pu-erh of the day. Sheng or Shou

I loved raw pu’erh and then got away from it last year because I had to reduce my caffeine intake. I would like to try some again and am looking for raw pu’erh teas that have a creamy fruity flavour. I don’t want to buy a whole cake, so it would have to come in a sample size. Any good recommendations? I shop a lot at Yunnan Sourcing so if they have any it would make for an easy purchase.

2015 Qing Mei Shan fr Yunnansourcing. 1/10 ratio. Highly enjoyable session. So sweet and thick and long lasting aftertaste. I have this tea since 11/15 and the color is dark orange. All this time kept in ziplock not pumidor cuz I didn’t want it to age.

2014 W2T New Amerykah 2. This tea has been mellowing out nicely, so naturally I added in some jiaogulan to prop up the bitterness back to a proper level of face searing. I went with 4 parts Amerykah to 1 part jiaogulan, which seemed to do the trick nicely. Lots of qi, or maybe it was just excessive caffeine? Lovely in any case.

2016 Wuliang H from EoT. This one’s coming along very nicely. Tasty, cooling, cloying, good combination of bitter and sweet, and goes down easy. Gets more bitter if you push it, but very pleasantly so.

Excellent tea. The depth is coming out on this one. I did my usual 10grams to 100ml of water just off boiling and one rinse. The florality aroma of this one comes early. Sweetness almsot like a gum taste comes in early. The later steeps lose much of the florality and the tea gets heavier and almost a touch viscous. Later steeps had the bitter aspects coming in. I played around in the leaves and would guess a couple of years leaf in this one. Nice leaf, and mostly 2 leaves and a bud. Found a couple that were almost able to stretch across my palm. Good tea to celebrate a bit with.

Just drank some dirt-cheap 2011 shu in a mug. This is an Asian grocery cake that came in a generic box: there was some no-name factory wrapper on the cake with a 2011 stamp. I broke up the whole cake and put it in a can, and after sitting for 6 months in my Florida garage storage it’s not too bad.

2018 Yiwu Guoyoulin from EoT. Form the new monthly teaclub – same material as the cake, but processed as a white.

Excellent.

2017 Jingmai Gushu ripe from Xiaguan… I didn’t even know floral chocolate was a taste until now. This is fantastic!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BlJ1eg3HrGY/?taken-by=liquidproust

I just revisited one of the first decent puerh cakes I ever purchased – a 2011 Ai Lao mountain raw puerh from Yunnan Sourcing. It has been four years since I last tried it, and it is opening up and revealing more fruit flavors (apricot, peach) than before. It has a nice salivary reaction, is still quite young (a touch of hay at the start before progressing to the fruit flavors), and I think this tea still has quite a long life ahead. Very pleasant tea to me.

It’s been kind of dead in the thread for a bit and I haven’t been using steepster at all, but hopefully some will still see this. I was trying out some teas I’ve had stored and I ran into W2T’s 2012 Ruiyuan NanNuo Old Arbor cake. Mine has been going along nicely, it still has a nice bite of bitterness and astringency, but it has developed a rich character and the bitterness that could be a bit too much if you overleaf is mellowing down. Is anyone else aging this one?