Our Big Snow Mountain is a ripe (shou) pu'er from Lincang, a mountainous stretch of Yunnan in southwestern China, close to the Myanmar border. Pressed in 2013, it has aged in our tea-only storage facility in Oakland ever since. This is the cake we reach for almost every day. We call it our utilitarian pu'er.
(We also press it as a 250g brick, if you'd rather start a little smaller.)
The first few steeps pour thick and dark, with the body of cacao or hot chocolate. The mouthfeel is silky. Open the lid and you'll pick up the fragrance of dried plums, delicate and complex, like plum blossoms in winter. Brew it all day. It never gets bitter.
What's in the cake
357g
full pu'er cake
2013
vintage, Lincang
13+ yrs
aged in Oakland
Why we love it
⛰️
Still mountain energy
Crispy, clean, and grounding. Like the air above the treeline.
🍫
Full-bodied and silky
Thick first steeps with cacao notes and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
🌙
Calms the nervous system
L-theanine balances the caffeine. You feel focused and settled, not wired.
🔥
Thermos-friendly
Break off a 4g chunk and brew it in a thermos
The math of your tea
Why 357 grams? The reason is older than the gram itself. The weight comes from traditional Chinese units, the jin and the liang, and from how the tea traveled — stacked seven cakes high, wrapped in bamboo, a bundle called a tong. Seven cakes of 357 grams come to about 2.5 kilos: a clean number in the old measures, a strange one in ours. And three, five, and seven are all yang numbers in Chinese tradition, so the weight carries a little luck, too.
Now the fun part. A full gongfu session takes about 4 grams, and 4 grams is plenty — multiple steeps, the whole experience. So one cake gives you roughly 89 sessions. Drink one a day and it lasts just under three months. At $150, that’s about $1.69 per session, or about $51 a month — about the cost of a coffee habit, for one of the great mountain teas, every day.
89
sessions per cake
~$1.69
per gongfu session
3 mo
of daily tea
Brew it on the Pure Land Tea Set for the full gongfu experience. Want the premium older sibling? Try our Big Snow Essence, a 1990s reserve from the same lineage.
