The Shou/Ripened/Cooked Puerh process was originally created as an attempt to imitate the effect of long aging on Raw Puerh tea cakes. While, instead, they mostly created the new class of Puerh, Ripe.
With Riparian White2Tea has returned to those roots of attempting to imitate the character of long aged Puerh with an experimental blend of semi-aged raw puerh and lighter ferment ripe puerh. Still very freshly pressed, it's already almost convincing in the color and early steeps. Later steeps are a bit thin, but It will be interesting to see what shape Riparian settles into in a year or two.
@ellestad I believe the classic 7572 recipe was blended with some sheng. That's what I was told, and it certainly looked that way from separating the leaves. The last 7571 I had still had that flavor (7572 these days doesn't taste the same). There also used to be some "purple mark" variants of shu bricks (8592 is one I used to enjoy IIRC).
Yee On has a 7342H bing that captures the taste of that style of blend.
I think it's largely gone out of fashion, probably because of the price of moderately aged sheng
2017 Mangjing Ripe from Farmer Leaf. A tea producer friend of farmer leaf reserved a small portion of their raw puerh maocha over several years. It was stored in fairly wet conditions in their Yunnan warehouse. In 2017, they processed that accumulated maocha into a small batch of ripe puerh. It was pressed into cakes in 2019.
They say the storage was wet, but no mold/mildew notes in the flavor. I like the flavor, on the darker side, and the energy is strong and very pleasant. After trying, I ordered a cake.
Prosbloom is one of my favorite White2Tea skull themed labels. The tea itself is high quality, reasonable price, fresh shou puerh tea. 2021, just getting better with age.
The third tea from Peter's visit to a Taiwan tea shop is a Dayi Shou Puerh of indeterminate age. Raw Puerh is often not really prized until it has decades of age on it. Ripe Puerh was originally created to mimic the effect of decades of age, by fast aging Puerh material in warm, wet piles. Dayi is a very well known factory Puerh producer. It may not be well known, but a little age on Shou Puerh, and it loses the characteristics that many find distasteful in young ripe puerh.