The artificially fermented sibling of a raw puer, ripe/shou puer produces a smooth soup that is warming and especially comforting to drink in the colder months. This tea has all the hallmarks of a quality ripe puer. Made from Menghai material, this tea has a smooth texture, date-like sweetness and a pleasantly woody overtone. This tea is also quite clean tasting, as it’s had plenty of time to rest off the pile, making it free of any off-taste that can sometimes be associated with freshly processed shou puer. For gongfu brewing, we recommend brewing this tea similar to a dragon ball or other single serving format, either extending the rinse to 20 seconds or so, although this tea opens up a bit quicker than the others in this series. This biscuit also performs well when western brewing, for which we advise a brewing for 30 seconds as a rinse (discard) in a 350-400ml vessel, then brewing for 20 seconds and adding an additional 20 seconds (or to taste) per brew after that. Each of the convenient single-serving biscuits contains 7g (+/-1 gram of tea).
