2013 Ontario 1357 Shou Pu-erh Cake

I broke this cake up last weekend hoping to add some variety to the tea I have at work. I’ve had this cake for maybe 3 years?
2X rinse, 205F water, 100 ml shibo, ~5g?
10s, 10s, 10s, 15s, etc… I need to remember to bring one of my strainers to work.
A hint of camphor and earth off the liquid. Early steeps – smooth, hint of dirt/earth, nut skin or shell, faint bitterness. No off flavors or weird finish. Easy drinking.
Later – still smooth, almost cocoa, some vanilla, earthy, but light.
I like it.

It is a very clean, bright and cheerful puerh. Wood, molasses, camphor, limestone, a hint of dried apple. Some decay on the nose but none on the tongue.

It is a sunny-morning tea, full of optimism and promise. Kinda amazing how many dramatically different puehrs are there in the world. This is one of the better ones, but then again everything that I have tried from Whispering Pines was firmly above-average.

What a day. lol I rushed to get to the post office with minutes to spare and well… It’s Sunday. That’s one thing about working from home a lot, the days just kind of mesh together. For meetings, I just have to remember one or two days per month lol. Anyway, thank goodness for those self-serve machines. I was still able to send it and thankfully, for once, I actually packaged it at home since they don’t have tape nor pens there.

The post news Lupicia frenzy has me tasting and re-tasting all their teas. Trying to decide which one to hoard is like asking to choose only one type of food to eat the rest of your life if you’re stuck on an island. lol I thought I’d chill with some good pu’er. I used to be a sheng girl but am shifting to a shou girl…

So my “out of sorts” day continued… I messed up royally while testing this tea. On the 3rd infusion, instead of 15 sec, it became 15 minutes. Ugh lol. So here are some notes on it: It’s a good daily drinker type. A clean shou for the beginners, no strong fermentation flavors. It has nice notes of molasses, brown sugar, walnut, slightly sweet. Has a nice smooth mouth-feeling. It has also had notes of wet earth, caramel, cocoa. The liquor is dark but 15 minutes of any pu’er would give you a dark syrup looking liquor I think lol.

Oh man…

Creamy, woody and sweet. It’s the perfect way to spend this afternoon working from home. Sometimes I get a little dark mulch, sometimes a little raisin. Sometimes, I get a little cocoa.

Smooth and sweet daily drinker, this light ripe would be a good introduction to shou.

This is overall a very nice tea. It was bittersweet in the start. The bitterness was not too strong or too long lasting. There was a fair amount of fermentation flavor. There may have been some chocolate notes but I wasn’t paying close attention to the specifics. Just the fact that it evolved into a nice sweet tea. I think I can say that by the twelfth steep it had developed a bit of a fruity taste although I could not pin it down to a specific fruit. Overall I really liked this tea. It has been so long since I have drank the loose of this tea that I couldn’t tell you how they compare. This one is definitely worth picking up a cake.

I steeped this twelve times in a 150ml Ru Kiln Shui Ping teapot with 13g leaf. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, and 2 minutes. There were maybe three or four steeps left in the tea but twelve was enough for me.

The “mildest” shou I have had, which is great because I’m a novice, and was about to give up on cooked pu’erh. It doesn’t help that I keep running out of the room to tend to poopy baby boy and my tea keeps going cold. Also, adds to perception of compost smell. :)

Medium infusions had a pretty peach tone. So, visually very nice in my white porcelain cup. It took two 15-sec infusions to get the deepest color.

No bitterness, mineral earthy taste, silky texture.

More than half the day has gone by, I survived a potluck, head’s killing me and I haven’t had any actual tea. I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to try today, but ended up choosing to give this a shot. Cake itself smells mushroomy and is easy enough to break into. I throw 5 grams into the gaiwan, give it a quick rinse and a fairly quick first steep.

The leaves have a spiced, sweetish scent, and the liquor brews up a fairly deep red. I’m taste mushroom and camphor from the very first scent. Super smooth, and I get a sweetish finish as it goes down. I get some hints of cocoa out of the second steep. I got completely sucked into some work and totally forgot about and oversteeped the third go around. But the tea still came out well, not too surprisingly. Still smooth, and a very distinct cacao flavor came through. I did one more steep which confirmed my worry that I probably pulled most of the flavor out during the oversteep, but I enjoyed this one, so I’ll have it again soon.

Gongfu brewed in a shiboridashi . This is a lighter shou puerh which is smooth with forest notes. As in it is nowhere close to what most people would call earthy but has just enough to give it a subtle complexity. Personally I enjoy the cake version of this tea more than the loose leaf version. It is hard to place what exactly is different so I wonder if it is a matter of the loose tea being kept in a bag vs the cake which was exposed to air through the paper wrapper & cloth bag the whole time.

An good daily drinker and probably a good intro to ripe pu’er cake!

I got notes of bitter sweet, wet earth, cream, and mostly walnut. With each steeping the tea got more brown sugar sweet and nutty. Very smooth texture! I didn’t get much cha qi/ tea drunk’n so I ended up drinking this late into the evening. A very friendly, ready to drink, daily drinker ripe that is smooth and easy to chug!

Full review on Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/2013-ontario-1357-ripe-shou-puer-from-whispering-pines-tea-co-tea-review/