Palace Tribute Tea Cake Ripe Puerh 2013 - Vital Tea Leaf

Notes of licorice, wood chips, and cherries.

Scent Notes

The initial scent is actually quite sweet and inviting. The tea leaves have a very classical puerh scent, but it isn’t nearly as smokey or woody as other puerh I have had. There is almost a candy like sweetness to this tea, like a hickory smoke.

Tasting Notes

On the first infusion, there are still large chunks of tea leaf, and they aren’t able to break apart. So I expect this to be quite light in flavor intensity. The tea is already a lovely orange brown hue. There doesn’t appear to be any surface oils or floaters. The first sips are quite mellow. The tea certainly can take the time to wake up. The texture is pretty well balanced, not creamy, but not as swift as water either. I am picking up a sweetness on the tongue, with a small amount of astringency shortly after on the sides of the tongue and back roof of mouth. A slight toasty finish, but it is very weak after only a few sips. Let’s move on to more infusions where it gets more exciting.
The color of the tea is way darker now. It is actually such a dark red brown that I can’t see the bottom of my cup. The tea leaves in the gaiwan are still not fully separated. Mmm yes this tea is starting to pick up flavor. Still a light texture, tasting notes of new wood, almost licorice-like, more astringent on the tongue after swallowing, with a rich back of throat roasted finish. I think I like my puerh’ s more creamy in texture, so I am going to try a lower water quantity.
Brew 30s, 80mL. As I pour the new water in, you can see the past water creating a blood like swirl at the bottom of the gaiwan. The tea leaf chunks are starting to break up a bit more, but still not fully apart. Same dark red brown color. More smokey on the nose, with a wakening aroma on the back of the sinuses, like a very very faint menthol effect. The texture is much more creamy, more how I like it. I think it is slightly less vicious than milk. Flavor notes are even stronger. While I still get that same familiar puerh taste, the qualities are more relaxed. Doesn’t feel as boring as a mouth full of wood chips, but has some almost citrus notes on the side of the tongue, small astringency, not very noticeable finish.
The tea leaves are all mostly apart now. The tea is back to more orange in color rather than red. I am getting savory notes on the nose, like a soup broth. Less creamy in texture, more flavor in the back of the throat on the swallow. Still surprisingly light in flavor. The main flavors picked up on the second infusion, but the third and fourth were pretty similar to the second in intensity.
The tea seems a bit lighter in darkness, the leaves are fully open in the cup. Hmm the flavor is much less intense now, but does have a sweet finish. No bitterness at all, a small amount of astringency. Yeah, not much else. Kinda getting boring in my opinion. I didn’t expect the flavor intensity to drop off on this infusion.
The scent has some planty sweetness, like a grilled onion. Brew 60s, 80mL, and the color is even lighter than before. Boo, taste is boring. Less intense than 5, still slightly milky, but lessening, some increasing sweetness as a delayed finish. It just feels empty now. The finish provides a cherry like sweetness on the center of the tongue, which is a new but subtle development.
I am going to brew this one at 2 min, 80mL. More rich liquor like notes on the nose, kinda like a sweet barrel aged spirit. Texture is a bit milkier now, flavor is empty bodied, and the sweetness is continuing to develop on the finish, now enveloping the full tongue, with a soft passing sweetness, like a sweet non tart apple or pear.
Same as 7. I am done with this tea.
I tried a 4 minute infusion. The sweetness comes on faster, but the main flavor is still gone.

Rating: 3/5

While this started off with great potential, it just fell off a cliff somewhere around infusion number 5 or 6. I do like the developing sweetness, but it doesn’t really come until after the main flavor is gone. I am sad because I was really hoping for this, since the flavor it did give while it had it, was really interesting. I am going to let this age as loose leaf in the two separate containers for a while and come back to it in a month or so.

I picked up this tea cake from Vital Tea Leaf when I visited San Francisco. Unfortunately I don’t really know much about it at all. I tried to OCR and translate some of the text. From what I got, the name of the cake is Palace Cake, I think the manufacturer is Menghai Tea Factory (勐海茶厂), and it is a ripe puerh cake pressed on April 8, 2013.

I just broke this tea cake up fully today. It is the first tea cake I have ever bought, and it is the first time I have ever broken a cake. I hope I did a good job. I decided to break up the entire cake for a few reasons. For one, it seemed like a fun thing to do. A rare opportunity that doesn’t come around that often. Two, I saw a video by Mai Leaf that breaking up a tea cake when it is a good age and letting it sit as loose leaf in jars makes it taste better. And finally is that this tea cake is already old enough, and I don’t feel like storing it away, as I would much rather consume it now. I don’t know if there is a way to master breaking up cakes, but I hope I at least did a decent job. I used a small knife to pry the cake apart. There were lots of small pieces and dust, and the cake was a lot harder to take apart than I thought. Getting nice leaves is almost impossible, and it is more like taking off chunks at a time. I hope I didn’t create too much dust and waste a lot. I forgot to measure the tea cake before I started taking it apart, but I measured my final yield and it was 336.1g. I don’t think I lost about 20g to dust, so I think the final tea cake might have been less than 357g if it might have lost water weight or something.

I decided to brew this tea today immediately after breaking it apart. I mixed the insides and outsides to get a decent sample. In maybe about a month I will try to do another comparison to see if I really can taste the difference between storing in a ceramic jar vs air tight stainless steel container. I split the total into two containers, at about 165g each. I guess I didn’t feel like saving a chunk of the cake to try and compare it later. I’m really not that patient.