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Did a couple of sessions with this tea over the last weekend. I’ve used up about half the cake now.

I really do not find this one to be plausible at the price. It is not horrible, but it is… boring. There is a little huigan in steeps 4-8, the mouth feel is decent, and I got a pretty solid tea sweat. But the endurance is poor, the tea being pretty much completely played out after around 10 steeps, and little feeling of power. I would as soon drink young Menghai factory tea at 1/3 the price.

My second session with this tea. The first time I thought it was rather boring, but this is really quite nice. Fairly thick mouth feel, sweet and bitter, nice mouth coating by the 3rd steep, smell of something powerfully fruity… pineapple maybe?

After 5 or 6 steeps the lid scent weakens and changes to something more like sugarcane, and I’m getting a pretty decent puer sweat. Tragically I won’t have time to steep it out in the gaiwan, something has come up and I’ll have to dump the leaf in a mug to finish.

Possibly I like autumn sheng more than I thought.

Fairly boring purchase from an Asian market, it cost about $10/200gm.

The leaf quality is very high, consisting entirely of rolled shoots with intact 2-leaves-and-a-bud with pretty much 0 dust or scraps.

5 grams in a gaiwan can go about 7-8 steeps. Also works OK for several steeps just loose in a mug, drinking off the leaves.

The vendor describes this one as “Young sheng puerh like” but I can’t agree with that.

There is a hint of sweetness and something perfumey in the aroma. Probably because of the relatively high brewing temp, I get a bit of astringent mouthcoating making it like this.

I would prefer to use less leaf just loose in the cup, but I find that this tea oversteeps and turns bitter when I try that.

This is my everyday shu recently. I obtained it from Yunnan Sourcing’s US site. Typically I brew it as I am today, with a basket infuser and a 12-ounce mug. Today I grabbed a chip that happened to be about 4 gm, put it in the infuser, and doused it in boiling water to cover while mashing with the handle of the puer knife to loosen it up. Then I poured off the rinse and left the infuser in the heated, covered, empty mug for a few minutes to steam. The first steep was about 3 minutes, and if experience is any guide I’ll do a couple of more with this leaf at 4-5 min.

As with most shu I drink, I don’t get a wild variety of flavors. There is a sort of generic woody taste, a little sweet, a little of some kind of fruit. At its best there can be a sort of ethereal mouthfeel.

Nice, very clean dry storage, high leaf grade, fine floral & sweet perfume. Begins to get thin after about 10 infusions, I felt it was played out after 14.