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Quite a bit of bitterness in this one with maybe some slight spicy notes. That’s not really the right word for the note, but I don’t know what to call it. Couldn’t find this one on the site anymore so it must be sold out. Not particularly good enough that I bothered to look up any more details about it.

I don’t have a ton of thoughts on this tea, I can mostly just compare it to the other three MangFei cakes I’ve tried lately. The four cakes were two Yunnan Sourcing cakes (‘11 and ’16), Bitterleaf’s Take My Breath Away (‘16), and this one. Of the cakes this is probably my least favorite, but not due to it being a bad tea. I’m a big fan of the YS11 as I find it the most multidimensional of the four. Bitter leaf’s is also excellent and I would call that my favorite, very young mangfei that I’ve sampled (although it’s got a steeper price). This PuerhShop tea is fairly good, but a little boring. It had a strong start, being by far the most bitter of the four even with two being five years younger. From there the tea just sort of faded away, not really bringing anything new to the table just mellowing out the bitter taste from the first few steps.

A nice smooth shou. Almost smooth to the point of being too light, but solid flavor.

Started out with a thicker mouth feel which was good. Not too much of the Bulang kick to it, but I suppose this is 7 years old now so that’s to be expected. As it sits now this tea is good, but a bit caught between stages. I think this will be great in a few more years and wish I had more than just the 5g sample.

A solid young Mangfei sheng. Fairly bitter with a thickish mouth feel. I would put it more towards the vegetal/bean flavor spectrum than floral or sweet. Not particularly aromatic for a young sheng, but when rinsed the wet leaves did give off a bit more. I think this tea has more potential for aging than the handful of other younger cakes I’ve tried from this area from several vendors.

“2004 Yang Ping Hao Kong Que Zhi Xiang (ripe)” as a gift from Liquid Proust included in the Pubertea group buy.
Shou really isn’t something I’m nearly as confident describing in depth as sheng, so I can’t give a great deal of insight into this tea. At 13 years old, this is also the oldest shou I’ve drank by 5 years or so meaning it is uncharted territory for me. I tried drinking a more recent cake yesterday appearing to have a roughly equal level of fermentation to it for comparison, and this older shou had less astringency/bitterness to it. There may have been a chocolate like sweetness to this, but I don’t know that that’s quite the right word to describe it. Imagine a very strongly brewed, decent quality shou with the slight bitterness present when steeped aggressively being replaced with a milder form of aged sheng profile. That’s the closest description I could come up with.
Overall this was a pleasant tea to drink over the course of 8 or 9 steeps. While there wasn’t a whole lot going on as far as fragrance at any point, the flavor hardly weakened from steep 1 until the end. I likely could have got 2+ more cups out of this, and I may go back tomorrow to ride the sample out.

While I enjoyed this tea a good amount, I couldn’t help but think how much better it could be. All the traces of a fantastic puer were there, but a little dull. Not sure if this brick is suffering from its awkward teenage years, storage issues (seems slightly too dry in my experience), or being stuck in a plastic bag in the TTB+ for too long. This honestly was a tea I enjoyed and would drink again, but I feel like a well managed brick of the exact same material would go from the good/forgettable category to fantastic. Please someone, for the love of god spend the money and drop $70 on a 100g brick to confirm this as I’m willing to bet a well stored brother of this sample would be excellent. As far as my 5g sample, there was some astringency but not the kind of ass kicking I would expect from LBZ material. It is nearing that 10+ year age within Scott’s dryer-ish storage so that likely explains this. The wet leaves had a fairly unique fragrance I couldn’t name.
Again I think this is a great tea from hints I got, but I only had a 5g sample that unfortunately may have suffered from prolonged zip lock bag disease. I’d be interested to hear others thoughts on the tea from more recent tastings.

Had the ball from the pubertea group buy today. I can’t remember if that was a “surprise” from LP or if I just can’t remember what the mterial there was. Either way, I enjoyed this one a lot. This was probably my favorite tea from that buy so far. No idea what the material here was or quality, but i thought this was great. The ball took a good three steps before it really opened up at all, but steeps 4-7 were fantastic. This had a sweater than the YQH and EOT stuff and was very easy to chug cup after cup. It didn’t last horribly long, and got to pretty mellow steeps a bit earlier than I would have liked for how good the mid stages were, but I also hit the first couple rinses/steeps fairly hard to get the ball opened up.
Also, this ball had enormous in tact leaves in it for being a rolled ball. Yeah there was chopped up stuff here and there, but several huge stems with two leaves and a bud each. That alone tells me this was much nicer than your average chopped up factory scraps used for many pu balls.

A pretty solid tea. Very strong floral notes, but not a whole lot of mouth feel or texture. I think this one will be better to drink sooner rather than later as far as aging.