2024 Mang Zhi (Farmer Series) Puerh

FatBat Private Pressing Raw Puerh

莽枝 · 抰林寨

FatBat’s new Farmer Series allows us to share teas we come across in our travels that we find interesting and representative of a region, direct from the farmers’ hands themselves.

This is a medium tree “qiao mu” picking from Yang Lin village in Mang Zhi mountain, picked and processed entirely by Brother Lei Lei and his family.

Mang Zhi tea is known for being sweet but sometimes with a higher level of astringency. After sampling through 4 separate pickings offered to us, we selected this batch which exhibited very low astringency, barely any bitterness and a clear, bright fruity sweetness.

Sweet florals, blueberries dusted with powdered sugar. This is a lighthearted tea, bursting with bright flavors. This is what the Chinese call “太阳味” or the “taste of sunshine”, referring to a well-processed sheng that has had abundant amounts of good, direct (not under plastic shelter) sun-drying time.

A NOTE ON OUR FARMER SERIES

While we typically obsess over controlling the processing of our own teas, or the purity of gushu pickings, we occasionally come across some impressive examples of farmer-processed maocha. These are teas we will offer in our newly launched Farmer Series. The material may be burly, or the processing slightly rustic, but these are the best examples of the tea we drink in the mountains, in the homes of the farmers we meet. It is the closest we can take you to the villages in the ancient tea mountains themselves.

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