I bought this cake in 2022, following sipdown of a much earlier sample, and it may have been BBTC’s last cake, because it vanished from their website soon after. I withheld my review though, not trusting my sense of taste due to CoVid recurrences. Now, today in late April 2025, I’m steeping it again, and find it to be a really swell tea that I look forward to enjoying! Strong tea flavor with hints of assamic content, lovely camphor aroma and a wintergreen taste that endured through early resteepings. Slightly astringent with just a scant bit of humidity (mustiness) in the second steep. No fishiness or sourness and lacking in petrichor or geosmin. There are some notes of leather and tobacco. A clear, sweet, amber liquor. I’ll rate it as a 90.
Sadly, the provenance of this tea is muddled, as BTTC seems to have made multiple revisions to the descriptions, both in vintage (“1990’s” vs. “2002” vs. merely “aged”) and in manufacture (“Kunming Tea Factory Green Stamp 7542 blend” vs. “probably made by a smaller factory in the Menghai area as a copy of the famous 7542 recipe”). Does this have to do with the privatization of state-owned tea factories? Or the imitations that were common during the Puerh “boom”? I don’t know, but I doubt BTTC is attempting deception. Probably just honestly revising the info as best they can, to reflect things as they’ve come to light. Even the aging is vague (“dry-stored in Taiwan” vs. “Natural dry storage”). Other variations appear in the internet archive of the Wayback Machine, though always with the same images of the cake, its wrapper, and the inner insert, which match what I received. I have not examined the embedded neifi.
Regardless of the various descriptions by BTTC, I am pleased with my purchase and would recommend a tasting if you can obtain it.
Flavors: Astringent, Autumn Leaf Pile, Camphor, Leather, Tea, Tobacco, Wintergreen
