Xinghai Releases 2023

Xinghai Releases is a rather prosaic arising from an incident already shared among a few of you.  A snafu arose with the shop pics that only happens if something new is posted.  Instead of the headache of trying to fix that, already attempted with “the fixor“, items will be posted behind the scenes.  A simple word search for item will suffice and missives of this sort will be issued replete with links as well.

The Puerh Junky project is more a study than curation.  This is mentioned because evidently a large catalogue suggests haphazard buying.  That’s never the case, and as mentioned previously, usually only a few items are acquired and those are sat upon till they’re fit for immediate drinking by the buyer. . . unless otherwise notified.  In any event, having items off page so to speak keeps the shop in the moderately overwhelming zone, as opposed to causing outright apoplexy.

As a study, focus is narrowly centered about specific factories and many only within themes encompassing usually Chinesey stuff like the Lunar New Year and peacocks.  Xinghai is a rather convenient factory of attention, as their logo often includes a peacock and the founder has a solid reputation.  That said, in a recent post on top puerh purveyors from various sites, they didn’t appear once, in contrast to say Fuhai, Zhongcha, and Liming, which are also included in the shop.  Below are links to the current Xinghai raw additions for the first part of 2023:

• ’14 Xinghai LBZ— Have a whole tong arriving this Jan ’23 (OSTENSIBY), but have one or two now.  Recent price check on this shows it’s doubled and I won’t be getting more.

• ’05 Xinghai Green Mark— This is the second batch.  Prototypical XH offering.

• ’07 HK Returns 10th— Low risk intro to Xinghai TF, also second batch.  Well stored.

• ’06 Bulang Old Tree—  Second batch with first more than twice the price.  Extremely interesting production in the vein of Quincy and Tiger.

• ’05 Bulang Shengtai Tribute— Requires time and attention.
• ’06 Stylin‘– I forgot to add talcum in the description.
• ’07 Green Peacock— The perfect juncture of character and economy.

Xinghai’s practice is to not date stamp their second-batch productions, which are priced about half of the first run.  As a whole, their productions are not especially sweet.  This could be because they’ve adhered to a very traditional processing and the sweetness has yet to arrive.  Stylin‘ and Green Peacock are on the sweet side.  HK Returns is in the most advanced stage of maturation, while the others are in varying stages of wood and usually apple.  The real outlier is the LBZ which differs greatly by virtue of its Guangdong storage and in all likelihood quasi-Lincang processing.