Rareness 5 2025 autumn gaogan

Year: 2025, autumn
Weight: 10 grams sample and 250 grams bing*
Country of origin: China, Yunnan province

* This autumnal collection is wrapped in the same wrapper design, distinguished only by a stamp with Chinese characters indicating the name of the tea. A few bings’ wrappers also have hand-written names in Latin letters on them, written by Milos Karasek himself—a well-known Slovak artist who designed the wrappers for these cakes.

Details:

— the story of Rareness 5

The exact origin of this tea is blurred and unknown. It comes from a deep forest jungle somewhere in the Yiwu mountains, usually called a Guoyoulin, or state forest. What is known, however, is how this tea made its way onto my table in 2019. My friend, Mr. Liu, who sources puerh teas, took me to Yiwu to meet one of his friends. The man who invited us to a kind of family gathering was the director of a large school in Yiwu town. Over the years, he had worked with most people in Yiwu town and the surrounding villages, and in the process had come to know many tea farmers, both near and far. He happened to tell us that one of his former students had brought him this tea.

He brewed the tea for us and asked for our opinion. I was not particularly fond of tasting tea in a cramped room, sitting on a bed near a kitchen, with people eating around us and some smoking nearby. But the moment I tasted this tea, I instantly knew it was something special—a tea that stands out.

The Rareness 5 I have had was produced several times: sometimes as pure gushu, sometimes as a mix of gushu and gaogan, and sometimes blended from both. The tea leaves come from areas where the cultivated trees I call gushu grow, and nearby, high-pole gaogan trees can also be found. Gaogan leaves are more expensive due to the labor and the dangerous climbing required during harvest. This autumn, I decided to make only pure gaogan, as was done back in 2021.

— tasting notes

The first brew reveals the special character of this tea—not an ordinary tea, but one with depth. Even when the first drops are brewed for only a few seconds, it shows sweetness with subtle spices. An overwhelming aroma of rainforest emerges: a humid forest far away from human habitation.

This tea is very easy to drink—you instantly crave another sip and another cup. The minerality is beautiful, so colourful and so tasty. It is hard to find such a fireworks of subtle notes all at once in most teas. This is the essence of the Rareness Series.

The richness and longevity of this tea are remarkable. The thick, rich tea soup repeats over and over through multiple infusions. If you brew this tea more intensely—using around 7 grams for 90 ml of water—it becomes a true representative of forest Yiwu tea: a genuine forest gushu experience with a strong wild mountain character and overwhelming fragrance.

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