27 Tasting Notes
Essentially powdered tea leaves. These guys are everything I dislike about mini tuos. While the leaf quality and size was better than generic garbage-grade tuos that most tea shops not specializing in puer sell, these are still very hard to get a good cup out of. The leaves are just so small and fragmented that any heat at all instantly brings out a sharp bitterness. I normally enjoy bitterness/astringency in a young sheng, but this is far too much with very little else to offer. I think only one of several tries have given me steeps that were enjoyable, so I haven’t found myself returning to these.
With that said, these are still much better than what I’ve found from other non-puer shops. If convenience trumps all they aren’t a bad idea, just be careful to steep at lower temps than normal. I would stick to the shou mini tuos from Yunnan Sourcing however as the bitterness there is less of an issue. I need to find my notes of which specifically, but there is a 5 g mini shou tuo from YS that I actually enjoy more than many cakes offered much more expensively.
I really enjoy this cake, so much so that I have been plowing through it much faster than I planned when I saw it in the White2Tea club. Like 2dog wrote in that month’s club description, following this cake as it settled down from pressing and lost a lot of water content has been informative.
This cake has a lot of the positive aspects I enjoyed so much in the 2015 Smooch. The two of them being my favorite Lincang material I’ve tried by far. A very thick mouth feel and sharp flavor. I’ve found the main difference between this and Smooch is that Pin is a bit less astringent and bitter, however that may just be from the lower leaf:water ratio I usually use with this compared to the full ball steeped at once. I may come back to this review and add more specific flavors I get out of the cake after a full year of settling down.
I think I approached this a little too early into it’s life as the cake was pretty newly pressed still and the young sheng notes out powered anything else. Not overly astringent by any means, but I remember thinking at the time it was too similar to other non-purple young shengs to justify it over something else. I only purchased a small sample however and reading other tasting notes leads me to believe what I was getting may have been due to brewing the leaves a little hot. Looking to return to this one at some point in time.
Awesome little cake from White2Tea. One of my first cakes, and I’ve played around with this one more than any other puer. I’ve learned more about brewing young sheng from this cake than I thought possible.
Quite a bit going on with this one for what it is: a solid bang for your buck. The two main components I get depending on how I’m steeping/the number of steeps I’ve done are a strong vegetal/bean flavor and a distinct sweetness later on. Definitely touchy in early steeps and will get bitter quick if you’re not watching the temp of your water.
Fairly good/decent cheap little cake. Not a shou that stands out as particularly memorable, but nothing negative to say about it either. I think this is a good learning cake for someone new to shou, as it’s small and has hints of several common shou flavors without anything too overwhelming. You don’t get too many steeps out of it, but at the price that’s a fair trade off.
Pretty much every other review is spot on. A solid, semi aged sheng that’s got a good amount of smokiness to it. I personally can’t stand tightly compressed cakes just for the sake of getting off enough for a session without breaking a sweat or stabbing myself, and this brick is nearly as compressed as an actual brick. I know this would have likely aged differently given a different level of compression, but I would give a higher ranking right this second for convenience sake if it was a little less compressed.
