A quick question to those out there more familiar with Yunnan greens and raw pu-erhs:
A year ago we ordered by mail a bunch of teas from Yunnan through tuochatea.com. Among those teas were a couple of large boxes of snow dragon, a very light green tea formed into little 1-inch corkscrews. In taste it reminded me of a bilochun, very mild and sweet with little brewed color. It also became astringent easily so it had to be brewed with cool temperatures for short steeps.
It wasn't one of our favorite teas so we moved on to others and only recently did I find one of the boxes and decided to give it a try. I was sure after a year of sitting in a plain cardboard box (the packaging it came in) it would be stale and tasteless, but I was surprised to find that it now tastes very much like a nice raw pu- erh. It has more depth of flavor and character, a darker liquor, and is similar to some high-grade old-tree sheng pu-erh leaves we picked up this year.
Is this normal for a Yunnan green, or was the snow dragon incorrectly labeled as a green and is really a variety of loose-leaf sheng pu- erh? Is it a quality of the tea varietal grown in Yunnan, or contamination from pu-erh processing in the same factory?
-Charles