357g 2007 Tasa Sheng Pu'er Bing 塔薩生普洱茶餅

2007 Tasa Sheng Pu'er (塔薩生普洱茶, Tǎ Sà Shēng Pǔ'ěr Chá, "Tasa Sheng Pu'er") - This 30g sample is a portion of a 357g bing. Tasa Bing is a 2007 Duoyi Patch Sheng Pu'er that was aged loose until 2017, when we had it pressed into a bing by a special request from a friend of ours. Her child, Tasa, has been drinking and pouring tea since they were very small, and for their tenth birthday she wanted to get them a bing from their birth year. We asked Li Shu Lin, our Nannuo Mountain tea farmer, if he had any bings from 2007, and he said that he didn't, but he did have tea--some máo chá 毛茶 ("Hairy Tea" - a term used for Loose Sheng Pu'er) from 2007. So we had this tea pressed into a bing for Tasa! When you press cakes, you don't generally press one at a time--it's more economical to press an entire run of bings--and so the many duplicates of this special birthday cake made their way into our catalogue. 

This cake is a great daily drinker for people who enjoy middle-aged Sheng Pu'er. Often referred to as "Golden Pu'er," these middle-aged cakes exhibit a budding earthiness with a dry mineral quality providing a full-bodied base for the complex floral notes of young Sheng, which are still present in this stage of the tea's development. This bing gives the overall impression of flowers drying on a hot brick, with woody overtones and a pleasant mouth-filling bitterness, typical of dry-aged Sheng. The Qi retains a youthful vigor that is entering into a grounded and energizing maturity.