2023 YARD BEER | chenpi shou pu'er

NOTES — CAMPHOR | FERNET | INKY

YARD BEER is a chenpi shou (“ripe”) pu’er tea with chenpi ("mandarin orange")  peel from Xinhui, Guangdong, and the tea material grown and produced in Menghai, Yunnan. This is a classic shou pu'er recipe—blending all manner of fruit, herb, and spice has a long history in Chinese tea making, but perhaps the best known is here presented in our custom blend of small batch shou with Guangdong-grown mandarin. At Hugo, we don't deal in tea nutrition specifically—we leave that to the scientists and nutritionists who who study tea on a molecular level. But chenpi shou pu'er has a deeply appreciable tasting quality aside from its roots in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). The mandarin peel hails from Xinhui (perhaps the most popular source of chenpi), and after cleaning and sun-drying, goes most usually to Fujian for blending with white teas, or Yunnan for blending with shou pu'er. In YARD BEER, the same small batch (20 kg) shou used in DIGESTIF is blended at an 8:2 ratio with chenpi. Usually such high quality ripe pu'er is not blended with chenpi; in true Hugo fashion, we requested every component be top shelf, and our friends at Xindi delivered.

Rinse once in typical ripe pu'er fashion (steep the tea in hot water for 5-ish seconds and pour off to open the leaves and "clean" the leaves), then enjoy a reliably long session as the chenpi slowly reveals its unique character ahead of the consistently smooth spice of our small batch pu'er.

VINTAGE — SPRING '23 (PRESSED IN SUMMER '23)

STYLE —CHENPI SHOU ("MANDARIN RIPE") PU'ER

CULTIVAR — HEIRLOOM DA YE ("BIG LEAF")

REGION —XINHUI, GUANGDONG + XISHUANGBANNA, YUNNAN, CHINA

LOCALE — XINHUI + MENGHAI

ELEVATION — 1300 METERS

PRODUCER — XIAOHUI QUAN

STEEPING PARAMETERS