2006 Menghai "Spring Of Menghai"

The first couple steps are light and sweet with wildflower honey, black tea, dried apricot, and citrus notes dominating the golden brew, with a sweet earthiness in the background. It quickly becomes bittersweet and turns orange. I normally would have reduced the steeping time, but the bittersweet steeps have a deep, aromatic, resinous wood thing that I love, and it disappears in lighter steeps. The bitterness is quite tolerable anyway. The next few steeps move toward a more generic but still pleasant mushroomy earthiness, and that’s where this session ends because I’ve had a lot of puerh today and I can feel it.

Nice cake made of high quality first flush tea leaves. The cake has a pleasant light and fresh aroma. Clear dark gold liquor. In terms of flavor, there is a lovely forest honey sweetness in the sip without any bitterness or smoke. While very sweet, I did not detect any fruit. Sometimes able to detect the floral of meadow flowers. This is definitely a rather light and gentle cup with a clean and lingering finish and a pleasant aftertaste. Overall a very enjoyable Menghai Dayi product. I went light on the leaf this time but plan to increase the dry leaf by 50% the next time I prepare a cup.

Working 10 grams of this up in the Gaiwan to see how it does. This is the oldest Menghai Spring that I have that was purchased as a set of samples from Finepuerh. They seem to another pretty good seller in the market. Their packaging and labeling was really nice.
Enough about them and now to the tea. I picked this one after Scratch the kitty tea randomizer picked the White2Tea Amerykah 3 times in a row! I don’t think I can do that tonight and work tomorrow.
Wet lea still has the green scent with a little wisp of smoke in there. brew is a little darker than the 2008 cake I had a couple of days ago. This has evened out into a sweet brew without much bite or astringency to it. Honey and flowers in aroma and taste to this one. it is a little unassuming compared to the tea I had earlier in the day. Smooth and mellow would be the notes on this. Not much vibrancy or punch but an easy drinking brew.