birthday present

[JAS-eTea Guy]

With all due respect, if you're going to get that one, you may as well get the real thing.
http://www.puerhshop.com/index.php?main ... cts_id=573

+1

[JAS-eTea Guy]

YES! Menghai pizza anyone? If you find it, please let us know. But only if it's East Coast style.

Why not? The last pizza my wife cooked looked like a bing of shu (and her meatloaf looks like a Baoyan brick).

LOL, hope she dosent read this thread or you and your pu are out on the street my friend!

Either that or you are just considered to be pu for the foreseeable future.

[jogrebe]

Newbies have enough to deal with in terms of familiarizing themselves with the seemingly indecipherable language of this field that the first criterion that a suggestion must satisfy is that it not add to the confusion. Menghai is a town in Yunnan, and I'm sure that there are roads, schools, and probably even pizzerias that bear the name. But when we talk about the tea producer Menghai, we mean one thing and one thing only: the Menghai Tea Factory. Period. Not Menghai Binchung Tea Factory, Menghai Pencheng Tea Factory, Menghai Banzhang Old Tree Tea, Menghai Yunhai Tea Factory, Menghai Xianming Tea Factory, Menghai Dayeh Tea Factory, nor any other factory so named. The practice is deceptive, and should not be encouraged. If any of the aforementioned producers sell items that are truly good, the newbie will have plenty of time to discover them. They are not, however, good starting points.

Menghai Tea Factory is, along with Kunming, the creator of the "cooked pu'er" process, has been around for decades, has a huge portfolio, and most importantly, will be available next year and in years to come, unlike many of the fly by night factories. That is what I meant by the real thing.

Oh wow thanks Tony. I honestly do not know what to think as I am by no ways a newbie when it comes to ripe puerh but I am surprised that I never picked up on that little Menghai name thing before and am surprised to learn that a good number of my Menghai cakes are fake. Well at least they are good tasting fakes at a good price but it is something that I will be sure to read closer when ordering more tea, as before I just assumed that Menghai was large enough to have multiple factories in different locations.

[tony shlongini]

Oh wow thanks Tony. I honestly do not know what to think as I am by no ways a newbie when it comes to ripe puerh but I am surprised that I never picked up on that little Menghai name thing before and am surprised to learn that a good number of my Menghai cakes are fake. Well at least they are good tasting fakes at a good price but it is something that I will be sure to read closer when ordering more tea, as before I just assumed that Menghai was large enough to have multiple factories in different locations.

A few years ago, The Man Show used to have a Q&A session at the end of the program, where Jimmy and Adam would field questions from the audience. A man asked, "Are fake boobs real?", to which 'Jimmy Kimmel gave the classic answer-

"If they exist, they're real."

Your cakes are not fake, and there is nothing stopping them from being good to drink. Nor are your cakes "fake Menghais". That would only be the case if they were advertised as such, ie: a non-MTF cake wrapped in a MTF wrapper (counterfeit or real) and sold as a MTF product.

What you have are real p'er cakes, but items that are not made by the Mengahi Tea Factory. That kind of advertising is sufficiently sinister, in my view, to preclude my ever dealing with such a company, even if their product is good. It also doesn't matter they are well priced- the real Menghais are very inexpensive themselves.

[entropyembrace]

Something that hasn't come up in this thread which you might want to keep in mind is that cooked or ripe pu-erh often has what most people consider unpleasant tastes and aromas until it's been aged a couple of years and even the more expensive 2008 and even 2007 cakes are sold with a note suggesting they be stored for a year or two before they can be fully enjoyed. Considering this is an introduction to pu cake I'd think a sheng cake or a slightly older shu would be a more pleasant introduction. I'm too much of a pu-erh newbie to suggest some specific cakes though.