Baopuxuan Mahei 2012

dry leaves: dark chocolate and dark herbal wet leaves: butter, verbena and a kind of smell of the sea soup: super transparent and clean, thick and big apetizing bubbles can appear while pouring 0, the rince: what suprises at first sight is how clean, transparent and thick that golden orangy soup is… in the mouth it’s a thick and silky water with, far in the background, a sort of honey-like sweetness, some butter, and something oceanic 1: some moderate bitterness shows up at the same time as some typical yiwu mahei taste : here it’s not grass it’s more a good and savory seaweed or, i don’t know, some sophisticated sea component… the aftertaste brings lots of cooling: not spearmint, more a kind of dark mint i am not able to describe 2: each cup is different, and even each sip seems different according to the temperature changes of the liquid: it starts like bitter tree bark, then it truely taste like arab green tea… it’s smooth, some astringency is building, nothing intense… The aftertaste has some soft bitterness, that nice seaweed component and the dark mint; lots of minty coolness in the mouth 3, 4: the wet leaves are now smelling aged sheng and butter the taste is also having cheiwei, and wood the tip of the tongue is getting creamy and the shengjin starts 5: some wood and perhaps sugarcane is coming (and will not go back), some milk.. there’s still some ageness… it’s very complex and dynamic… 6: it seems to fade a little (well not really…), vegetal, wood, seaweed… delivering some houyun and cooling in mouth… shengjin is more present 7: wet leaves have no more ageness… the body is becoming more vegetal… it still delivers an active aftertaste and shengjin 8: wet leaves smell grassy and more minty… some leather & tobacco appear 9: oddly the soup is very cloudy, the taste has bitterness, mint, tobacco and that seaweed component. 10: The soup is clean & almost transparent again, wtf… the texture is very silky already 11 brews and it’s far from being dead…

The aftertaste along with the shengjin give lots of depths but its intensity fades quickly, what will last is a distant bitterness, a distant feeling of sweetness & seaweed and a moderate shengjin. bitter-sweet oceanic yun :)

No need to talk about qi or to focus on that, i’m feeling exalted.

That’s really interesting. First it gives me a lesson on how a well processed puer must be, because i know how it was, and how muted it was in ’12, and now i can see how complex, pure & dynamic it is. Secondly because i think it’s a rather classic mahei… Perhaps it’s not something everyone would love, i suppose the material is not even super crazy good, but to me this is perfect. It’s a tuo, and it’s superior in quality to so many things i have… Eventually this makes realize how badly processed many of our (well… my) cakes are…