Followup on 2007 6FTM Hong Yin

I brought the remaining bit of the Six Famous Tea Mountain 2007 "Hong Yin". Brewing the tea at home birthed a very different animal than the same leaves brewed at my office.



For one, the liquor is not orange! As below, it's a pale yellow. Cloudy through the first two infusions, which I didn't notice at work.



Also, the flavor is very different. At work, the tea was monotonous, pleasant, biscuity, floral. Davin best described how this tea tasted at home: "if you served this to me without me knowing what it was, I'd assume it was overbrewed jasmine tea". Nauseatingly floral, very bitter, and not much under it, we quit drinking the tea after 7 infusions: it developed no new flavors, lost no strength, and it made us quite hungry.

At home I use water stored with a piece of bamboo charcoal and two maifan stones (granite, basically). At work, I use filtered water rather devoid of minerals. At the office I brew in a stoneware pot, at home I used a basaltic clay gaiwan.



The chunk I had left came from close to the center dimple of the cake and took two long rinses to decompress. Unsurprisingly, the leaves pictured above look much more broken than is typical for this cake. You can tell it's a blend, and probably not all hand-harvested.

As for what will become of it over time, who knows. I own no more of it, and that causes me no distress.