Manglu Mountain, in early summer
Summer is when we reach for sheng — raw puerh, unfermented, still close to the leaf it started as. Where aged and cooked puerh settle into a room like an old friend who's stopped needing to prove anything, sheng arrives bright and a little restless. In the heat, that restlessness is what you want.
This batch comes from Manglu Mountain, in the Xigui core production area of Lincang, Yunnan — a place defined by a contradiction that turns out to be its advantage. High latitude usually means thinner light and a shorter growing season; low elevation usually means heat without nuance. Manglu Mountain sits at both at once, cradled by a bend in the Lancang River, which moderates the swings between day and night. The tea grows slowly here, but without the harshness that slow growth usually costs at higher altitude. Clean development, not rushed.
The leaves are picked from old, large tea trees — 大树 — rather than the smaller cultivated bushes more common elsewhere. Older trees root deeper and carry flavor differently: less immediate sweetness up front, more that unfolds across the steeps. This year's spring harvest is fresh and bright, the kind that quenches rather than weighs down — 生津止渴, the Chinese text says, a phrase that doesn't translate cleanly but means something like: it brings the mouth back to life and clears the mind with it.
What you're drinking now is young. Sheng puerh is built to change — five years from now this same tea will taste like a different tea, and that's the point, not a flaw to wait out. The tin carries a small painted landscape of the mountain and river it came from, so the place travels with it even after the leaves are gone.