Gushu Rare5 ’20

Name: Rare5 ’20
Original name: Kōngshān yōuyùn, 空山幽韵*
Year: 2020, spring
Weight: 250 grams pressed cake
Whereabouts: China, Yunnan province

Details:

slow opening with chocolate notes, watery & pure, light sweetness, bitter-sweet & baked notes, a nice wood-y finish, sweetish spicy ness in the aftertastes, something that connects all 3 Rare5 gushu’s from 2020,’21,’23, sometimes this unique flavour is more sweeter sometimes more spicy sometimes bitter.

Lazy drops* shows a really ‘rude’ bitterness. The 5-6th brew is very rewarding, giving these minerality and exotic woods notes that I love lately, it is like salty bitter and sweet, reminds me of salty caramel ice creams variations sold these years,

*when some drops remains in an empty teapot, they lazyly sliding down the leaves to the bottom, they tends to be a real concentrated essence of the tea

This is a gushu version of Rare5. This tea is made gushu only not gaogan high pole trees. Gushu are trees that has been trimmed (not cut down but rather ‘adjusted’ to easier picking of leaves) and gaogan are forgotten high pole tea trees in ‘big’ forest. We could say gaogan is also gushu.

This tea was stored in Jinghong, Yunnan province till mid 2025.

Alex puerh blog review here (This is review of an earlier batch from Jinghong that was brought to Europe in mid 2023)

* poetic rendering of 空山幽韵 in the spirit of classical Chinese poetry:
“Silent peaks, where hidden grace lingers.”
or
“In the empty mountain, a quiet charm abides.”
These translations aim to capture both the stillness (空山) and the subtle, lingering beauty (幽韵) that classical poets often evoke.

source: This is a chatgpt translation