From the Menghai vaults, across the steppe
The 7572 recipe has stood at the centre of shu pu-erh since the mid-1970s — a blend mastered by Menghai Tea Factory and now synonymous with the entire category. Amgalan Chin, our cross-regional tea specialist, first encountered this cake in a Soviet-era tea catalogue brought to Ulaanbaatar by caravan traders. It took him years of travel along the old tea-horse roads to finally taste the recipe freshly pressed in Menghai county.
This 2023 release comes from a small lot Amgalan selected during a spring visit to the factory’s fermentation cellars. The leaves are harvested from high-altitude gardens around Bulang Mountain and fermented the traditional way, in a controlled wò duī that lasts close to two months. After pressing, the cakes were allowed to rest for six months in Kunming’s dry, thin air before being wrapped.
The result is a shu that already drinks with the smoothness of a much older tea — a testament to the factory’s skill and the regional terroir. For Amgalan, it captures the same steady, grounded energy he values in the aged pu-erh cellars of Ulan-Ude, making it a daily drinker that will only deepen with years. When you break the cake, you taste not just a tea but a thread connecting Yunnan’s jungles to the Mongolian steppe.