2001 Mengku Old tree (T4/T4+)

• Traditional processing Old tree puerh
• Smooth, thick, rich brews
• Deeply calming Qi
• Great Taiwan dry storage

These early cakes by Shuangjiang Mengku factory use a lot of old tree Puerh in the blend and represent fantastic value for aged old tree puerh. While it’s not as strong as Menghai tea of the era, it more than makes up for it by it smoothness, good aftertaste and lovely calming Qi.

Even though in this case you’re buying great aged taste at not very much (price is low, it clearly tastes like 20 year old dry storage puerh and there’s no premium because of the factory so there really is not much reason to try to make a fake of a tea like this), as usual we went above and beyond to establish authenticity of this cake, if you’re interested follows a lengthy exposition of our findings:

The yearbook doesn’t have a picture of this exact cake (which is normal, the yearbook doesn’t have pictures of all cakes). There were quite a few versions of these “Zhongcha mengku” cakes dated either 2000 or 2001, some of them have the traditional Shuangjiang Mengku big leaf instead of a neifei that you can see in the picture, which is pretty hard to fake obviously. Zhongcha = 中茶, the 茶 mark is inside a circle made of 中 characters. There are no credible fakes for 2000s Mengku cakes and the tea clearly tastes of this age so we feel very confident with identification of this tea, we’ve also run it through one senior expert who confirmed our understanding. It was common for this factory to use varying amount of old tree in their early 2000s cakes, some more than other. We think this one has a lot more than average from the taste profile (smooth) and Qi (deep) and good durability.

Big approx ~357g cakes, some weight loss over the years. Open cake misses some tea from the back (315g, discounted from full price).