2012 Awazon Aged Royal Ripe Puerh Tea Cake

This one was bad, so bad I couldn’t write up this note until I had several sessions with my therapist. I should have used a new Yixing gaiwan to suck some of the flavor out of this tea. The tea was bittersweet at the start with a fair amount of fermentation flavor, mainly caramel and fishiness. That flavor was rather unpleasant and it continued to in the same manner for ten steeps. It did become a nice sweet ripe puerh with chocolate notes on the eleventh steep, but that was after I tossed the Awazon leaves and put in 6g of 2016 Dayi 7542.

Flavours: Caramel, well aged herring.

This one was good, but not as good as I remember. I recently restocked on this. I had used it up a while ago. It is possible however that my new Yixing gaiwan sucked some of the flavor out of this tea. I had not seasoned the gaiwan yet. The tea was bittersweet at the start with a fair amount of fermentation flavor. That flavor was a bit unpleasant. It did become a nice sweet ripe puerh over the course of ten steeps. I guess you could say it developed some chocolate notes in there. But I didn’t notice a fruity taste like with some ripe. Perhaps that note would have come out in a few more steeps.

I steeped this ten times in a 150ml Yixing gaiwan with 12.2g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse and a 10 minute rest. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, and 1 min.