Tea: Black Water Ridge Yiwu Puer Type: Raw Puer (生普洱） Region: Heishui Liangzi, Gua Feng Zhai, Yiwu Harvest: April 2025 Press Date: May 2025 2025 Tasting Notes: Guava, Honeysuckle, Orchid, Cream, Rock Sugar Black Water Ridge is a rare tea, it is a single-origin tea cake made exclusively from Guafeng Zhai material in Yiwu. Yiwu is well renown for its gentle character of tea, their welcoming depths, and for their incredible ability to age magnificently. Highly sought, endlessly copied, this region has been meticulously divided down to micro regions with their different flavors, terroirs, villages, ethnic groups, mountains, and even sides of mountains and different garden plots on a single mountain side. Thus, we are proud to say that 100% of the tea leaves in this tea cake come from one particular mountain, Hei Shui Liangzi, or Black Water Ridge, and from one specific garden we visted in April 2025. Heishui Liangzi is the second tallest mountain in Xishuang Banna, second only to Huazhu Liangzi, and it is the crowning jewel of what many puer drinkers refer to as the 'wild flavor' of Guafeng Zhai tea. Gua Feng Zhai is one of the most remote tea growing regions in Yiwu. The first dirt road into the village was hewn from forest in 2001, electricity was first connected in 2008, and its tea has been fanatically coveted since the early 2010s. This region is renown for its wild jungles, the minimal human intervention, and the richly wild taste of the teas. Our time out in Guafeng Zhai this spring really impressed upon us just how special this region is, the teas, the mountains, the people, and the culture. We are honored to be able to offer this tea from such a beautiful mountain garden made by such wonderful people. While we have done a lot of blending this year, mixing batches of tea from different gardens together to complement and accent flavors, the tea from Black Water Ridge deserves to be experienced in its pure form, thus it is one of the few unblended teas we are offering this year. The dry leaves give off rich tropical fruit fragrances when placed in a warmed gaiwan, we get guava and papaya in addition to a richly floral background. These fragrances only intensify when brewed with hot water, releasing even more floral notes with a stickier tropical fruit flavor, we even get some citrus hop fragrances like those in a rich IPA. Unlike an IPA though, there is very little bitterness in this tea; on the tongue, we get notes of cream, rock sugar, flowers and a pleasant minerality. While the Chaqi isn’t as profound as the Gushu base of No Man’s Land, the Black Water Ridge qiaomu provides soothing waves of relaxing energy that makes us brew this tea beyond ten infusions. The gentle mouthfeel, the sweet tea soup, and the energy of this tea truly show us the best of Yiwu, and are great examples of the ‘wild flavor’ people are referring to when they speak of Guafeng Zhai teas. We offer this tea in 25 gram samples (chunks lovingly pried off the cake), whole 200 gram cakes, and a set of 5 cake tongs wrapped in bamboo leaves and totaling 1000 grams. If you're interested in sampling this year's full flight of puer pressings, check out the Yunnan Flight, a set of 6 dragon balls from different regions each pressed in 7 gram balls for convenient brewing. If you've been buying from us for a while, and trust our taste, we have bundled all the cakes together into one single Product a Bundle Tong of sorts at 10% off their individual prices (similar to our tong pricing). We recommend brewing this tea gongfu style in a gaiwan or Chinese teapot. We use 6 grams of tea in a 100ml brewing vessel with boiling water, steeping 5 second for the first few infusions and adding 5 seconds after ever subsequent infusion. Most of these puer teas can be re-infused over 15 times, when brewing in this gongfu style. Never bought a cake before, learn how to break it up with a tea pick on our YouTube.
