Aged Tangerine Peel & Gong Ting Ripe Pu-erh Tea Cake

Pretty good ripe. The cake is on the loose side and it brews up fast and dark. Yup, that tangerine flavor sings right through it. Not sure how I ended up with three cakes of this, but it makes a good gift. Just a tad bit “humid” on the nose in the first brew (after a quick wash) but it doesn’t linger or return. Got 8+ steepings out of it before moving on, but I could have pushed another 4 brews from it. The leaves are a pretty big chop, too. Worth giving a try!

Thin, inky, flavorful liquid. The first few steeps are more earthy, with that sweet dirt shou flavor, later on the tangerine peel comes out more. Forgiving to steep, I think there’s lots of potential here to play around with different temperatures and ratios. Nice big pieces of tangerine peel too, which gives a more intense citrus flavor than some other cakes with chenpi.

I’ve been drinking this for the last few days and it helped me through the freezing cold weekend. I knew I wanted a cake as soon as I saw it go up on the YS site. I have so many of these tangerine teas now that I’m not sure why I needed another one but I did enjoy it. Out of seven tangerine/mandarin teas and a couple of others in other citrus fruits, White2Tea’s Mini O’Bitters has been the only one I haven’t loved.

It smells deliciously orangey both dry and wet. The cake seemed more tightly pressed than some I’ve poked at but the large pieces of tangerine peel make it easy to chip off chunks. I was kind of surprised by the size of the tangerine pieces. When I brew the whole tangerines stuffed with tea I usually break up the peel pretty small and White2Teas chenpi cakes have had tiny bits of peel but this tea has some big bits. Very orangey flavor. It’s not a subtle “use your imagination and maybe you’ll taste orange” tea. The tea flavor is there too but so much oranginess. It makes me happy. I gongfu-ed a few steeps and then went to a more western or grandpa type style because that was just easier while I worked on things. I found the spare filter for my Thé de Chine mug (recently cracked the one that came with it but had I’d saved the filter from another mug that tragically died after being knocked off the side of the bathtub…tea and bubble baths, try it but maybe don’t knock your mug on the floor) so I was was using that and it was easy to adjust the water amount for longer steeps. One of these days I’ll try a tangerine tea in yixing but I haven’t decided which teapot will be the designated citrus pot. I feel like I don’t use my yixing pots enough but I find them more of a pain than glass or porcelain.