Last year, I received a 2002 (or 2003?) Mengku cake from the Shuangjiang Mengku Tea Co. This is one of the big and increasingly famous new puerh factories. It's located in the south west of Yunnan, close to the border with Burma. This is a picture I made last year in June.
And this is a picture of the actual cake I have from the same batch as the one above. I took this picture last week. Maybe you'll notice that the greener/yellow leaves have turned brownish within the 2 summers at my house. It doesn't seem very apparent on the pictures, but for I found the difference quite striking.
Here is a better close up of the upper face of the cake. It's too tightly pressed and the leaves don't shine, but it still looks quite OK on a first quick look.
Too curious, I decided to taste it for the first time last week. The result was very disappointing. Despite its aged looks, it was still very astringent and bitter with a relatively flat finish. Its leaves (below left) even failed to open properly after a 5 minutes infusion. The leaves of a Spring 2006 Mengku cake on the right show how they should have opened. (- I will comment that other cake some other day.)
Besides, the leaves are not even wild, despite the wrapping paper saying so! This is another example of deceiving looks. Nothing can replace the actual tasting. Also, it's good to have a high benchmark of real wild puerh (at least in your memory) to know what excellent puerh is supposed to taste like.
Update: Following comments by a reader, I've added this picture of a long brew I just made again (sorry for the darkness of my indoor lights, but it's already night in Taiwan):
Last time, the leaves were flaked by a friend, so I wanted to brew it again to make sure about their (lack of) quality. I was careful during the flaking, but some breaks still occured because this cake is very hard pressed. I was then careful only to take big, whole dry pieces. The result is quite consistent with before: all I get in my pot are very small leave pieces, however they are more open this time. For this brew, I was only able to find 1 leaf that was somewhat whole. And this is not a good sign as cut leaves produce more astringency.
Looking at the color of the brew, I don't think it's as young as 2004. 2002/03 seems more correct. Is it a fake Mengku? Maybe. At least I'm quite certain it's a fake wild puerh. Since wrapping papers are so often copied, I find it more interesting to discuss the tea itself than the paper.
I agree that my cake is different from the one this reader bought. His seems better pressed (not too hard and not too loose) and the leaves are more whole. However, I think that his is younger from the color of the brew and of the dry cake. This darkened color of my cake was actually the reason I wrote this post. I found it interesting to show the rather quick aging of this puerh cake in my Taipei apartment. And another interesting lesson we can see is that age is less important than the primary quality of the leaves.
Update 2: Here is a close up of the open leaves that I shot with a flash last night (I cropped out the rest because the flash at close distance doesn't make beautiful pictures):
So, I hope this sheds a new light on how broken the leaves are.
Ses caractéristiques sont donc très semblables (vous pouvez relire l'article). Sa petite taille fait qu'elle conviendra plutôt à des thés aux feuilles petites ou morcellés et infusables de nombreuses fois. Bref, je vais en faire ma nouvelle théière à vieux puerh cru. Mieux vaut pas avoir de taille 4x4 pour ces thés-là. Un petit moteur qui ne consomme pas trop vaut mieux pour économiser ce concentré de carburant!
And on the other side you can see the dragon's tail!
What I find amazing is how the maker could make this iron look so old. It looks as if it were a 1000 years old archeological find. The seller told me that I can raise ('yang') this teapot -like an Yixing teapot-. The older, the more beautiful. One way to do so is to rub it with a raw potatoe!
Pareil pour la vue du dessous (2003 à gauche et 2002 à droite):
Elle continet 1,2 litres et elle est presque légère avec ses 1,7 kg. Ses parois plus fines que ma précédentes ne garderont pas l'eau chaude aussi longtemps, par contre.
D'un point de vue de la forme, elle est exactement comme je me l'imaginais, mais ses motifs en forme de pointe de flèche n'étaient pas aussi visibles sur la photo du cataloque. C'est déjà très bien, mais je crois que je trouve la prochaine encore meilleure:
Pourquoi un hibou? Est-ce une tetsubin pour tous les buveurs de thé nocturnes? Ce qui est sûr, c'est que l'artisan a appelé cette tesubin 'hibou'. Et c'est vrai qu'elle est chouette!
Starting this year, puerh cakes start to have such standard labels printed on them with all the information (factory name, date of production, weight, certification number...) that we all wished for so long.
- comme la tetsubin est lourde (2,55 kg en tout) et que la fonte conduit bien la chaleur, l'eau reste très chaude assez longtemps pour faire plusieurs infusions sans réchauffer l'eau 
And this is a picture of the actual cake I have from the same batch as the one above. I took this picture last week. Maybe you'll notice that the greener/yellow leaves have turned brownish within the 2 summers at my house. It doesn't seem very apparent on the pictures, but for I found the difference quite striking. 
Here is a better close up of the upper face of the cake. It's too tightly pressed and the leaves don't shine, but it still looks quite OK on a first quick look.
Too curious, I decided to taste it for the first time last week. The result was very disappointing. Despite its aged looks, it was still very astringent and bitter with a relatively flat finish. Its leaves (below left) even failed to open properly after a 5 minutes infusion. The leaves of a Spring 2006 Mengku cake on the right show how they should have opened. (- I will comment that other cake some other day.)
Besides, the leaves are not even wild, despite the wrapping paper saying so! This is another example of deceiving looks. Nothing can replace the actual tasting. Also, it's good to have a high benchmark of real wild puerh (at least in your memory) to know what excellent puerh is supposed to taste like.
So, I hope this sheds a new light on how broken the leaves are.
J'aime bien cette photo d'une co-étudiante de Teaparker. Non seulement elle a fait cousu tous les tissus, mais elle a aussi fait le socle en céramique de sa théière elle-même. (Elle a commencé à apprendre la potterie il y a 3 ans, après que Teaparker nous a amené faire un bol chez Maitre Gu).
Car c'est aussi cela le gongfu cha: un moment où l'on peut laisser libre cours à notre créativité artistique dans l'arrangement visuel de nos accessoires. Et quand c'est beau, le thé n'en devient que meilleur!
I will give you more details about it when I receive the qizi bings. Today, we can first have a look of how I brew it and I'll show you how amazing wild puerh is.
SoL was asking yesterday to give more details about how many leaves I put in my gaibei/teapot. Here you can see that the open leaves remain quite low in the gaibei. This volume is actually a little bit more than usual. I could have done with a little bit less leaves.
And when I continued to unfurl further, I even found this little tippy in the heart of the leaf. (Some other wild puerhs have even more than 3 tips in one!) Wild puerh trees are believed to develop their tips like this as a defense mechanism, to better protect them from insects and the hardships of their high altitude environment. 
This shows quite well how puerh is 'wild at heart'. It's thanks to its wild habitat that it has become such a concentrated and fragrant tea. Look at low altitude plantation puerh tips! You'll see that they are smaller and don't contain so many other tips.
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