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
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!