Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Pu-erh
Where to Buy: Teavivre
Tea Description:
This raw pu-erh cake is grown and produced in Fengqing, Yunnan, which is the origin place of DianHong black tea. This Wild Tree Yesheng Raw Pu-erh Cake is harvest in spring of 2013. Between March to May, after harvesting the fresh leaves, tea workers will process them: fixation, rolling, drying, sifting, and then store the leaves in carton boxes.
As the workers use iron pan for fixation, and roll the tea with their hands, the leaves do not have good looks as machine-made leaves. Yet regarding on quality, this Wild Tree Yesheng Pu-erh Cake is a green food from nature, in the mists and clouds on high mountains. It is a tea worth being in your collection list.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
The dry leaf aroma of this 2013 Fengqing Wild Tree Yesheng Raw Pu-erh Tea Cake from Teavivre is almost non-existent. This surprised me, only because I’m used to Pu-erh having some aroma, but I didn’t smell much of anything when I smelled the dry leaf.
Conversely, the wet leaves have a strong vegetal scent to them that immediately made me think of peas. Granted, peas are not my favorite vegetable (that’s putting it mildly) and because of that, they are not a food that I’m smelling on a regular basis. But when I smelled these wet leaves, green peas is what came to mind.
For those of you who are like me: timid when it comes to Pu-erh tea because of that strong, earthy and sometimes fishy taste and smell, you can rest assured that you won’t experience that with this Pu-erh. This is a very young Pu-erh, and it tastes much more like a green tea to me than it does a Pu-erh.
It has a vegetal taste, but it’s a remarkably smooth vegetal note. It doesn’t have that “crisp” or “lively” sort of vegetative taste that you might experience with a typical green tea. Instead, this has a very mellow vegetative taste. It doesn’t taste grassy. It tastes like mild steamed vegetables: like spinach, perhaps, only milder and sweeter.
There is a buttery note to this too, something I don’t typically experience with a Pu-erh. So, imagine that aforementioned extra mild, sweet spinach, topped with mushrooms that have been lightly sauteed in butter and then topped with thinly sliced almonds … only the almonds are raw. It has that sort of creamy, buttery taste that you might experience with a raw almond.
Later infusions brought out more savory flavors to the vegetal tones. Notes of salt and seaweed were contrasted by some newly emerging fruity notes. The flavor becomes deeper and more complex with each new infusion.
I like in “wild tree” teas like this that I can almost taste the “wild” in them. There is a note to these teas that I don’t often find in the more conventional farm grown teas.
I would recommend this Pu-erh to those new to Pu-erh so that they can experience some “different” Pu-erh teas, as well as fans of green tea. It’s a really unique tea experience … one definitely worth trying.
