2010 Xiao Fan Menghai

This is a very good ripe that Puerh Brooklyn doesn’t yet list on their website. It was quite expensive. For the price I paid I was expecting phenomenal. This tea was really, really good but I will have to drink it again before I decide it was phenomenal. There was a fair amount of fermentation taste to the early steeps, not unpleasant or fishy. There were some notes of dark chocolate in there too. As I resteeped this tea over and over again, eventually steeping it 16 times it got sweeter and sweeter, developing a fruity note. I really can’t pin it down to a specific fruit but it did improve dramatically. I gave it more than my customary twelve steeps because it was so expensive. Even after 16 steeps I think I could have gotten another 2 steeps out of the leaves. It had gotten weaker by the 16th steep but not so weak that the leaves were dead. Overall this was a very, very good tea.

I steeped this tea sixteen times in a 160ml solid silver teapot with 12.2g leaf and boiling water. 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, 2 min, 2.5 min, 3 min, 3.5 min, and 4 minutes.