Mengku Tea Factory (Dragon Tea House)
Edit CompanyRecent Tasting Notes
The cake smells like chocolate trees. It flakes apart easily.
I rinsed with boiling water and let it sit for 15 minutes before tasting.
Gaiwan, boiling, 5/5/7/7/10/10/20/30/40/60
I leafed this quite a bit more than usual because I’ve discovered I generally like more leaf in pu erh. That made for interesting colors. The first couple of steeps were a sort of dirty gold, then became more orange-gold.
The flavor is richer than some other pu erhs I have had recently, and the tea is also a bit astringent. It has an interesting array of flavors ranging from the white chocolatey note to a smoky one, to a caramel-espresso one. There’s even something fruity about it, though I can’t categorize it — it’s not berry, melon, or stone fruit — more of a generic suggestion of fruit.
I’m quite taken with this one. Even though its flavor profile isn’t terribly different from other shengs, there’s something qualitatively “more” about it that makes it special to my taste buds.
Flavors: Astringent, Butter, Caramel, Chocolate, Espresso, Fruity, Smoke, White Chocolate
Preparation
Getting this one out to try tonight. Seems to be a nice little cake. The leaf in this one when breaking of the cake are really small, almost tiny compared to most of what I drink.
I got about 10 grams off the cake and tossed it in the gaiwan. I gave it a rinse and opened it up just to inhale a bit of the steam. The steam came across as almost a steamed snow pea aroma. I let it sit for about 15 minutes before brewing.
I started with 5 second brews on this one. The color comes out golden meaning it has aged a bit. The aroma is a bit hard to pin down on the brew. Tasting it A bit tart with maybe a whisper of bitter and smoke in the background. That quickly fades out and goes slightly sweet. It has some of the tobacco in there as well. For a second or so I thought this may be a bit thin but it comes in subtle at first and washes across the tongue. I will not say oily but thickening as the sip lingers in the mouth. I would almost say a bit of grape skin in there somewhere. I thought this might have been a bit delicate but it is much stronger than that. There is aso a bit of pepper in there as well as the sip fades.
Flavors: Bitter, Grapes, Peas, Smoke, Sweet, Tobacco
The way the tea sits in my mouth and body play a large role in my puerh experiences, giving certain ones more oomph.
I totally get what you mean. There’s also a lot of scope to experiment with the amount of leaf, I think. I am looking forward to more heavily leafing some of the ones I thought were good but not outstanding to see if that makes a difference.
Cool, I look forward to your results. Do you just break off a chunk and call it good or do you measure? I’ve found my sweet spot to be around 6-7g/100mL for most pu.
I was measuring before, but the last few times I did it visually. Filled the 50ml gaiwan to about a third, maybe a bit more.
That’s probably only a gram, no more than two, pretty low leaf amount for that volume. Yeah, you might like a higher leaf for some of those other puerh!
When i was measuring, I was doing about 2.7g, so what I am getting by eyeballing is more than that…
It’s a good thing I’m not eyeballing then!