Tangyan Burma Raw Tea Cake Vintage 2017

Tangyan is the major town of Tangyan Township in Shan State, Burma. The region is located in the valley of a very mountainous area and is populated largely with the Palaung people who also live in Yunnan Province and Northern Thailand. The Palaung have always been tea drinkers. Historically, every family would grow their own tea bush in the garden, along with fruits like mango and jackfruit.

The Tea Horse Road was a system of caravan paths winding through the mountains of Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet in Southwest China. This was also a tea trade route and let to the trade and sales of post-fermented, aged cakes we frequently see as Pu’er tea in the market. However, this style of aged tea is not limited only to Pu’er County in Yunnan, China, but the tradition can be seen in surrounding areas that were also indigenous to tea and along the Tea Horse Road. This raw tea cake would be considered a sheng style cake in Chinese tradition (sheng translates as “raw”). The 2017 raw tea cake is from 300-400 year old trees and is hand-roasted in a metal pot and sun-dried. The take is compressed into cakes using stone molds to allow for ease of storage while aging.

In this vintage, we are tasting peat, pine resin, wild ginseng with slight aromatics of agar wood and sandalwood with an immensely strong Cha Qi or “tea energy.”