tea from this era is produced without any kind of fertilizers or pesticides or anything like that. It just, you know, it wasn't when you're getting a few, you know, one brick costs, you know, three or four yen or maybe at the time, you're not gonna have the money to, you know, go and fertilize and spray pesticides to preen the leaf for something that you don't need it to look nice at all. It's amazing how some of the most humble teas with age can become something really special and unique. You know, probably not as complex as a sheng pu'er would be at 26 years old, but like I said, certainly much more affordable to be able to drink these teas. And half a kilo of tea that I'm now selling for $80. And in fact, my understanding is this tea can sell for quite a bit more now as well, but because I bought quite a few, I'm just, you know, I'm just selling them. I've raised the price gradually over the years, but you know. The tea soup's losing a little bit of color. I'm gonna push this one a little bit more. This is a tea that really likes hot water as well. Definitely a lot of little small stuff. If you want to use a strainer, you could, or just let it, it's pretty heavy. The stuff, the little broken bits will fall to the bottom of the cup as well pretty quickly, so you can just dump those out. Man, I wish I had some access to some yak butter and make this with yak butter. Maybe I'll take one of these someday from my warehouse in Kunming and take one up to Tibet and make some yak butter tea with some 30-year, 35-year-old kong brick. That would be, that would be really awesome. In fact, I'm going to do that. Probably by the time I get around to doing that, we'll all just have virtual reality implants and you can just experience it, you know. I don't know, I've read too many science fiction books, but it's entirely possible. Probably won't be as exciting as watching somebody play Fallout 4, but I think it'll be pretty nice. Anyways, what else? Not much else to say about this. Definitely go online, check out the listing again. If you think you're at all interested, definitely pick up a sample. I think, if anything else, just to broaden your horizons, this is a worthwhile tea to experience. As a hei cha, to me it's totally unique. It doesn't share much similarity to like fu zhuan or hei cha zhuan from Hunan. It's not like liu bao at all. It's not really like hu liu wan so much. Again, it's also been dry stored basically its entire life as well, so that really sets it apart from a lot of other hei cha as well, which are typically stored in Guangxi or Hunan or Anhui. I think it's definitely unique. Kong brick itself is unique, but this kong brick that we are offering is unique because of its history, its storage condition, I think is just incredibly unique as well. I probably didn't wait long enough. This is actually a tea that you could take and boil. You could brew it several times and then you could take it after it lost some power, take it and boil it again. That's kind of how it was intended to be drunk. You could try that if you wanted to maybe get some Indian ghee or something like that. You could get some butter. I haven't tried it, but experiment. I'd be interested to see your comments in the video if you either have this tea or get this tea and you want to try to make some kind of butter tea with it. Might be really interesting. But I think we'll leave it at that since we're not going to wait around. I'm going to push this for a few minutes and drink it again, but we probably won't wait around for that. Again, enjoyable tea, a little piece of history. Check it out. The 1992 Tibetan kong brick on yunansourcing.com. Thanks for watching.