Tea: Late Bloomer 2023 Spring Mangfei Raw Puer
Type: Raw Puer (生普洱）
Harvest: April 2023
Press Date: April 2023
Region: Mangfei, Lincang, Yunnan
2023 Tasting Notes: Stone Fruit, White Lilac, Orange Juice, Horseradish, Graham Crackers
This tea comes from a village East of Lincang, nearly bordering Myanmar. The unique terroir of this region gives this tea a floral-fragrant forward nose with a body that is distinct from the other Lincang raw puer teas we source. We fell in love with this production region after sampling some single origin teas with a few years on them. We decided we liked the way this tea ages, but we wanted to be sure of the production material, so we pressed our own batch.
This tea starts out juicy and fragrant from the very first brew. While the fragrances are a little more on the leaves than in the soup, this will change as this tea ages, hence the name, Late Bloomer. While not as strong and punchy as the Bangdong, nor as gentle and light as the Kuashan, this pure Mangfei production toes the line between a tea that can be brewed strong or delicate depending on the mood of the session. A good tea to drink now with all its versatility or age for a more uniform flower-forward experience.
The farming household we source this tea reserves all their gushu trees for single tree or double tree production, thus this tea is purely a Qiaomu, or Old Arbor production. As a result, the leaves are beautiful, the buds are plentiful, and these younger (50-100 year old) tree leaves can handle the heat of the wok and the stress of sun wilting, resulting in a visually stunning tea with plenty of fresh young flavor and power too.
We offer this tea in 25 gram samples (chunks lovingly pried off the cake), whole 200 gram cakes, and a set of 5 cake tongs wrapped in bamboo leaves and totaling 1000 grams.
If you're interested in sampling this year's full flight of puer pressings, check out the Yunnan Flight, a set of 6 dragon balls from different regions each pressed in 7 gram balls for convenient brewing.
We recommend brewing this tea gongfu style in a gaiwan or Chinese teapot. We use 6 grams of tea in a 100ml brewing vessel with boiling water, steeping 5 second for the first few infusions and adding 5 seconds after ever subsequent infusion. Most of these puer teas can be re-infused over 15 times, when brewing in this gongfu style.
Curious about these Chinese puer tea terms, check out our growing appendix of Chinese - pinyin - English translated terms here.
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