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2007 MengYang Guoyan Youle Mountain Wild Arbor 400g Sheng Pu-erh. This is an old photo, from 2008, so the cake is very young / fresh.
Sheng (raw or green) Pu-erh is a lot like a green tea, and you can see this in the color of the leaves.
Photo © teajournaling (Flickr), CC BY 2.0.
This photo shows a Fāngchá, a flat square of tea, made of sheng (raw) Pu-erh. The name just means "square tea". With fangcha, characters are typically pressed into the tea, as shown here. This photo was taken in 2006, so the tea is still fresh and unaged, essentially like green tea. Photo © Jason Fasi, CC BY-SA 2.5.
Ripe (Shou) Pu-erh, in a bowl or nest (tuocha) shape. The flatter disk shapes (bingcha) are somewhat more common, but this is still one of the more common shapes which Pu-erh is compressed into. Photo © Ignat Gorazd (Flickr), CC BY-SA 2.0.
Spent some time hacking away at the tea brick and discovered nope, it IS green tea. So once I had enough, and the water in the boiler had cooled to the right temp for green tea, I loaded the powder and chunks into the IngenuiTEA, and set it brewing. Yup, definitely green tea. And...not good, IMO. Tastes like overcooked green vegetables. Sugar just made it taste like sweet overcooked vegetables. I hit that flavor from a lot of green teas, which makes me think I just can't handle green teas. A little more on the brick. In my searching yesterday, I learned that these types of bricks are often made of lower quality, powdered tea leaves and stems. It's super compressed, like tablet candy (SweeTarts, Bottle Caps, Smarties) but a lot harder. A knife barely touched it. The cleaver and a hammer barely touched it. I ended up getting my hacksaw-like cheap serrated knife and sawing away at it. These bricks are often sold at historical reenactment places, even though bricks like this weren't imported into the US until 2000 or so. Most sites I saw that asked about them, the asker was advised, "just use it as a decorative novelty." I think I'll stick with loose leaf tea.
