’08 7262

Deep petrichor, full sweetness, bold dark chocolate bitterness.  Strong bitter chocolate and mineral petrichor aftertaste.  Medium-heavy texture, assertive astringency reaching throat.  Filling.  Heady, numbing, and sedating qi, comes on strongly after a couple rounds.  Sweetness retreats and bitterness advances deeper in session.  Menghai broad-leaf material.  Medium compression.  Stored in LA since Jul ’22.

Dayi’s 7262 recipe is a widely acclaimed ripe created at the end of the 90s through collaboration between Zou Bin-liang (now of Haiwan/Laotongzhi) and one of Menghai’s Five Golden Flowers Ruan Dian-rong (now of 6FTM).  It officially entered the market in 2000.  Considerable confusion surrounds its name given numbered-recipe convention.  In this iteration, the “7” is a head nod to the 70s when ripes were developed.  The next two number indicate principal composition, leaf grades between 2-6.  Finally, “2” keeps with convention referencing Dayi (technically Menghai TF) as the factory of origin.

Meistra Zhang Jian-li, founder of Xinghai TF not only hails from the Menghai TF lineage but is also one of Menghai’s Five Golden Flowers.  Xinghai reliably continued the Menghai TF tradition of ripe fermentation such that it became the go-to factory after Menghai/Day stopped processing puerhs famous boutiques after being bought by a group in 2004.  At the same time, Xinghai worked to develop its own fermentation signature.  All told, Xinghai gained an unquestioned reputation for crafting outstanding ripes, particularly in the areas of sweetness, mouthfeel, consistency, and innovation.

22¢