Classic Recipe: 7572

A good 7572 pours a dark reddish-brown to near-black liquor, clear rather than cloudy, with a smooth earthy-woody body and no harsh or sharply medicinal edge. Because it is the benchmark blend, consistency is the selling point: it should taste recognizably like itself year to year rather than surprising you. A persistent damp pile smell (dui wei) in a cake more than a couple of years past production points to rushed fermentation or poor storage, not the recipe. Cloudiness in the liquor is a warning sign about storage or fermentation quality. What you want is clean earth and smoothness, not funk or roughness.

7572 is made at the Menghai (Dayi) factory from a blend of Yunnan large-leaf material that is then wo dui (wet pile) fermented, the process developed in the 1970s to produce a ready-to-drink dark style without decades of aging. The code is a production blueprint, not a single origin: 75 the recipe formula, 7 the leaf grade, 2 the factory. Menghai has the longest shou production history, and its 7572 is widely treated as the reference standard for what factory ripe should taste like.

Gongfu: 6-8 g per 100 ml in a gaiwan or dark clay pot, 95-100°C, one or two rinses (useful for younger cakes to reduce pile smell), then steeps of 10-20 seconds extending gradually; expect 8-10 infusions. A dark clay pot is a traditional pairing for ripe and can round the earthy character slightly. Western: about 4 g per 250 ml, 100°C, 3-4 minutes, re-steeping several times; ripe is forgiving of fuller steeps.

7572 is one of the most affordable benchmark cakes in puerh, roughly €6-15 (about $7-17) per 100 g for recent-year production, which is part of why it is so widely used as a daily drinker and a reference point. Aged and first-batch examples cost more, but the category stays accessible.

Prices reviewed June 2026

Young 7572 benefits from a year or two of rest in a breathable container to let any pile smell dissipate before regular drinking; once settled, ordinary stable dry storage is fine. Ripe does not transform as dramatically as raw with age, so storage here is about cleanliness more than chasing decades.

Aged 7572 with documented storage carries a modest premium over recent production and is a common, comparatively affordable way to taste what a decade or more does to factory ripe; very old well-stored examples command collector interest, though ripe in general occupies a smaller aged-collector niche than sheng. For most drinkers, recent-year 7572 is a buy-and-drink tea rather than a buy-and-hold one.