2015 Yunnan Sourcing Green Miracle Wild Arbor Ripe Puerh Tea

This lightly fermented shou is a prime example of needing to be aired out, age, and storage. Go look at all the other reviews here and it’s all over the place. I drank this, looked at the reviews and it sounds like a different tea compared to reviews a year ago.

My Green Miracle goat got pretty well aired out, sat for months in the open, then I threw it in my shou pumidor. I got no dry, funk, tart, nor mutated fermented stank that people mention here. Notes I found were primarily mineral wet stones, with some rounds of dirt earth, caramel, clean, and fresh taste. Bit of a green essence to it with some crisp cold breaths.

Full review on Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/2015-green-miracle-shou-puer-yunnan-sourcing/

Maybe my palate still needs developing, but I didn’t like this as much as others have said, and certainly not as much as the YS 2012 Yong De Blue.
For the price it’s a good daily drinking Ripe. I quite like fermentation flavour, which is there, but not fishy. It’s certainly earthy with forest floor notes, and some sweetness comes through more after steep 4. For me it weakened after steep 5 with only 7.5g leaf in a 100ml Gaiwan, but was better with 9g. Maybe it doesn’t need 2 rinses.

This is another one of those shous that smells like crab boil to me—dry leaf, wet leaf, and brew—although the wet leaf smells a bit earthier, and the brew has a hint of a sweet smell to it. I don’t mind the crabbiness, as it doesn’t mean that the tea will taste fishy, and as a Floridian, I’ve never found crab spices offensive. So it works for me.

The brew itself is mineral, dark flavored, sweet, and thick. That tangy kind of ferment flavor is strong, but again, it’s not fishy at all. I pushed it a little around steep 4, and it got a bit bitter in a way that reminded me of a black coffee, which was nice. It did get a bit astringent toward the end.

Drank this tea with Matu. It had a forest/dirt taste, a dark color and a thick texture that I enjoyed. It smelled like fish food or like a barn. Drank it as a comparison to 2015 little walk raw puerh, which I found to be very bitter and mouth-drying, but which also had a more enjoyable aroma of dried cranberries. I thought the ripe was better, but I’m brand new to this, so.. There you go.

Drank this today with Cherokee. I’m fairly certain it’s the best ripe I’ve had to date. I have been swapping away most of the ripe puerh I acquired early in my puerh journey, as I’ve found my tastes lie much more in the realm of raw puerh, but I still have this sample. I gave it one rinse, and did taste a bit of fermentation flavor in the first couple steeps, but it wasn’t too stanky, thankfully. Got a couple lighter red steeps, followed by about five or six which looked and felt like motor oil – gotta love that. Foresty flavors for the first steeps, accompanied by a bit of a chocolate flavor in mid-late steeps. Nice and sweet and thick.

When I first brewed up this tea, the two of us really didn’t get along. My sample was sort of broken up and powdery, so the first steep was incredibly strong and bitter, like getting slapped in the face with a bar of baker’s chocolate. Second steep was better, though I still didn’t love it. It was more like a 90% chocolate bar as opposed to 100%. Third and fourth steep have the same theme…the tea is just really really strong, like coats my tongue in this cocoa bitterness that diminishes over time. It’s not personally my sort of thing, but I can see how someone would like it, and I can see how this could get better with age.

Later steeps definitely got less strong, and a little thicker and sweeter. However, the tea also dropped off pretty sharply after steep seven or so. Pretty good, but not a favorite.

I tasted a lot of fermentation flavor in the first four steeps, which cleared completely by steep six. The fermentation on this one is very clean with no “off” smells or tastes. Spicy, woody and sweet were the dominant notes, with the sweetness landing between dark fruits and caramel for me. There were no bitter notes after the fermentation cleared.

I rode this session all the way down to thin brown water over 12 steeps just to see what subtleties the leaf held. It got sweeter and spicier as the session went on. The first nine steeps were the best. I picked up some mild astringency in steeps 10 and 11, but strangely it disappeared in steep 12.

The leaves were mostly broken, but larger than gong ting. As expected this tea is not quite as powerful as a gong ting, but it’s not too far behind. The leaf quality as expressed in the cup was very good to excellent, making this a cake I’ll stash in the “Florida pumidor” for two or three years and revisit with the expectation of it becoming something great.

I brewed up about 6 grams in a 100ml gaiwan. Two rinses at about 10 seconds on first and a bit less on the second. The first steep smells and tastes like an earthy tree bark with dark chocolate. The bark tastes like a Pau D’arco bark tea, if you have ever had that (its not for drinking for flavor…medicinal properties) I think the earthy bark taste is the fermentation flavor tho not fishy at all. The second and third steeps starts to move more into the honey sweet/tobacco back end with less of the earthy bark taste. The smell of the wet leaf now has a fruity/cherry sweet smell that I enjoy. Third steep onward the tea opens up to reveal what its all about. This is a damn good ripe. A nice chocolatey sweet back end with a great cha qi. I think with some aging this tea could be even better, possibly even amazing! I would recommend this one for sure. A great ripe that will get better…cant wait! No fishy fermentation flavor and quite sweet at a young age..what more can you ask of this tea.

Scott over at Yunnan Sourcing seems to have ‘ripened’ some skills this season! I really enjoyed this tea, and I love that it is wild arbor. It is very chocolatey. I found it to be deep and bold, very smooth, somewhat sweet, and quite durable. I bet if this was sold as a premium Dayi product, it would fetch at least double the price. Another winner, and one of the reasons I find that it is better to discover gems from small independent labels you can trust, than to simply buy factory teas (no knock to good factory teas, though!).

This is a very tasty ripe from Yunnan Sourcing. Because I trust the source of the tea I believe it is wild arbor tea. It was think and earthy in the early steeps. Fermentation flavor dominated the first four steeps. Around steep five other flavor notes began to emerge. The note that people refer to as chocolate is not out of bounds. It is quite sweet. There were a variety of complex notes after the fourth steep. This is a good quality tea. It is not however for someone with an aversion to fermentation flavor. While I detected no fishyness, it was strongly earthy.

I steeped this tea eight times in a 180ml teapot with 10.5g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, and 30 sec. I could have certainly gotten five or six more steeps out of the leaves but I am at my caffeine limit for the day.