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I had a sampler of this tucked away from a Mei Leaf order back in November. I haven’t been ordering much from them lately, owing largely to the better value I’ve been getting out of the W2T orders. Nevertheless, I have so much tea that I’ll probably be putting non-club orders on hold for a while. It gives me the opportunity to clear out my drawers and try some teas that I had forgotten about.

Bliss Beholder is one of Mei Leaf’s most expensive sheng puerhs that is available right now, retailing at about 180 USD. I purchased this sampler right when it came out, and now it only seems like the tea is available in whole cakes. It is a sheng from Man Zhuan, advertised as one of the six ancient Puerh mountains dating back to the Qing dynasty.

Initial impressions off the bat were strong, steamed rocks and the fruitiness characteristic of much of the Mei Leaf sheng catalogue. However, the rest of the session was largely lacking especially at the price point. It’s a fruity sheng with an exotic nature to it; I can detect the hints of sandalwood to complement the apricot, and it is buoyed by a strong minerality, but I have had much better.

I still have two more sessions of this tea so this review may be subject to change, but as of right now it’s ‘ok’.

The last of the ‘chocolate’ themed shu puerhs I bought from W2T a couple months back. It has a very similar cover to that of Smoove Cacao, a tea with similar taste notes that I personally wasn’t a huge fan of. These ‘easy drinking’ shus tend to lack the mouthfeel and performance of more sophisticated small batch productions. With that said, I do think this is the better tea of the two; again I get the advent calendar chocolate tasting notes with some lingering minerality. The smell of the wet leaf is truly dark chocolate, and maybe some cinnamon spice akin to that of Mexican hot chocolate. Probably a bit more deserving of being a daily drinker.

It turns out that there are only 3 repeat productions in the W2T lootbag, and 9 lootbag exclusives. That definitely makes things more interesting from a sampling perspective, but many are quick to notice that the repeats are some of the vendor’s cheaper productions. Anzac, for example, is only $18 for a 200g cake. This has led many to be suspicious of the quality of the lootbag teas – surely it is a good gimmick for them to be able to unload some of their cheaper and less desirable tea.

So far, the teas I have sampled haven’t been bad. I don’t think I’ve rated any of them less than a 75, which is what I consider average. Afterclang is the next new production that I pulled out of the lootbag, mistakenly labeled with the sticker of ‘Anzac’. I was only able to notice this misprint because of the cover of Anzac containing the actual tea name, so unless the wrappers are wrong (a possibility) then this one is indeed Afterclang.

This is the first dud of the selection. I hardly could taste anything out of this sheng, and it made me wonder if I had caught COVID or something. I checked the wet leaf and noticed that the coin seemed to be pretty compressed, so I gave it another few steeps for it to open up. It took a solid six infusions to finally start delivering some flavor – lots of apricots. My mom always remarks at how sheng smells like apricots, and for the most part while I tend to disagree, I certainly agree for this specific one. However, so far this is the weakest of the teas offered in this loot bag; perhaps I will have a better session the next time when I can account for the compression in the initial steeps.

With most of my puerh samples out of the way, it’s time to move on to the cakes I bought. Lumber Slut is a classic in the W2T lexicon, being an affordable shu with heavy woody notes. I chose the 2021 edition of this tea because it was the best selling iteration which was still available. Whether or not this is a true indicator of the quality of the tea to other years, I am not sure, but overall I was pretty impressed. It is a surprisingly drinkable tea, and while its mouthfeel is not as rich as other shus I’ve tried so far, I feel like this is an excellent tea for the relative value.

Pulchritude is an archaic term for beauty. This 2023 production is another loot-bag exclusive from white2tea which lacks any sort of ‘beta’. As usual, I didn’t know what to expect, and this one really surprised me with a taste profile I’ve never seen before in a sheng puerh. Immediately off the bat I got notes of vanilla and lotus, very unique for this tea type, and very on the dot.

I drank this tea to death, and it definitely exceeded my expectations as to what could come from this loot bag. I expected a lot of mediocre and largely huangpian productions; I am not expecting elite high quality sheng from this, and even with Pulchritude you don’t really get that, but you get something that is unusual for the tea type. I really hope the rest of the offerings in this bag are like this, but I still won’t get my hopes up. Solid tea.

I jumped at the opportunity to get the W2T ‘lootbag’, a ‘random’ assortment of sheng puerh productions. After about two months of shipping hijinx, including an erroneous tracking number, I finally received a mysterious package from a random person in New York, containing the loot bag. I have no clue what happened between China and California, but I was just happy to have not lost my tea in the mail. I wouldn’t call the loot bag random; In reality, each bag will have six mini-cakes of the same twelve different varieties, of which there are some of pre-existing releases while others are exclusive to the loot bag. While I was hoping for a little bit more of a ‘loot bag’ experience, including teas of different rarity, I decided to maximize the randomness by blind selecting from the bag.

Respect at the Buckhorn was the tea I chose today. It is one of the loot bag exclusives, and the only information we have to go off of is that it was a 2023 picking that was pressed this year. The cakes are about 7.5g, a little more than what I am used to with shengs, and unfortunately they are too big to fit through the lid of my Yixing pot. I’m not a huge fan of breaking up tea cakes, but in this instance I had to break it in half.

Initial impressions are of a mid-grade quality tea, and from what I can gather based on the talcum mineral scent of the wet leaf probably picked somewhere around Yiwu. It features a lot of that bitter astrigency one would expect from a Green Hype but unlike that budget sheng it never wanders into the territory of truly annoying. I really hope that this lootbag isn’t just an assortment of mediocre shengs but it’s looking like that might be the play. W2T could really take this to the next level if there was an element of randomness and rarity to the bag; sure you can still load it up with huangpian and Green Hype type teas but the possibility of there being a 1/100 chance of getting a road 2 nowhere type production would make it more than worthwhile. Perhaps it’s gambling at that point but I don’t care.

I’m down for any shu puerh that has chocolatey notes, so when I saw this one on W2T’s collection, I jumped at it. This is indeed an easy going drinker, but it isn’t one that inspires. It’s a little bit on the watery side, which isn’t to say that it’s bad, but the chocolatey notes come off as rather chalky in comparison to higher quality ‘gong ting’ productions which will have a milky chocolateness to it. In fact it sort of reminds me of those cheap advent calendar chocolates I would get in my Christmas stocking. Definitely nostalgic if anything.

Like most W2T shus, it is of a pretty uncomparable value, and thus if you enjoy the tea type you won’t balk at drinking this, even regularly. Would I buy a cake of it? Probably not, but I definitely will finish my set of minis.

To open up November, I will be finishing up the series of five black teas from Masu which were sent as part of the Old Ways Tea club back at the start of last month. So far I haven’t been all that impressed with the selection, ranging from the bad to the ugly. The last variant we have here is ‘wild style’ which sounds good on paper. I like to get a little wild sometimes.

As usual, flavors are muted but lean heavily on the floral with a little bit of fruity. It’s way less tasty than most hongchas, which is a bit disappointing. Maybe I’m just a bit too used to the stuff coming out of tong mu, or maybe I have been fooled this entire time by artificial sweetener or something. Nevertheless, it lands in the mediocre bin again. I won’t be missing these teas, and am hoping that the December club from OWT will have a better selection. They did have two decent yanchas in the box this past month, especially a ‘wild style’ DHP which I received pretty favorably.

EDIT: The later infusions of this tea opened up a little bit better than the other variants, so I feel obliged to give it a retroactive increase in its rating.

Totally forgot I had some of this tea left. I remember this sheng having a very distinct flavor to it, but the compression of the cake dissuaded me from digging too close to the beeng for a while. Well here we are, about 3 years later, and I am no longer hesitant to just break off a chunk of tea with my hands.

The smell of the wet leaf is very pungent and alcoholic in nature. Lots of fermented and bamboo notes which immediately raise my nostrils and get me in the mood for the session. I had a heavy load of Kuura’s Heresy yesterday, and it definitely lifted my spirits for the rest of the day. Lets see if the W2T production can stand up to it -

This tea brews very clear, especially for a sheng. It really makes me wonder what sort of material they were working with here; it’s unusual for a W2T production in that it was never sold in ‘mini’ form, but rather only in a cake. I definitely remember it having some younger notes, but age will do that to a puerh. As for further infusions, this is a very easy drinking sheng with a very unique flavor profile. It is almost bubblegummy in its sweetness, but delicate and fragile with not as much taste as one would expect from a sheng with this sort of mouthfeel. That isn’t to say the characteristic bamboo and cherimoya sweetness that I remember from 3 years ago isn’t there – honestly a lot hasn’t changed much from those initial sessions – but it definitely is smooth and streamlined, characteristic of heavy bud pickings.

This is a pretty special sheng in that it leaves an impression. It does not tick all the boxes for me to be a GOAT tea, but it’s absolutely deserving of the steep (by W2T standards) price tag.