2015 Baohexiang Zizai Premium Ripe Puerh Tea Brick 125g

I purchased this tea for $15.99 from puerhshop, kind of a throw-in I probably picked to get free shipping. When given a choice, I’d rather get more Tea than pay shipping.

This is a ripe “choco” brick molded into 18 breakable squares. Mathematically 125g doesn’t really divide evenly into 18 parts (repeating number). So depending upon how you break off the square you will get 5-7g per piece. This works out nicely for a brewing vessel in the range of 100-130cc.

This tea company was created by a former employee of Taetea, who supposedly is responsible for some of the ripe recipes when he worked there. I find this tea has the Dayi house flavor, so I can believe the story. It brews up dark and syrupy. The tea ranges from 2012-2015 and was pressed in 2015, and still needs time to clear fermentation flavor which may take awhile given the compression. I’ve had this for over a year and it still seems fairly heavily fermented. I got 10 steeps easy and the tea isn’t even going much off the flash brew time yet. It is definitely on the pricier side for a new ripe. The vendor thinks this will increase in value, but I don’t see the value in brick tea when it starts out at this price. It is a curiosity without a huge commitment, I can easily finish up a small amount of tea like this.

This is a tasty ripe tea with a lot of fermentation flavor left. The fermentation taste was quite strong for the first four or five steeps and then dissipated. It was initially sweet in nature and then some bitterness intervened in the middle steeps. There were notes of cocoa or chocolate in there too. It even developed a fruity flavor in later steeps. The later steeps taste of this tea balances it out. The initial steeps were thick with fermentation flavor but sweet too. It developed a nicer flavor later. According to Puerhshop this brand is a premium brand of tea. That being said I had never heard of them before and wonder if anyone else has. This small brick is the only offering at Puerhshop from this Menghai Baohexiang Tea Co. Ltd so I don’t know about their other products. This one was pretty good in the end but really needs to age a little to lose some of that fermentation taste. It was almost fishy in nature but not quite. For the price of this I am not unhappy with my purchase. It was only $13.79.

I steeped this tea eight times in a 120ml gaiwan with 9.1g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. It didn’t take long at all for the leaves to open up. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, anad 30 sec. The tea color of the eighth steep was still an amber brown. This tea would certainly gone a few more steeps, maybe twelve, maybe fifteen but I was at my caffeine limit.