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I received a free 20g sample of this with a teaware order a couple months back. It has sat in my pumidor since then and now was finally time to give it a go. My sample was practically just a single large chunk from the cake with a handful of loose leaves at the bottom of the wrapper. Doing my best to try to maintain leaf integrity, I separated 9.5 grams from the sample for my trusty 140ml gaiwan. It was difficult to make out much aroma from the dry leaf, but in the preheated gaiwan I did pick up a scent that came across as somewhat darker to me than in some other young raws. After a brief 10s rinse the scent was very reminiscent of the white2tea 2017 “f*ck what u heard” that I reviewed last time. Once the leaves cooled down, the aroma did change. It was perhaps more sweeter, I don’t know if I’d use the word floral.

I’ve been in the habit of drinking some of the rinses lately, and despite filling the gaiwan almost full I did drink this one as well. It was very light as is to be expected. Green, buttery, with something else in there later on that I can’t put my finger on. Perhaps it’s some sort of floral sweetness of some kind, but I can’t really say. There was some body/mouthfeel to the tea already and it made my heart start beating noticeably harder in my chest as well as made me feel significantly hot. It also made blood start pumping into a certain key region in my lower body, which was interesting and an entirely new experience related to tea.

At this point I gave the tea my customary ten minute rest before I proceeded to the first proper infusion. In this time the large chunks soaked enough water and loosened enough for me to make the leaves come apart by just poking at the clumps a little with my finger. I proceeded to do a total of ten infusion, for 7s, 7s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 75s, 2 min. and 3 min. The first steep had a light flavor of cream/vanilla infused with green. The body wasn’t that heavy, but the mouthfeel was nice and noticeable. After my initial observations about the taste, I actually forgot about the taste entirely as the mouthfeel was such that it just really grabbed all your attention. Even though, apart from the even stronger pro-erectile effects than before, the direct effects of cha qi were subtle, you got the sense that there’s energy in this tea. This was the last I noticed during my session though.

The second infusion still had some body to it, but the nice mouthfeel from before was gone. The taste was your typical green young sheng flavor, but slightly more mature/developed/elegant with perhaps some underlying sweetness of some sort to balance it a little. You could still notice hints of the creamy vanilla from the prior infusion. There wasn’t really any noticeable astringency to the tea yet, but it did leave the surfaces of your mouth a tad sandpapery. The third steep had a very “clear” taste to it. There wasn’t that much of the green or astringent character, but they were out there somewhere. The tea is hard to describe beyond that. It didn’t simply taste like water, nor did it have a particularly mineral character to it either. The body was light and the tea did leave the roof of your mouth a bit more sandpapery than before, but not your tongue.

The body became even lighter in the fourth steeping, barely surpassing water, although it was still not poor. There was more astringency now, and at times you could get an almost metallic finish. There wasn’t much greenness to the taste and instead the tea had more of an astringent taste to it. The fifth steep produced a darker green flavor than I’m used to experiencing in young raws, with this time not very much astringency at all. There was an interesting balance to the rather simple green flavor, with the balance coming from something darker lying underneath that might’ve also been almost savory in nature. The steep was surprisingly filling, leaving me feeling sated after finishing my cup even though the flavor itself was nothing to write home about. The tea left a green aroma lingering in your mouth and nose even though there wasn’t really a lingering aftertaste to accompany it. There was also slightly more body, even if it remained light.

While I don’t think that the sixth steep was a weak infusion, there weren’t really any flavors there to grab onto. There was some typical green astringency that you expect, of course, as well as a sort of weird vibe I got in the finish that reminded me of manure, but all in all there wasn’t really much flavor there. The seventh steep did rectify this somewhat by presenting a green taste that differed from the green taste I get in a lot of young shengs. It reminded me of a sort of semi-passable lower grade green tea. While there wasn’t much astringency, it did leave your mouth a bit sandpapery.

Somewhat surprisingly, while the eighth steep was relatively light in terms of viscosity, it did have an okay mouthfeel. The taste was now that of your typical young sheng, green and slightly astringent. After lengthening the steeping time for the ninth infusion, I found that the tea was starting to taste unenjoyable to me. I expected the tenth infusion to only get worse, but it was actually better than its predecessor. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, but it wasn’t too unpleasant to drink. While I suspect this tea could have probably gone on, I decided to stop here because I did not want it to get nasty.

After really liking Crimson Lotus’s Lucky Cloud which is allegedly also Jingmai material, I was interested to try out my first raw pu’er from the region. All in all, to a still relative pu’er newb this came across to me as a midrange sheng, which is also how it’s priced. If there’s one word I would use to describe it, I think it would be “balanced.” I don’t drink very many blended raws, so I don’t know how much this being a blend has to do with it, but this tea, while still very young and in my opinion not something I would drink now, rounds off some of the rougher edges you tend to see in my experience in material that comes from a single family, etc. I don’t think those things mean very much now, but ten years down the line it would be interesting to see how they affect the overall profile and balance.

While this tea did seem to have some cha qi – even if very front-loaded – decent texture that will hopefully improve with age, and seemingly okay longevity, nothing about it struck me as particularly special. As this is a tea that I would not drink now, if I were to invest money and time into a cake, I would want something I have a good feeling about. While this will likely be a very good tea in ten years’ time or more, if I’m going to make that sort of commitment, I don’t just want a tea that I think will be good, I want a tea I think will potentially be amazing, even if it doesn’t turn out that way. I want either something really high quality or something really special and unique. I feel this tea is neither of those. If you are looking specifically for Jingmai material to age on a budget, then try a sample of this to see if it’s what you’re looking for. Otherwise, if you’re going to be sitting on a cake for 10+ years, I’d save up and invest in higher grade material like the Midas Touch. If this tea were drinkable now, it’d be a different story, but in my eyes it’s neither interesting, rewarding or enjoyable enough in its current state. Your mileage may vary of course. If you’re looking for the best bang for your buck, then I think there are better value propositions out there. If you’re looking specifically for Jingmai and you really love Jingmai, then there are less. It is not my intention to try to sell this tea short as it has quite a few promising attributes and probably has potential to be a very tasty tea, it’s just not there yet.

I received a free sample of Bitterleaf Teas’ 2017 In Bloom with a recent order and will likely be ordering a sample of the 2017 Midas Touch to try out as well, so expect to see reviews of more Jingmai teas in the not too distant future. Those are of course different vintage than Jingmai LOVE, but I’m interested to see how they compare nonetheless.

This is the first white2tea production I’ve ever tried. Before we proceed, it should be noted that I may be an extremely biased reviewer and you may want to disregard everything I have to say about this tea or any other white2tea production. To explain my weird relationship with this company, I may not know very much about them apart from that Paul who runs it started out as a blogger and that their teas are extremely well regarded by many people in the Western online tea community based on information I’ve passively accumulated browsing the web, but browsing their site, looking at the names and artwork for their cakes and the vague product descriptions paired with often frankly quite ridiculous prices, I can’t help but get a sense of a pretentious hipster label. Yes, there are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around by vendors when it comes to pu’er and ultimately none of those things matter because what it all boils down to is whether you like the tea or not. But informed tea drinkers do want to know certain things about the material they are buying, especially if they are paying a lot of money for it. People want to be able to try to gauge how the tea might age and they’d also like to be able to compare the cost of the tea to the base cost of similar material. And if they like the tea they’d like to possibly seek out similar material from the same region and so forth to see if it shares any similar characteristics. I can agree with white2tea’s philosophy of letting the tea speak for itself on paper, but they lost any right to make such statements after releasing a product like The Treachery of Story Telling that costs an absolutely absurd amount of money, features no product description whatsoever and they sell no samples for.

Another reason why I’ve been avoiding their products up till now is because I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to tea and while I appreciate people like Glen from Crimson Lotus Tea who create blends and consider tea their art, I don’t mind experiencing the flaws and imperfections of single origin material, and what white2tea offers is exactly that, blends. To use an analogy, while I love music but don’t listen to that much classical apart from modern classical and minimalism in particular, when I do listen to classical, what I very much want to hear is music recorded live in the studio or live in concert, none of that modern over-producer, over-edited crap that is all too prevalent nowadays. You’d be shocked if you saw what the Pro Tools sessions for a modern digital classical recording look like and how many edits there can be in just a single track. To continue the music analogy, those audiophiles who understand the breathtaking beauty that well recorded analog recordings can offer know that “hiss is your friend”. A little tape hiss never killed anyone, and as long as we are talking about hiss that’s within reasonable bounds, making hiss part of the discussion about sound quality is just nonsense. In tea, I think one could liken noise to bitterness and astringency perhaps to digital clipping. As long as bitterness is within tolerable levers (too much of anything in life is a bad thing), it is not an issue and can enhance the experience and even be very pleasurable and desired. Astringency, like digital clipping, is generally not desired or found pleasant. Some amount of astringency can be okay and digital clipping can be used creatively to create a certain sound, but when digital clipping is introduced as a product of trying to simply make the record sound louder, most people find it unpleasant and undesirable. Of course from a young sheng a certain amount of bitterness or astringency is expected and generally desired to give assurance of its ageing potential. Anyway, to get off this tangent, while I acknowledge that blended teas may be better than the sum of their parts, I, while a perfectionist of sorts when it comes to certain things, don’t mind imperfections, in fact I welcome them. Imperfection is in itself perfection. There’s nothing more boring than perfection. It is the pursuit of perfection that drives and motivates us, but I don’t think we’d actually ever want to attain it.

By now you have hopefully gathered that my extreme distaste for white2tea without ever having tasted any of their teas is part rational, part irrational, or perhaps just purely irrational. In any event, up till now I’ve avoided handing over any of my money to white2tea even though I’ve been curious to try out their products, but in the end I ended up ordering a couple of samples from different price points. Originally I’d planned to taste these teas blind and have a person pick teas for me at random from various pu’er samples from different vendors to remove any biases I may have, but right now I’m doing a small experiment to see how much (or little) letting a pu’er sample chill out and hydrate in your pumidor impacts the tea. I may still do the blind test for the other samples, unless I deem it too much hassle, we’ll see. Regardless, this tea was drunk the same day I received the sample, so that along with my potential bias may affect my findings. I will be having another session once the sample has spent some time in my pumidor and if the results differ notably from these initial ones I will do a follow-up review.

To finally get to my actual tasting notes, I brewed around 8.4g of this tea in a 140ml gaiwan. The sample I received was prepared exemplarily, consisting of really nice looking large intact leaves and a few larger chunks. No dust, no debris. I don’t know how they detached so many so nice looking leaves from the cake. I got hardly any smell trying to sniff the sample bag, but once in the preheated gaiwan my nose was greeted by the scent of… cotton candy? Maybe. I’ve seen the words cotton candy floating around in the list of flavor notes for some young pu’er teas recently and that was actually on my mind right when I sniffed the leaves so I may have been influenced by that. I haven’t actually had cotton candy in a decade or more so I can’t really say I can recall off the top of my head how it smells like. After a 10s rinse the smell of the wet leaves was green, darkish and buttery. Pretty typical for some young raws. Since this was such an expensive tea, I did drink the rinse. It was extremely light, but had a nice body, which is not that unusual for a lot of teas if you rinse them with a relatively small amount of water like I did. The taste that I could discern was sweet, buttery, with a finish that was… maybe fruity would be a more conventional way of putting it, but I’d describe it as kind of perfumey. I don’t want to use the word artificial, but it had this “unnatural” quality to it, like it consisted of an impossible combination of flavor notes. The finish turned mineral after some time passed. After it died down, there wasn’t really any kind of lasting aftertaste. I can’t really say if the rinse had any effect on me, but if it did, I’d probably describe it as calming/grounding.

I carried on with the brewing after giving the leaves a 10 minute rest. I did a total of nine more steeps, for 7s, 7s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 75s and 2 min. The first proper infusion had a nice milky/juicy body. It was still very, very light in flavor. Despite my extreme preconceived biases, I actually secretly had really, really high expectations for this tea and I expected it to blow me away. This was evident when I thought I could feel cha qi from just the first sip, before I’d even swallowed the tea. I assume all of that was just pure placebo. After this I never felt any cha qi over the course of the entire sessions (spoiler). The flavor wasn’t exactly like water, but water is the closest thing I can think of to describe it. I couldn’t really discern if it was mineraly, perfumey, astringent or what. The finish was sort of unpleasant, but in like the mildest way possible. Again I happened to pay attention to how the finish dies rather quickly and leaves your palate relatively clean without any sort of real aftertaste. At this point I drew the conclusion this is probably a tea you don’t drink for taste. I was basing this on expectancy of plenty of body and cha qi. Things didn’t quite turn out that way (spoilers).

After doing the second steep, I noticed a leaf with clear black spots/burn marks on it in the gaiwan. This wasn’t anything like the scorching you can see in tea leaves that have been hit with boiling water over and over again over the course of a session in the form of mild discoloration, etc. I can only assume the black marks are from the wok. I’ve heard you can get burnt leaves if the frying isn’t done correctly, but I’ve never actually seen it myself before. If the spots are indeed from the pan frying, I find that a very big no-no for material that otherwise looks quite nice and is being asked such a steep price for.

The second infusion itself lacked any real flavor initially. The first thing it reminded me of was fat-free milk, but the milkiness went away with time. There was an underlying young greenness and astringency, but both were very faint. There was also a mineral character. The body was lighter now, which even though the tea was still probably thicker than some other teas was kinda disappointing after the last “two” steeps. Even though the flavors weren’t strong, I wasn’t enjoying the tea very much. The very last gulp had a very rocky taste to it, literally like licking a rock. That was a first one for me. Although the tea left some stuff residing in the mouth, there was once again no real lasting aftertaste to the tea.

After the third steeping the leaves were finally starting to open up. I noted that the material does look rather good, healthy is the word I would use. Sadly the body of the soup was even lighter now, not too far from water. D: The flavor wasn’t too far off from water either. It wasn’t really super mineraly anymore. There was a very, very lightly green aspect to it, but overall the tea stayed impressively neutral in flavor, like it was trying its damnedest to be Switzerland and not taste like anything, not even water. I could see someone calling the flavor a super, super, super light white chocolate if you ignore the slight green tinge. The taste was soft and the astringency was kept surprisingly well under control for now. Since it had become a habit by this point, I noted that there was once again no aftertaste, the taste just dies down like soft drinks for example are designed to do to keep you drinking them. This tea was no battery acid like some young shengs can be for your stomach, but I noted it starting to affect me somewhat, although I hadn’t actually eaten anything so it could have also been my growing hunger.

As I continued steeping, I noted that the leaves look kinda weird color-wise. I’m not sure if it has to do with the tea being blended. The appearance reminds me of the dry leaf for Oriental Beauty. The fourth steep hit me with a ton of astringency. It was almost more like a flavor than the typical physical sensation you get. The mouth-pucker was actually kept relatively minimal. The tea had perhaps a mineral finish. Albeit I didn’t particularly enjoy it, the tea wasn’t as unpleasant as you might think. Over time the tea became dominantly more mineraly – unfortunately the bad kind – replacing the astringent taste. Once again no aftertaste.

The leaves started looking just about fully open after the fifth steep. I will say again that if nothing else the leaves do look rather pretty, even if different than what I’m used to. The tea was still extremely light. Thankfully it did not have the same astringency from before. It had perhaps a very, very light front vegetal sweetness to it. It tasted greener, more vegetal than before, even though the flavors were still faint. The greenness started to resemble for the first time the typical bad young sheng greenness I don’t enjoy, although it was still lighter than in other teas. At the end of my cup, I could feel some slight pucker on my tongue.

I was scared to lengthen the steeping time for the sixth infusion, but what really surprised me was to find that the flavors had tapered off severely despite me doing that. The tea was mineraly again. You really had to look for the vegetal character to maybe catch a glimpse of it if you were lucky. The tea was starting to taste a bit nasty to me, although it was soft nasty. There was more pucker now after finishing my cup like I’d expected, but the sensation wasn’t as uncomfortable as with other teas.

I didn’t really want to keep drinking the tea, but I went on anyway. Somewhat ironically, I think the flavors were genuinely really strong and bold for the first time in the seventh steep. I’m not sure if the taste was a weird mixture between mineral and vegetal or what. I don’t know why, but I found the taste less enjoyable than the “too young, too green” taste I’ve encountered in so many other young raws. The following eighth steep was equally bold in flavor, flavor that was that epitome young sheng green astringent bad green tea taste. It did have a softer edge to it than other teas though.

In an effort to try to do as many steeps as I could, I did do one final ninth infusion and I was punished gravely for it. The tea was really damn nasty from the moment it hit my tongue and I for the life of me could not finish my cup. It’s not typical for me to toss a cup even if it’s not very enjoyable, but this one I simply could not bring myself to down. Even the half a cup that I did soldier down caused unpleasant prickling on my tongue. The tea was way beyond just simple bad green tea.

And there you have it. A bit of a longer review. If you made it through the whole thing, rant and all, then well done. You’re a real sport. Needless to say I did not enjoy this tea. I’m not sure if saying this is the worst raw pu’er I’ve ever had is going too far, but it’s not far off. One could say that it started off kind of decent, but I think it would be a bit too generous to say that it was genuinely interesting even at that point. As I was drinking this tea I started to ponder what my criteria are for rating a tea “Not Recommended” as that has not come up before, and whether it would be too extreme of me to rate this tea as such. After giving it some thought after the session though, taking into consideration that this is one of the most negative experiences I’ve had with pu’er and pairing that with the extremely high price point of this tea, I think there is actually nothing extreme about my conclusion. I half expect some pu’er connoisseurs to say I don’t know how to appreciate this tea, which could of course very well be true, but I fail to see how that would be the case when I found this tea mainly quite unpleasant to drink after the first few steeps. I got no qi, the body and texture were ultimately disappointing after the initial steeps, and the longevity was really disappointing as well, especially relative to the strength of flavor and the price of the material (bringing up the price again).

Now, it could very well be that this tea will improve dramatically in my pumidor as it hydrates a little. As stated earlier, I am going to session this tea again in a few weeks’ time and if the results differ dramatically I will report on that. It is possible that I will try to do the blind tasting arrangement for the other white2tea samples I have, but as fun as that would be, if I deem it too much hassle I may just end up reviewing the teas regularly. I’d like to be able to trust my own ability to ultimately review teas fairly.

This cake has spent a few months in my pumidor. Today I finally decided to break into it. This is over a year old now, and while still containing plenty of various shades of green, I was surprised to see some much darker shades than I was expecting. The leaves are respectably large and the average leaf size is surprisingly homogenous. Leaf integrity has been maintained well in pressing the cake, and unlike in many cakes where the surface layer looks really nice but beneath that you find a lot of broken leaf and dust, the leaf quality seems consistent throughout the cake.

For this session I filled my trusty 250ml Yixing clay teapot with 13.3g of leaf and after a brief 10s rinse followed by a 15-minute rest I got to brewing. I did a total of nine steeps, for 15s, 15s, 17s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 1 min., 2 min. and 3 min. respectively. The drinking was done from a silver teacup. The scent of the dry leaf in a preheated teapot was a very typical young pu’er scent of hay. The scent of the rinsed leaves was also very typical: green, slightly creamy, and vegetal.

At first I wasn’t sure if the first steep was really watery or just really light. When the tea hits your tongue it tastes a lot like water. The other flavors are quite light and subtle and come with an interesting delay with each sip, not just in the beginning. The taste is green, vegetal, maybe very subtly sweet, and clean. There’s a very gentle vegetal aftertaste that appears with some delay and lasts quite long. I’m not sure, but I may have already felt some qi from the very first steep. There was some warmth in my belly and slight ache in different parts of my body.

The second steep was very similar to the first. It tasted a lot like mineral water when it hit your tongue. The mineraly green tea taste comes with a delay. The taste isn’t similar to a lot of other young raws I’ve drunk that border on unpleasant and conjure an image of you steeping some random tree leaves, but instead the flavor is comparable to some actual pretty high-end green teas that have a very dominant mineral character to them and aren’t necessarily that focused solely on yummy flavors and a wow factor. I haven’t drunk that many quality green teas, but I’m thinking of teas like Long Jing, Huang Shan Mao Feng and Anji Bai Cha (at least the ones I’ve had). The second infusion maintains the long aftertaste of the first.

The third steep tasted possibly even more watery to me than before, but I simply can’t say if what I was tasting was actually the taste of the water pushing through or the taste of the tea itself. The overall taste was very mineraly, with less green notes than before. I’m not sure if there was possibly some very, very slight astringency to the finish; it felt different from your typical astringency. The green, vegetal, maybe even slightly sweet aftertaste from before remained the same, however. The aftertaste may have even been getting better. Despite my initial uncertainty about this tea and how relatively simple it is taste-wise, it was around this third steep that I began finding it surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. The way it sounds on paper betrays the true qualities of this tea.

In the fourth steeping I immediately noticed the lighter body. The body in this tea had actually never grabbed my attention up to that point, but when it was suddenly gone I immediately took notice. I’d say the body in previous infusions had always been reasonably light, but it had been there. This tea is interesting, because if you don’t consciously pay attention to the texture in your mouth, you simply don’t notice it. The taste continued to be very mineraly and retained the same aftertaste. Like a great green tea, this sheng in its current state is a surprisingly nice tea to just sip away. I could however definitely feel it rummaging my gut a little at this point. This is undoubtedly from gushu material and commands a certain amount of respect.

In the fifth steeping the flavors were slightly more immediate than before and perhaps slightly more forward as well. The tea may have also been getting a shade sweeter, with the sweetness being mineral in character. The prior body was back now and not watery thin anymore. The same familiar aftertaste was also retained. The tea continued to be surprisingly nice, although I’m not sure why. I suspect it may have some mood lifting qualities, but they are so subtle that I could not reliably identify them, possibly partially because the tea also feels like it’s wrecking your body from the inside like a kid throwing a tantrum. I would describe this sort of as a green tea+, even though it’s not necessarily strictly better than some of the finest green teas.

The sixth steeping saw no change. The tea continued to be very enjoyable, contemplative even. The seventh infusion however tasted even more dominantly like mineral water than all the prior ones, with other aspects of the tea greatly diminished. The body remained consistent to before, if not a tad thicker. It may have actually even been considerably thicker than before, but you really have to pay attention to the texture in this tea to notice it. After sipping enough of the tea, a bit more green sweetness did appear, but the previously very consistent aftertaste had now weakened notably.

I pushed the eight steep a bit harder, which resulted in even stronger mineral water taste, but this time with a bit of a harsh/unpleasant edge to it. There was however some mineral sweetness in the finish and overall the steep was still surprisingly tasty (mineral) water. The greenness was there if you really looked for it, and there was some faint astringency in the finish as well. The ninth infusion was the last one I did, and this time the flavors were more balanced as I wasn’t pushing the tea in the same manner as before. The flavor was still dominated by the mineral character, but the mineral taste had changed from before. The body was somewhat lighter now and you could detect some minor astringency in the finish, but the mineral taste still retained notable strength to it and on that front the tea showed no signs of losing steam yet. I, however, decided to call it here, because I’d had plenty of tea by that point.

After some uncertainty during the first two steeps, I found myself having a surprisingly positive experience with this tea. The tea has a very pure, light and simple taste right now, which really surprised me. I usually don’t enjoy a mineral character in tea, apart from some really high-end teas that can sometimes have an actually enjoyable mineral taste to them, but this is really rare. In this tea it wasn’t necessarily enjoyable, but I didn’t mind it either. I also typically demand dynamic progression from the flavor over the session, but with this tea the very consistent flavor did not bother or bore me. There wasn’t really any totally obvious qi, but the tea’s young potency can certainly be felt in the stomach and as aching in your muscles during and long after the sessions. Those to whom some potent young sheng can feel like battery acid in their stomach and simply can’t handle it may not want to drink this tea young.

Your session may vary wildly from mine, but at its current stage this is a tea that I would recommend to people who enjoy green tea with a prominent mineral character. If for you the taste is the most important thing about tea, this may not be for you, however. The more I drink tea the more emphasis I’ve started to put on aftertaste, texture and how the tea makes you feel. Taste is of course great, but some of the best teas I’ve had did not blow you away with their front flavors. This tea has such an interesting flavor profile and interesting delay to the follow-up flavors that I find it hard to gauge the longevity of this tea, especially since I did not fully steep it out. If you draw the line where the greener notes drop off, then the longevity is perhaps a bit disappointing. If you draw the line somewhere else, however, then I have no idea how long this one can go without actually trying it out.

I debated over whether to rate this tea as Recommended or not. I try to be somewhat strict about that so it does not lose its meaning, and one of the main criteria I’ve crystallized it down to is whether I would buy more of the tea were I to run out. As much as I enjoy this tea in its current state, I’m not sure if I’d buy more of it after drinking all 400 grams. However, when I take into account the ageing potential of this tea, I have high hopes this one will become really yummy in ten years or so. Who knows how it will actually age, but I have a good feeling about this one, granted I’m a total newb when it comes to ageing. Therefore I am awarding San Ke Shu a personal recommendation, making it only the third tea so far. If the tea interests you at all, I recommend checking it out relatively soon, because not many cakes were pressed, only thirty or so I believe. The prices are not going to come down and once these are gone they are gone.

I’d like to have one more session with this tea, but I will try to refrain as this tea does feel quite special and I’d like to reserve as much of it as possible for the future. I’ve been somewhat concerned about my pu’er storage after a string of some negative experiences and disappointments, but luckily this session helped dispel many of those concerns. I will have to continue sessioning my teas to verify that the concerns I raised in my previous Crimson Lotus Tea single tree Lao Ban Zhang gushu review were unfounded, but for the time being I’m content concluding that young sheng simply can be very fickle.

I’m debating over whether I should move to using a slightly higher leaf-to-water ratio with my Yixing since the pour time is quite good relative to the size, but that remains to be seen.

This single serving spent a week in my pumidor in a humidity just shy of 70% RH before the session. I believe this was my first time drinking raw pu’er as mao cha. The dry leaves were impressively large. To honor this special tea, I drank it together with my mom using a full set of a fine silver teapot, cha hai and cups. The 120ml size of the teapot was perfect for the eight grams provided, although there was barely enough room to fit all the leaves in and the largest one I had to soak in some warm water to bend it enough to fit it in without breaking it (it was absolutely massive). As for most of my tea reviews, I used bottled spring water for consistency.

I gave the leaves a typical 10s rinse, but since this was such expensive material we of course drank the rinse (might as well call it the first infusion). It was the most sublime rinse I’ve ever drank! White chocolate! Definitely white chocolate. Absolutely stunning. In a league of its own. Far above any other tea I’ve had and this was only the rinse. Rich, divine, euphoric. An overwhelming multi-sensory experience. I could have sworn even the liquor in the cup smelled like white chocolate, but it could have also been the cup itself (warm silver smells like bliss). The wet leaves themselves had a pretty typical greenish scent, with perhaps some creaminess in there, but that could have again been the silver.

At this point I gave the rinsed leaves a customary 10-minute rest before resuming with the brewing. I proceeded to do a total of fifteen more infusions, for 12s, 12s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 50s, 85s, 2m 15s, 3m 15s, 4m 30s, 6m, 8m, 12m, and 20m respectively according to my mental clock (and later cell phone). The “first” infusion was quite similar to the rinse. Soft, delicate, gentle, maybe a bit floral, with a hint of green perhaps in there somewhere. All in all the rinse was better though. The next infusion was stronger, greener, with some mild astringency. This did not change for the next several steeps. The tea continued to brew out soft, delicate, green, slightly astringent. A pattern I’ve experienced many young raws fall into after the first few initial steeps, before sometimes proceeding into sweetness. Where this tea differed from the others I’ve had was the softness and delicacy to this essentially bad green tea taste, although I’m not sure if this is an attribute of the tea or all the silver used (this was my first time brewing sheng in a silver teapot). I noticed perhaps some very, very mild vegetal sweetness in some infusions as well as a “cleaner” taste in some of the later infusions. For a few steeps I did experiment with some slightly cooler water as I’ve heard some people brew young sheng at below boiling, but it did not have a significant impact on the flavor. The greenness and astringency were perhaps diminished to a very slight degree, but the overall flavor was weaker as well. No real changes in the flavor profile.

It took till the tenth infusion (this was also when I returner back to boiling water) before the greenness and astringency started weakening and the flavor profile shifted back towards the early steeps. The leaves were showing no signs of losing steam at this point. The overall experience became softer like in the beginning and eventually the greenness tapered off completely while the very mild and manageable astringency remained quite constant. One steep produced a mild cooling effect in the mouth as well as a relatively weak but reasonably nice aftertaste. The tea exhibited perhaps some very minor (often vegetal) sweetness in the very late steeps, but not nearly to the degree than many other young shengs. At no point was there any kind of mineral flavor. The very last infusion I did was the only one that felt significantly thick in the mouth. Prior to that only a couple random steeps had displayed some light body to them. For the fifteenth infusion the flavors had taperer off quite significantly and the astringency had shot up for the first time, although it was still manageable. The tea soup also came across as somewhat creamy, but that may have just been the texture. The leaves could have probably gone on for a couple more steeps, but based on the trajectory of this tea I did not expect it to improve from this point onward and I also didn’t have the time and patience to start doing hour-long infusions just to see if what came out would be drinkable or not.

At the end of the session the brewed leaves were a very pale green, massive, and extremely soft and tender. If I’ve ever seen leaves that I could believe were gushu based on looks, these would be them. This being mao cha no doubt helped preserve the integrity of the leaves, but examining the big, stout leaves after brewing does not fail to make an impression.

All in all I’m not sure how I’d rate this session as a whole. The rinse was the absolute highest quality cup of tea I’ve had the privilege of consuming and the longevity of this tea is probably the very best I’ve seen in a raw pu’er, but after the first few initial steepings the flavors became extremely basic and not particularly enjoyable even if they possessed a very soft quality to them. Back when I first started getting into young raw pu’er some nine months ago (still haven’t progressed to aged or semi-aged, although I have a couple samples on the way), the very first sessions I had were very dynamic in terms of flavor and always hit me with very noticeable cha qi. Since the beginning of summer, all the sessions I’ve had have lacked cha qi and have either deteriorated after the initial steeps to the bad green tea taste I experienced in this tea in the mid steeps or started off that way from the very beginning, even teas I’ve drunk before and had totally different experiences with. I don’t know if the summer has something to do with it. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky with the very first teas I drank and they have since all advanced to an awkward state in their development all at the same time. In any case, what I’m saying is something about the way I’m storing my tea or brewing it might be affecting it negatively, unless the experience I had with this tea falls within expectations. I’ve been avoiding raw pu’er for most of the summer due to the bad experiences I’ve had, but I’ll need to get to sampling more of the teas I have to see if I’ve just had bad luck or if there truly might be an issue. The next sample I receive I’m going to try out right away and then drink again after it has spent some time in my pumidor to compare.

Anyway, the first two cups of this were sublime. If stored correctly, I could see material like this being extremely nice in a decade or two. My own experience leaves me somewhat unsure if I can wholeheartedly recommend purchasing a sample of this to experience a tea of this caliber for yourself, but if you love tea and love pu’er and this isn’t your first rodeo, then consider it an investment into growing your own tea appreciation.

Is Ban Zhang truly the king of pu’er? I dunno, but you can serve me the rinse from this tea any day. Look forward to my next pu’er review hopefully very soon.

The infamous Golden Needle White Lotus. I acquired a cake of this a while back through Yunnan Sourcing and after giving it a few months to sit in my pumidor I finally decided to give it a taste. The cake is very similar to the Yong De Blue Label I reviewed a while back in that it consisting of predominantly very small grade leaves the bing feels like it’s going to come apart at any moment, and thus the bottom of the wrapper was covered in a record amount of loose leaves.

I prepared a fairly standard amount of 11.3g in my 160ml Jianshui clay teapot and after a brief 10s rinse and a 10 minute rest I got to brewing. I did a total of eight steeps, for 12s, 12s, 12s, 18s, 25s, 48s, 90s and 2 min. 30s according to my mental clock. The smell of the cake, the dry leaves in a hot teapot and the wet leaves after the rinse were all extremely classic examples of a typical shu pu’er. The rinse liquor, however, had something atypical about it. I don’t really know how to describe it, but it was interesting.

The first infusion brewed a cloudy reddish brown, like muddy lake water. It was a strong steep, with a dominant earthy character and a grainy texture. Some might say it tasted like muddy lake water. There was no sweetness. The next infusion brewed darker as is to be expected. There was less earth now, a hint of chocolate in the background, and the tiniest amount of sweetness without there being any actual sweetness in the tea. Overall the second steep had a rounder, more balanced taste. The tea was still very strong, but a nudge below the first one.

The third steep was even darker reddish brown, but not even remotely close to black as I’d expected from such small leaf grade. The strength ended up being weaker than the last two, however, because I flubbed trying to extend the steeping time by a couple seconds and the infusions ended up being about the same time. But it wasn’t weak by any means, just weaker in comparison. The tea had a very distinct flavor of coffee, one that has stood on a hot plate for a while and then cooled a bit before drinking, but without the bitterness. The taste of coffee was especially noticeable in the aftertaste.

The fourth brew produced a clearer, less dark liquor with most of the cloudiness now gone. I was getting a very typical shu pu’er flavor now, with maybe a hint more sweetness without there being any actual sweetness in the tea still. For the first time, and I think for the only time, there was now maybe a bit of body. I was disappointed at first by the sudden super generic flavor, but in the end the infusion wasn’t bad actually. As I was sipping the next steep and noting the flavor dropping off a tad, I recalled that I learned from brewing the Yong De Blue Label that I need to extend the steeping times much more aggressively with these really small grade ripes. There was nothing noteworthy about the steep itself. It was similar in flavor to the last one, but managed to be far less enjoyable.

Despite practically doubling the steeping time for the next infusion and the strength being adequate, the flavors were starting to get thinner. The tea had a very mindless shu flavor to it, with once again a degree more sweetness without being what I’d actually call sweet. I may have also noticed a bit of minerality pushing through in this infusion. Despite the front flavors being disappointing, the aftertaste was pretty okay actually. I can’t be sure about this, but I may have also noticed some very, very mild cha qi in my chest/temples.

For the next infusion I nearly doubled the brewing time again and now most of the other flavors had dropped off very sharply with a lot of sweetness emerging in their stead. Despite being actually sweet for the first time, the tea still wasn’t terribly sweet for a shu pu’er. Besides the sweetness, there was still some discernible shu base in the background. Flavor-wise this infusion was pretty decent, not great, but not terrible either. Like with the previous steep, I thought I may have noticed some qi building in my chest/head. The tea also made me sweat a bit at this point.

The eighth steep was the last I did. It had an acceptable level of strength to it still, but the flavors that now leaned more towards the darker end of the spectrum weren’t very appealing to me. The brief prior sweetness had nearly completely dropped off, although you did get some of it in the aftertaste. One could probably have continued steeping the leaves still, but I suspected I might not enjoy where this tea was headed or that it might turn flat out nasty, so I decided to stop here.

Overall this was possibly the most underwhelming shu pu’er I’ve had so far, but granted I’m still very new to ripe. It’s not bad, and I wouldn’t mind having it once in a while, but the flavor profile didn’t really appeal to me and at least in its current state the tea feels like it’s lacking something. For me that something is sweetness. This is clearly a quality product, but at least right now it lacks something that makes it stand out and feel special. To me some of the flavors feel perhaps a bit underdeveloped, which is something that will hopefully improve with some more age, but I will admit I have zero knowledge let alone experience about how shu pu’er can be expected to develop over time. I’m hoping this one will develop some sweetness as right now that is my biggest gripe about this tea. Granted I did not fully steep out this tea and I did a poor job of brewing it, but still even for a gong ting style tea this one seemed to not have that great longevity. I could be mistaken about that though.

I sensed more potential for improvement in this one than in some others, but at least in its current state I find this tea difficult to recommend based on my initial impressions. I will have to revisit this one at a later date, but I doubt brewing it better will make enough difference to change my thoughts on it. A couple more years of age will hopefully have a positive impact on this tea. Some small changes might make a difference.

This is the first Crimson Lotus tea that I’ve tried (I’m waiting for the 2017 sheng to come out). I’ve had the cake sitting in my pumidor for a month or two as I like to give pu’er plenty of time to make themselves at home. The bing itself is quite nice looking, with minimal amount of dust and debris sitting at the bottom of the wrapper. The cake is satisfyingly soft and easy to break thin, intact chunks from, but does not totally come apart on its own like the Yong De Blue Label I reviewed earlier.

I used 11g of leaf in my 160ml Jianshui clay teapot, giving the leaves a brief 10s rinse followed by a 10 min. rest before I began brewing. I did a total of eleven steeps, for 13s, 13s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 50s, 80s, 2 min., 3 min. and 4 min. according to my mental clock. Like with the dry leaf, the wet leaves didn’t have a very strong aroma. Following the rinse, they had a smell of dark, sweet hay, which is within the typical shu pu’er spectrum.

As I was using primarily chunks that were about the size of a coin and didn’t rinse the tea for that long, the color of the first steep was still somewhat pale as was to be expected. It did have some body and a surprising amount of sweetness for a first infusion. At first the tea came across as a pretty typical shu pu’er, but as I was sipping my second cup, I felt there was something different about this tea. Part of it had to do with flavor, but more so it was about the sense I got from the tea. Hard to say if I was imagining it, but it felt to me like the tea may have had a slight cooling sensation and perhaps even made you feel slightly good. Especially for a first infusion, the steep was actually very nice.

The second steep produced a much darker liquor as one would expect. There was also more body and hints of coffee and maybe a bit of chocolate in the taste, with the tea leaving a dark chocolate bitterness lingering in your mouth. A nice infusion. The following third steep was almost totally black, with only a slight red hue revealing that it was in fact not coffee. The tea had much less body now, while the flavor had shifted back towards a sweeter profile with some of the coffee/chocolate still going on. There was also something in the aftertaste I didn’t quite recognize. I also noticed that the tea made your saliva taste sweet in your mouth.

The fourth infusion remained nearly as dark, with the tea having more body again. There was less sweetness and the flavors had shifted towards a darker part of the spectrum. I tasted slightly roasted and nutty flavors, with still small hints of the coffee/roasted coffee bean going on. I quite liked this infusion. It had a nice body and was very pleasing to drink.

The color of the fifth infusion was still quite dark, but not quite as dark as before. There was also less body than in the last steep, but still some. It kind of felt like the tea caused your saliva the thicken in your mouth. It had a different kind of sweetness to it than before, and as the tea cooled down a little it got even more sweeter and almost syrupy. The next infusion was still a fairly dark brownish red, but by this point the liquor was getting noticeably lighter. The taste now had a much more noticeable mineraly character, which even extends to how I would probably describe the sweetness. Again, I did not really spend time confirming this, but it felt like there may have been some mouth cooling going on. The tea was still performing well, but based on past experience, I got the sense that we were probably exiting the middle steeps and entering the late steeps now. The flavors were coming across as perhaps somewhat thinner without being watery or necessarily weak in strength. I have no complaints about this infusion, even though it wasn’t necessarily as solid as earlier steeps. The aftertaste was again somewhat mineraly in the beginning and developed into something quite nice over time.

Surprisingly the following infusion was still about as dark as the last one and it still retained a bit of body. The flavors changed again. I’m not sure how to describe the taste, but I liked it. While the tea tasted great, at the same time for me personally this infusion felt like it was more about things besides the flavor – how it felt and how it made you feel – attributes that I appreciate most about great tea. I must say this infusion was really darn nice, especially for a this late steep. Even though this tea offered many excellent infusions, I would say this one was definitely my favorite from this session.

The next steep was the eighth. It had a much lighter color. Despite this, the tea still maintained a very stable strength. Again the sweetness present in the tea was slightly different from before, although this infusion wasn’t predominantly sweet. I might describe it as a slightly berrylike sweetness, but I’m not sure. The flavors became darker in the next infusion. Less sweet, while still maintaining a good amount of flavor.

I happened to take a smell of the leaves before drinking the tenth steeping and they had a surprisingly pleasant smell to them. After some pondering I came to the conclusion that they smelled like nectarine, or at least I believe that’s the correct fruit. I haven’t had it since my childhood, but I’m talking about a fruit with a fuzzy skin and not an entirely sweet taste to it. The liquor itself had a considerably lighter color to it now, but in terms of flavor it hadn’t lost that much strength and it was still very drinkable. The tea had a prominent fruity sweetness to it now and it was quite surprising how sweet the tea actually was. The aftertaste that the tea left in your mouth was most definitely nectarine or whatever fruit it was that I smelled in the leaves. The tea may have still even had some body to it.

I did try doing an eleventh steeping, but although the taste wasn’t necessarily watery, the color was very light now and the flavors were starting to thin out considerably. There was however a huge amount of sweetness to the tea still, although the aftertaste wasn’t necessarily the most pleasant. I probably wouldn’t recommend stretching this tea too far, but your results may vary so experiment.

Overall this was a really excellent tea, and I’m really happy to say that about a shu pu’er. So far I’ve had trouble developing an appreciation for shu pu’er and finding a tea that I genuinely like, but this tea was a very pleasant surprise and excellent from start to finish. The tea is dynamic, interesting, rewarding, and the longevity is about what you’d expect from a ripe pu’er, if not slightly above average. I try to reserve the “Recommended” stamp to only teas I would buy more of myself if I ran out and I’ve only given it to one tea before this, but I’m happy to say that Lucky Cloud now joins that group. I will have to try out more ripe pu’ers to see what I like, but unless I find other teas that I like even way more than this one, I’ll likely be ordering at least a cake or two if not a whole tong, provided it does not sell out before then. Crimson Lotus did an excellent job sourcing this one and now I probably have no option but to sample their other shu pu’ers as well.

This bing looks like a bundle of worms wriggling around in dirt. Whether you find that aesthetically appealing or unappealing is up to you. Anyway, I thought I’d already drunk some fairly tippy shus (this is only my fifth, so make of that what you will), but this cake takes the… cake. The leaves are all of such a small leaf grade that it is virtually impossible for them to become entangled with one another and thus the bing is close to coming apart on its own. It’s not even necessary to use tools to pry leaves off if you don’t want and you can practically just rub the edges a bit to make the leaves start coming off. I noticed a smaller amount of dust and smaller particles than typical and most of the stuff that has come loose on its own and you find lying inside the wrapper is good to use for brewing. If you wanted to break this cake into loose form for daily drinking, I imagine it would take hardly no time at all.

I used 11.5g of leaves in my 160ml Jianshui teapot. My intention was to use 11g instead of the 10.5g I’ve been using in the past as I felt upping the amount of leaf a tad might yield better results, but when my scale said 11.5g I was too lazy to take some leaves out. I managed to include a couple of smaller chunks amid the individual leaves. The dry leaves had a typical shu pu’er scent, but while I was smelling them it occurred to me that since I’m storing my ripe cakes stacked atop one another in a box, I may very well be smelling the neighboring cakes when sniffing the surface leaves, which makes paying attention to the aroma of the dry leaves somewhat moot. In any case, after a brief 10s rinse the wet leaves didn’t display the typical manure smell I’m used to smelling in a lot of shu and instead I got a dark scent more akin to coffee beans, dark chocolate and the like. After giving the leaves a ten minute rest, I got to brewing.

I steeped the leaves nine times, for 10s, 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 75s and 4 min. I am unsure whether the leaves could have gone on as I did not try. I don’t recall what the rinse had looked like, but the first infusion surprised me by being much darker than I’m used to. The taste was also much bolder than shu pu’er typically is in my experience. Both of these I attribute to the very small leaf grade. I’m bad at even attempting to describe ripe pu’er, but the taste was perhaps a bit sweet and it seemed to leave a similar aftertaste in your mouth as coffee.

The second infusion brewed even darker, yielding probably the darkest color I’ve seen in shu pu’er thus far. Unless you had a light source directly behind a transparent vessel, you could not see through the dark liquor. Only when shining a light through could you see that the liquor was actually red and not black, but the red was such a dark shade that it almost seemed to have a purple hue to it. The flavor remained strong like in the first infusion and the taste was akin to almost something like diluted coffee, which seems very common for the second steep of the ripe pu’ers I’ve had. I’m not really a coffee drinker, I may drink a couple cups a year if that, so flavor profiles like this are not necessarily something that appeal to me particularly, but my tasting notes say “not bad, not bad” nevertheless, so it was pretty okay. This infusion had the longest aftertaste I’ve encountered in shu thus far, and it remained very stable as well. The more I drink high-quality teas, the more I start to appreciate things like long, stable, enjoyable aftertaste that are not a given at all even in some really nice teas, and thus I definitely give this tea/infusion points for it. More so than the front flavors.

As I continued to flash brew the tea, the third infusion wasn’t quite as dark in color as the last one. While the strength of the flavor remained strong, the flavors themselves started to become lighter in nature. As I said, I struggle to describe the flavors, but if you’ve ever drunk shu pu’er they were pretty typical ripe flavors. I would not use the word earthy. The tea was sort of sweet without being actually sweet. Again, if you’ve ever drunk pu’er, you probably know the deal. After lengthening the steep time a little for the fourth steep, the color was once again very dark albeit not quite as dark as at its darkest in the second infusion. Like before, the tea continued to brew quite strong while the flavors themselves continued to get lighter in flavor. The exact same thing can be said about the fifth infusion, but now the tea was starting to taste better than in earlier steeps and the person I was drinking with echoed this sentiment.

From the sixth steep onward the color of the tea soup finally started to get lighter. The sixth steeping itself while not exactly sweet was beginning to get sweeter. Starting with the seventh steep the strength of the flavor started to come down as well. As the nature of the flavor continued to get lighter, it was difficult to tell if the tea was getting watery or simply lighter. As the eighth steep produced a much, much lighter color than before, more of a dark orange than a red, I decided to ramp up the steeping time for the last steep I did straight to four minutes. This, while yielding a bit more color than before, was nowhere near as dark as before. The tea soup had more sweetness now, and in fact I’d call it a mineral sweetness albeit not necessarily the same kind you typically get in many teas as they begin to steep out. The steep was pretty okay. If the tea still had more in it, extracting it would have probably required steeping the tea for closer to fifteen minutes if not more and so I just decided to call it there.

Overall the tea performs as you’d expect and you trade off longevity for strength of flavor. Objectively this is neither a good thing or a bad thing as it’s a quite fair trade-off. In my limited experience shu pu’er can be quite light when it comes to taste, so those seeking a bolder flavor and especially those not interested in stretching out a session may find a nice daily drinker in this one. Like certain other ripe pu’ers I’ve tried, this came across as a tea that might appeal to those who are coffee drinkers. I myself while thinking a couple of infusions were fairly nice still struggle to find an appreciation for shu pu’er, but I will continue to try.

This tea taught me that with ripes that have this small a leaf grade you need to start pushing them much more aggressively once they start to drop in color. How aggressively, I don’t know. Next time I’ll need to brew this one in a gaiwan so I can monitor the color before I pour. Flavor-wise nothing really jumped out at me about this one. Everything I tasted here I’ve tasted before in other shus. I will need to drink this one more to formulate a more conclusive opinion on it, but my first impressions of it were not particularly strong one way or the other. If you are a shu drinker, you will likely enjoy this one, but that is just a guess on my part.

Yay, my tenth review! I received ten grams of this tea as a free sample with my order from Essence of Tea. The bag has been sitting opened in my pumidor for over a month so it has had ample time to air out and acclimatize. My sample consisted of one larger piece, big, intact individual leaves as well as some smaller ones at the bottom of the bag. The sample had an air of being prepared with care.

Since there weren’t enough leaves to fill up the rather large Yixing teapot I usually use for sheng, I put 8.9g of leaves in a 130ml gaiwan instead. The dry leaves had a much darker and aged smell than you usually get in a sheng of this age, which leads me to believe what I was smelling may have been acquired in storage. This was a non-issue, though, because after a ten-second rinse the dark aroma was gone and I was greeted instead by a sweet, vegetal scent. After a customary ten-minute rest, I got to brewing. I did a total of eleven steeps, for 10s, 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 80s, 2 min., 3 min. and 4 min. respectively. The tea could have gone longer, but I gave up. I did all my drinking from a silver cup that I received from Crimson Lotus Tea the very same day, in case you are a believer in that silver makes a difference in taste. I have yet to do a direct A/B, but the potential influence on flavor is not why I bought the cup.

The first infusion had a thick, soft, creamy texture and a very prominent vanilla note, but also some astringency in the finish that I’m not used to seeing in the very first steep when brewing in clay. I hardly ever brew sheng in porcelain, so I can’t say if this tea is more astringent than average or if I’m just not used to it. In any case the first infusion was excellent. The second steep was less thick and in it the vanilla note was replaced by a creamy taste. It was also much more astringent than the first one or what I’m used to.

The third infusion was still creamy, but started to taste greener while still remaining reasonably astringent. The fourth one was the same, while having perhaps a bit more body and also possibly leaving a smoky tobacco aroma in your mouth. After that the creamy character dropped off and for the next four steeps the taste was green and astringent with some emerging green sweetness. Very typical young sheng flavor.

Starting with infusion nine the other flavors were finally starting to taper off, making way to typical young raw pu’er sweetness, although the sweetness wasn’t especially sweet. The tenth steeping tasted very clean while still maintaining strength really well. The eleventh infusion is where I stopped and that was probably the first time the tea was starting showing signs of dropping in strength.

All in all this was a good tea and a positive session. I didn’t like the tea enough to warrant a purchase, but my pumidor is already starting to get to a point where a tea has to be really special or interesting for me to be willing to devote room for it. If I were to magically acquire a cake of this, I would store it rather than drink it. The tea can be drunk now, but although the early infusions were nice, I think it’s still underdeveloped in other areas and tastes quite young. I found the tea quite astringent at every step, but even at its most intense it remained manageable. The biggest shortcoming I noted for the tea was a seeming lack of discernible cha qi. Normally I would regard this as a bigger issue, but I feel in this case the tea makes up for the seeming lack of qi with its seemingly excellent longevity and the way in which it maintains its strength extremely well throughout the session.

If you like creamy sheng and this tea sounds promising, I recommend trying a sample to see for yourself how you like it. For an Essence of Tea offering the cake is quite affordable and I think this is certainly a quality tea. The tea is okay to drink now, but frankly I think it would be a waste to do so. I can see this tea becoming very yummy in ten or fifteen years and drinking it now would be a waste of potential. I’m sure there are other creamy shengs out there that are more suited for immediate consumption.

In its current state I think this is a good tea. In the future I can see it becoming a great one. I’m trying to be conservative with how I hand out Recommended badges and reserve those to only teas I would buy myself or buy more of if I ran out, so therefore this doesn’t get one despite being something I recommend trying out.

This is a quite premium-priced ripe made up of a quite tippy blend of smaller and more medium-sized leaves. The cake doesn’t look anything special and the compression is neither too loose or too heavy. I was able to break off a single piece of the top layer that weighed almost exactly the desired 10.5g for my 160ml Jianshui teapot simply by inserting my pu’er pick from the side in a couple of places and then lifting up. I then proceeded to gently break this one large piece into a few smaller pieces by hand. I’d like to note that this cake has the cleanest-looking wrapper I’ve seen, that is to say when I lifted the bing off the inside of the wrapper only had a very small number of broken-off leaves and a few specks of dust here and there. I’m not saying this is necessarily any sort of indicator of quality, it’s just an observation I made.

The dry leaves have a very typical shu pu’er smell to my nose. Even in a pre-heated teapot the scent of the broken-off portion of the cake was very faint, however. I gave the leaves only one average rinse for just over ten seconds and let them rest for ten minutes before I started brewing. The scent of the wet leaves was somewhat surprising. There wasn’t any of the typical manure I smell in shu pu’er and instead my nose picked up hay which I associate more with raw pu’er and another note for which the closest descriptor my brain could come up with is warm raisin. That is not quite accurate, but it’s the best I could come up with. The scent was warm and familiar. Another note of interest is that even the smell of the wet leaves was much weaker than is typical for shu pu’er.

I did a total of ten infusions, for 10s, 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 60s, 90s and 120s. Since I was using almost exclusively larger chunks without any individual leaves and didn’t do a longer rinse, the leaves had yet to come apart by the first infusion which in turn resulted in a somewhat lighter first brew, which I was fine with. The color of the liquor was a cloudy red-ish orange. This cloudiness is something I noted in the first and last couple of infusions. In the mid-steeps when the liquor was darker it was hard to tell whether the soup was clear or not or if the cloudiness had persisted. Typically I associate the clarity of the tea soup as being an indicator of quality to a certain degree, but I’m not sure if I’d say the inverse is necessarily true and the lack of clarity is some sort of sign of the lack of quality. You shouldn’t take it more than as an observation. As expected, the first infusion was quite light, but it tasted okay although it’s hard to really say anything about it flavor-wise. It was maybe a bit sweet.

The second steep brewed darker. It coated your mouth with a slimy coating similar to thick saliva. I’m making the guess that this sensation is possibly the one the name of this tea refers to according to the description. The flavors in this infusion were interesting, but also beyond description. They weren’t really reminiscent of any flavors you can find anywhere else to my knowledge and therefore came across as somewhat abstract to me. Besides the flavor and mouthfeel the tea had to offer, it also made me sweat quite a bit and I might’ve even detected some tightness in my chest. In my limited personal experience and based on what I’ve gathered from others, cha qi is not that common to come across in shu pu’er so I was pleasantly surprised to find it here.

Based on the trajectory of the first two steeps, I felt this tea had promise to be the best ripe pu’er I’ve tasted, but unfortunately the tea didn’t manage to live up to that potential. The third steep brewed a very dark red. Not a particularly gorgeous red, just red. It had perhaps some sweetness and perhaps the tiniest hint of a toffee note, but I wasn’t getting much from it. The earlier slimy mouthfeel was greatly diminished, but the tea was making me feel warm and I could feel the qi in my chest. The qi continued to be present for the next three steeps before dropping off, whereas the taste remained extremely basic throughout. The tea tasted clean, with the sweetness gradually emerging as the infusions went on. The slick, slimy mouthfeel was coming and going in nature making a small return a couple of times. The last infusion I did interestingly had possibly the most flavor out of all the infusions I did, but at the same time I got the sense the tea might’ve been on its last legs. I’ve seen the pattern of a tea giving one last decent brew before totally giving out enough times to develop a sense for it. Whether or not the tea still had more to give, I was forced to end the session there due to time constraints and also being quite adequately hydrated by that point. Flavor-wise the final infusion actually had something else going on besides the base shu pu’er sweetness, but I’m not sure if there would’ve been anything more of interest for me to discover had I continued with the session.

I really had my hopes up for this tea after the second infusion. For a ripe this tea has decent qi going on, but in terms of flavor the tea just came across as incredibly stripped down after the second steep. It doesn’t even actually have that much of the typical shu sweetness and instead simply presents this base underlying shu pu’er flavor that isn’t all that much. On the sheng front this reminds me of the Misty Peak spring 2016 sheng which had the qi going for it, but the flavors just weren’t interesting. If this was a raw, I’d stash it away for ten years and come back to it, but since this is a ripe I’m not sure if I can really expect any huge changes over time. I will have to try brewing this in slightly different ways as time goes on and hopefully get some better results. This wasn’t a bad tea, but it didn’t turn out to be the first ripe I could award the green Recommended stamp to like I’d hoped.

My first Menghai, my first aged ripe, also only my third shu overall. The bing looks quite gorgeous in person and as the 9 in the recipe suggests the leaf size is quite impressive. This being my first factory production ripe, I was expecting a potentially heavier compression, but instead the cake turned out to be incredibly loosely pressed. The bing is notably thicker than most cakes of this weight and the backside isn’t even symmetric in shape/thickness. Prying leaves off without causing additional breakage was a breeze and a pleasure.

I brewed 10.5g of this tea in my brand new 160ml Jianshui clay teapot. I’ve only had one session with it before, so it should be noted that it may not be performing optimally just yet. I rinsed the leaves for slightly over ten seconds and allowed them to rest for ten minutes before I started brewing. I did a total of twelve steeps for 10s, 10s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 50s, 65s, 2 min., 4 min. and 8 min. respectively. The last steep revealed the leaves to be utterly spent. Overall the longevity was about what I’d expected, if not a tad better.

The first infusion was sweet, perhaps a bit earthy, and pretty smooth. Very typical base ripe pu’er flavors. It had a rosé color, whereas the rinse had an orange hue. Throughout the steeps the tea produced a remarkably clear liquor. The second steep was very dark and blood red. It tasted very smooth and clean, almost like diluted coffee. It wasn’t as sweet as before, but left a roasted coffee bean type of flavor in your mouth.

The third steep was again perhaps a bit earthy. It was sweeter than before, with an almost berry-like flavor. The tea was super clean and easy to drink. It also made me salivate a lot, which may have contributed to the almost honey-like sweetness this infusion nearly reached toward the end (in flavor, not intensity). The following fourth infusion was a step backwards, presenting very simplistic flavors and tasting very reminiscent of the first infusion with its basic watery sweetness. Steep five was more of this same typical shu taste, with a hint of those berries I thought I’d tasted earlier.

In steep number six I finally got much more of those berries and that infusion was quite nice. I’m bad with berries, but steep seven tasted like redcurrant juice or something to me. It was juicy, with maybe a bit of sweetness. Overall very nice. The eighth infusion was sweet, but the other flavors were seeming to start to taper off. The sweetness persisted in the ninth steep, but the tea soup was starting to taste watery.

The tenth steep I brewed much stronger and the taste I got was the same as the manure type of smell I smell in most ripe pu’ers. I don’t mind the smell, but as a taste I wasn’t the biggest fan of it. There was perhaps some sweetness, but not that much. Wondering if the leaves still had more to give, I doubled the steeping time again and the soup I got had a vanilla flavor to it. One could say there was perhaps almost a cherry note as well, which isn’t all that surprising as the two often go hand in hand. The infusion was quite nice actually and had a nice aftertaste as well. For the twelfth infusion I tried doubling the steeping time one last time, but the resulting tea tasted practically like water, sweet water. It tasted like drinking the remainders of a strawberry slushie where it’s just melted ice at the bottom of the cup with a hint of color and flavor from the strawberry. If you had a big bottle of it, it would be fine for quenching your thirst during summertime.

So what are my thoughts on this tea? I prefer teas that are interesting, dynamic and grab my attention. Therefore this tea was not very interesting to me in the first several steeps. It was only in the latter half that the tea started to feel more interesting. Even though the tea does present many different flavors over the course of a session, compared to other types of tea ripe pu’er does seem to present much smaller dynamic swings in my still quite limited experience, and this tea was no exception. It’s easy to drink and such an inoffensive tea you could probably serve this to anyone from children to elderly. They might not say they like it, but they are unlikely to say they can’t drink it either.

For me perhaps the biggest shortcoming of this tea is the lack of bitterness. I’m not saying other ripe pu’ers are necessarily known for having bitterness either, but toward the end of the session I really found myself yearning for some bitterness or something, anything, to give the tea some bite, edge and character. This was especially apparent since I’ve been tasting Yunnan Sourcing’s fresh spring 2017 black teas over the past few days and enjoying the wonderfully elegant kuwei in some of them. Those people who think bitterness is a bad thing need to drink more tea. A lot more tea.

Despite some of the criticisms I can find for this tea, this might be the best ripe out of the three I’ve had so far, the others being “The New Black” by Misty Peak and “Green Miracle” by Yunnan Sourcing. At the very least it most certainly proved that Menghai is definitely competitive when it comes to producing ripe pu’er. Had this tea been more interesting in the early steeps, it would have been easier for me to recommend. As it stands, it is a tea that is very easy to drink through the day without having to pay too much attention to it, but for the price there are likely to be many other ripes out there that are cheaper and possibly better. I’m not aware of what exactly age has brought to this tea, but I personally wouldn’t say that it is worth paying such a premium for the age at least in this case. This is not a price point I mind paying for a full bing of tea, shu or not, but you could get a pretty nice sheng for the same price.

My journey to find a shu that makes me fall in love with ripe pu’er continues. The next tea I review is likely to be a shu as well, but after that I may start to miss sheng. In any case I have many ripes in the pipeline for me to try out and with this new Jianshui teapot I’ll likely be drinking a lot more ripe pu’er on a regular basis. This tea made me curious toward ripes made from Bulang material and whether some of them retain some of that more fiery nature. Don’t be surprised if the next tea I review comes from that region…