A China based vendor reached out about trying teas for review, mostly sheng that sounded nice, so I'm reviewing the first versions from a unique looking sample set here.
Some of the versions sound promising, but beyond that they're presented as small cakes, which is different, 28 grams each, partitioned in a way that reminds me of candy bar form. I'm starting with what look to be two of the more basic versions, getting a feel for what they are, and checking on brewing issues related to that form.
Chen Sheng Hao is a leading producer of pu-erh tea from old growth forests in Yunnan Province.
Meng Hai Chen Sheng Tea Co., Ltd. was established in 2007 by Mr. Chen Shenghe, a tea lover who has worked in the tea industry for more than 50 years.
2022 Yin Ban Zhang (银班章)
A blended raw Pu-erh selected materials from the Ban Zhang area. This tea has powerful "Chaqi". The beginning taste is bitter and slightly astringent with quick sweet aftertaste.
2022 Chen Sheng #1 (陈升一号)
One of the featured and award-winning blended raw Pu-Erh tea of Chen Sheng Hao. Selected early spring large-leaf arbor tree leaves in the Menghai area. It has a balanced taste and good coordination in all aspects of aroma, taste, and “cha qi”. It is friendly to new Pu-erh tea drinkers.
2022 Na Ka (那卡)
“Na Ka” is the sweetness representative of Pu-Erh tea. The soup has an attractive pale-gold color in the cup. The aroma and taste are alluring, exhibiting a noticeable peach-like flavor and strong sweetness in the later infusions. There is also a strong cup scent left behind in the early brews.
2022 Ban Po Zhai (半坡寨)
Sourced from Nannuo mountain with a light sweet orchid aroma, subtle woody aroma, and lingering sweet aftertaste.
2022 Emperor (霸王青饼)
Another award-winning and featured Pu-erh tea of Chen Sheng Hao. It is well known as a raw Pu-erh tea that has strong and penetrating characteristics like “Emperor”. It has strong bitterness upfront, penetrating aroma, pronounced salivation and sweet-after-taste, long cooling, and powerful Cha Qi. It can last for 15 infusions and still have good taste.
2022 Chen Xiang Sheng Hua (陈香升华)
A classic sweet raw Pu-erh tea with an elegant floral and bean aroma.
2022 Zhen Ming Qing Bing (珍茗青饼)
Selected large-leaf arbor tree leaves from the Menghai area. This blended raw Pu-erh is gentle and sweet, suitable for tea lovers who are new to Pu-erh tea.
So I'll be trying the last two, the 2022 Chen Xiang Sheng Hua (陈香升华) and 2022 Zhen Ming Qing Bing (珍茗青饼). Some of the others sound even nicer but it makes sense to start with what seem to be more basic to adjust to the type range, and sort out brewing, etc. If there are quality limitations across the set those should come up here.
Review:
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Chen Xiang Shen Hua left, Zhen Ming Qing Bing right, in all photos |
I broke form and used a quick rinse for these. They were starting as quarter-disc chunks, 7 grams each, and of course a short rinse didn't cause them to open. For a pu'er enthusiast familiar with separating compressed tea that candy-bar style of separation isn't at all necessary, but I have no problem with it, and for people new to pu'er it could be much easier.
Color difference between these is significant; the Chen Xiang Sheng Hua version is much darker. Ordinarily I'd expect that to relate to more aging input or higher degree of oxidation from initial processing, but I'm not really sure. The first version opening faster would cause it to infuse stronger initially.
Chen Xiang Sheng Hua: not enough to go by yet; too light. That's normal for first round infusions. There is already pleasant warm mineral range; that should develop well, once other aspects join it.
Zhen Ming Qing Bing (Menghai): again far too light for a flavor list. It might be lighter in flavor aspect character, but that's about it so far.
CXSH 2: even more warm mineral tone, without so much joining in beyond that, but intensity did pick up. It seems closest to warm spice range at this point, of course not exactly cinnamon, but other aromatic spice instead. Since I've used their descriptions to help separate types to at least a name I can reference their description, floral and bean. Maybe. Warm mineral is most pronounced, at this point, and the rest leans towards spice range, it seems to me.
ZMQB: this is opening slower due to compression being different, higher. Both could be interpreted as floral, kind of a default common range across a lot of sheng. This is brighter in tone, and just a little creamy in feel. I would imagine astringency and bitterness will pick up and that feel and flavor will change a lot.
I'll use a longer soak for this version to get degree of leaf separation and wetting to even up, probably coupled with pulling it apart a bit after the next infusion. Of course someone could separate the leaves the old fashioned way while they're dry, with a pu'er knife or pick. There's one on the table but I wanted to see how this works using the whole chunks.
CXSH 3: dryness picks up, and intensity. This is nice, for the range it's in. I've tried a tea version not so far off this in the last month or so, but that was a wild material origin fall harvest version from Vietnam. The markers related to quality are good for this, the sweetness, overall balance, the way the astringency feels, lack of potential flaws, and flavor intensity and complexity. Not in an exceptional sense, but it's nice.
I'm still going with warm mineral standing out most in this, onto spice range beyond that. It could work interpreting that as bean instead, along the lines of red bean. I probably love beans a lot more than most people; I was a vegetarian for 17 years, and my absolute favorite desert food is Chinese beans and dried fruit with crushed ice and longan juice. I could live on that.
ZMQB: it's funny how slowly this is ramping up in intensity, but then it's still half compressed. I'll break it apart manually to move that along. This is why I generally don't like drinking sheng as dragonballs, because it makes the process slower, and mixes infusion of leaves between those first wetted rounds ago and others just opening up. Of course that might also bump complexity, experiencing flavor inputs in middle-sequence rounds from the leaf material just getting started in early rounds. It's probably as much about me not being accustomed to that as it actually being inferior.
There's not a lot of bitterness or astringency from this, not even stronger than average flavor intensity. In splitting it half the material was still bone-dry on the inside, and fully compressed. Just pulling the chunk apart won't work; it's easy to separate with a pu'er knife while partly wetted. For people accustomed to separating dry compressed leaf it might make sense to just do it while dry instead.
CSXH 4: heavy warm mineral is quite pleasant in this. The feel being just a bit dry is not negative. I'd ordinarily interpret the flavor as spice, as I've mentioned, then also including cedar wood. I suppose someone interpreting this as including a bit of camphor would make sense.
ZMQB: intensity picks up a good bit, but beyond a floral range it's hard to separate out a description. Feel is more astringent, and limited bitterness enters in. Sweetness level is fine but not especially pronounced. Flavors are generally clean, and intensity is ok, it's just not easy to describe as a list.
Sheng versions can become a bit muted at an in-between stage related to aging but this is not remotely in that situation; at 2 years old it should've started a transition process but should be relatively close to where it started. 3 or 4 years can offset initial astringency some but it wouldn't change that much in 2 years.
CSXH 5: that spice tone undergoes an interesting and pleasant transition; it picks up. Feel is nice at this stage too, kind of substantial, but not harsh. Some of these warm tones people might interpret in a broad range of different ways, as bean instead of spice, or aromatic wood, or camphor (it has an edge to it).
ZMQB: finally bitterness is getting to where I expected. I guess the default description of this being floral works. For me being 10 cups of sheng into this experience I'm almost finished; I also had a few earlier from leaf left over from yesterday.
Noise level and disruption at the house today is atypical. It's hot out, at 10 AM now, so probably in the mid-80s F (87 F / 31 C; I looked it up), but beyond that workers are here to repair an air conditioner, and a separate set of them are cleaning the other units. I've taken breaks a few times to move furniture or storage boxes; it's not ideal.
CSXH 6: balance is nice for this, the way heavier spice range input and warm tones come together. This isn't really a personal favorite style of sheng but it's not really an uncommon one. It seems appropriate that a sample set includes a version like this, since warm aromatic tones that lean towards spice is a normal range to encounter, just not as common as lighter toned more floral character, with higher sweetness.
ZMQB: bitterness and astringency really give this a punch. It's not as harsh as factory tea versions, which typically absolutely need a good bit of aging to be enjoyable, but this style wouldn't be for everyone either. This might hold up ok to another 15 years of aging, but it's also a bit approachable now for that to be the case. Whole-leaf and natural growth sourced teas tend to be a bit milder, and to include more depth and unusual complexity than just strength.
I think I'll probably like the style of other sample versions included more. Sheng with pronounced bitterness can be fine, but it works best when it complements high sweetness and even more pronounced floral range. The feel of this is a little dry, which isn't unusual for young Menghai sheng, but it's not necessarily the best style to drink so young. It doesn't help powering through 6 rounds of two versions at the same time, without any food, or even water breaks, to offset that.
I did try more rounds later, and intensity held up ok across a good number of additional rounds, with no unusual shifts in aspects after this.
Conclusions
I would say this is a qualified success as an introduction. Brewing process was ok, but one version opening slowly made for an unusually drawn out initial infusion sequence. Character for both is fine, distinctive and interesting, without much for flaws in aspect descriptions.
Lack of distinctness of flavors seemed a limitation for the Menghai version; sometimes that occurs when a fall version lacks intensity. I don't know if harvest time is ever described for these. I think that's more a problem when tea plants / trees are forced to produce a lot of material for a spring harvest, and then again for black tea production in summer, then stressing the plants to go through it all a third time.
Probably forcing plantation material tea plants to make a lot of material would also offset aspect distinctiveness, but this could be more naturally grown instead, a general theme tied to lots of different growing contexts and descriptions. It seems like a harsh edge usually accompanies teas made with emphasis on high production, forced to produce material quickly through chemical fertilizer use, which is why factory tea generally needs a decade and a half to settle, not two years.
These were fine. The real test will be trying their other teas they describe as more distinctive flagship versions.
It's interesting considering how these compare to two wild-origin, indigenous producer Vietnamese versions that I just reviewedthat I just reviewed. These are more typical of Yunnan style sheng, not quite as distinctive and unusual as those. I suppose quality level was a little higher for those, but that combined with style being less conventional, making them a different kind of thing. A better test might be comparing those with versions presented as the best of this set instead.
As far as value goes it's hard to judge without trying the versions presented as their highest level range. This set was $75 for 196 grams, so 38 cents a gram, or equivalent to a standard 357 gram cake costing $135. That's on the high side but not so far off typical cake pricing, for upper-medium quality level sheng, which is a very pleasant and distinctive range at this point. It's a hard price range for me to adjust to given sheng pricing was much lower 5 to 10 years ago, but general quality levels and access to more interesting versions has increased. It might be hard going back to appreciate what sold for $40 a cake a decade ago, when everything cost much less due to inflation occurring since.
For teas presented as best-quality, most demanded origin ranges normal lower-end conventional pricing range goes out the window, and teas cost whatever they cost.
As a point of reference White 2 Tea, another well-respected Western-facing vendor sells a terroir tasting set of four 100 grams cakes, for $50 (here). I've heard those criticized for being generally type-typical but a bit too basic (low) in quality level to really capture what works well in sheng type character (which of course is complete hearsay; I've not tried them). If the better versions of these represent the opposite extreme of the quality scale the much higher per-gram cost would be justified, and they could work much better to explore further into positive sheng range.
Exploring sheng requires resetting expectations some, adjusting to more bitterness, for example, so starting on the basic side or using a better sample set to explore could make sense. Or just buying a lot of samples, but per-weight cost tends to be higher for that, and it involves a lot of guesswork and sorting.
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