2010 Xizihao "Manning Gucha"

You know that I loves me my Xizihao. It used to be terrifically exciting when Sanhetang released a new cake; or, rather, when Houde or Yunnan Sourcing chose to stock them. The 2005-era cakes were really very good, and perhaps, if quality has waned a little through the years, then we can say that Xizihao are, at least, still reliable.

(I consider productions such as the recent 2010 Xizihao bamboo tong to have been transient negative events that I'd rather pretend didn't occur.)

This cake, unsurprisingly, is expensive.  At over $110 for a one-year-old cake, we are expecting good, perhaps great, things to occur in the cup.  It is the more expensive of a pair of Simao cakes stocked by Houde, which reportedly come from Jinggu (not Jingu!), in Simao prefecture.  For a man like that likes Simao cakes and Xizihao cakes, surely a Xizihao Simao cake will be impressive!

(Edit: thanks to Shah8 for suggesting that this might be a Manzhuan (?) cake - this information wasn't available at Houde.)

The leaves look healthy enough.  Much ink has been spilled concerning the varietal of pu'er trees in Jinggu, and concerning the predominantly taidicha [plantation tea] crops in the Laowushan area on Zhenyuan county from where this product derives.  In this case (edit: unless it's a Manzhuan cake!), the leaves appear to be medium-sized (not particularly small), and have the gentle, sweet aroma of a cake coping with the English wintertime.

Alarm bells begin to ring from the rinse, which is orange.  I'm willing to accept that some regions might brew orange straight away, but I am left with the suspicion that something untoward has occurred.  There are plenty of reliable young Jinggu cakes out there that brew bright yellow, after all...

This suspicion builds when we consider the aroma in the wenxiangbei [aroma cup], which proves to be a muted, uninteresting, generic sweetness with little potency.

As with all Xizihao cakes, this is a clean tea.  It brews a fresh, zesty brew. However, something is amiss here.  Somewhere near the back of the throat is a hint of a huigan [returning sweet sensation]; somewhere on the tongue is a distant hint of cooling freshness; somewhere on the lips is a muted vibrancy.  I take such characteristics to be positive signs, but their presence seems significantly diluted, as if there is a portion of leaves in the blend that is trying to make itself felt, and which is failing in comparison to some other, larger contribution to the blend.

Sadly, that remainder of the blend must be less accomplished, because it is a fairly flat, generic affair -although tasty enough, in its granary Simao way.  The distant sensations of quality are all that suggest that this cake is more than a mainstream cake, and I suspect that many tasters would pass over it in a blind tasting test.

Whether this majority of the blend comes from processing or from lesser leaf quality is debatable; the result is a decent, clean, but ultimately unrewarding cake.  The final nail in its coffin is that my mother, who was passing by and tried a cup, noted "It's rather empty."  And that's my mother.

I respectfully disagree with Guang when he writes that this is a masculine tea which would probably overwhelm the senses if brewed "incorrectly".  Its orange character makes it very forgiving and difficult to overbrew, and it is not at all the powerful, masculine cake that the product description had led me to hope for.

It is entirely unimaginable that this cake could sell for over $110.