216 Tasting Notes
Hmm. I don’t think that I like this pu-erh as much as yesterday’s plain one. The dried leaves smelled exactly like the citrus meringue cookies I’ve been snacking on this week, so I had high hopes! But the citrus flavor overwhelmed all of the tea flavor without giving anything in replacement except a lingering sourness.
(Still, thank you, Angrboda, for the sample! I would have thought that this one would be more to my liking, so you have saved me from this mistake!)
My first pu-erh, courtesy of a fantastic sampler sent to me by Angrboda!
…Okay, I totally see what everyone is talking about with the smell. There is definitely a delicate odor of cow barn here. (When people talked about “barnyard”, I was imagining something like the hay and leather scent of a riding stable, but no: this, my friends, is cows.) Weirdly, though, it tastes like it smells and it tastes good; I don’t know what to make of this! I am, so far, confused by pu-erh tea.
I did the first few steeps at near-boiling, under thirty seconds, and then had a few with cooler water and longer times. The tea didn’t get noticeably bitter, but the first few steeps were juicier, I think. The color was an utterly gorgeous red-gold!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cait_tea/4561061811/in/set-72157623664718933/
So: I am intrigued enough to come back for more. We shall see!
Preparation
Six flowers and a partially-steeped tie guan yin leaf in a mug. I’m on the second steep now, and I can already feel the flowers putting me to sleep like Dorothy in the poppy fields. I fear that if I left off logging this until I finished the second mug my tasting note would look more like this:
Six flowersssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz**snore**zzzzzzz
So tasty, though!
