Mahei, three pressings, one continuous cellar
This vertical comes from a single family workshop at the edge of Mahei village in Yiwu, on limestone slopes at 1,100 metres where native trees run eighty years and older. The same household pressed a batch from the first spring flush in 2014, again in 2019, and again in 2024, each time using the same wok-firing, sun-drying, and stone-compression method, so the only real variable across the set is the years themselves.
Liu Shenyang has held all three cakes since they were pressed, cellared under the same conditions rather than scattered across whatever storage happened to be convenient at the time. That consistency is the point of a vertical: without it, you’re tasting the storage as much as the tea. Here, the 2014 has had a decade to develop dark cherry, camphor, and a whisper of ginseng root; the 2019 sits at a succulent midpoint of dried plum and brown sugar; the 2024 is still bright apricot and citrus, its long aging still ahead of it.
Brewed side by side with identical parameters, the set reads as one continuous curve rather than three separate teas, a decade of the same leaf, the same hands, and one storage program tracking it the whole way.