Après la pluie

ok, I’ve been brave and finally have tasted this tea.
I bought it because of its name and because of Bonnie and because of The tea Fairy and because of Tommy the Toad…because the 3 of you are making a lot of gorgeous notes about pu’erh…and I wanted to try.

So I decided to go for a flavoured one…and then I have never brewed it…It’s really scary to begin with a pu’erh !
However, each week since I bought it my daughter asks me : why did you buy this tea ? It stinks…why did you buy rotten tea ? and why don’t you try it now you have bought it ?

Tonight cteresa made a note about it, as I sent her a sample of it, and I felt like it was really the right moment to dare…(however my daughter is with her grandma, she cannot laugh at me !)

I feel stupid now…for have been scared by a tea !
The taste is not horrible, it has a kind of mix of earth taste + mango vanilla taste.
Quite interesting without being exceptional to me.

I maybe won’t wait 3 months now to try another pu’erh…on the other hand I like to sniff the teas I’m going to buy and this is not the case with a pu’erh…so…wait and see

I do not have a lot of experience with Pu´er – and the plain ones I have had were sort of awful to my palate. The flavoured ones I have found easier to drink, but keep in mind, I have very little experience with pu´er teas.

This was kindly sent in a swap with Ysaurella and she had not tried it yet when she sent it to me, so no brewing tips. The Cannon website seems totally useless for anything (and flash should die….) so I have been experimenting with this. My problem with it is trying to make it strong, or better said intense enough.

My first experiment with water round 80-85 and my usual ammount of black tea resulted in a mellow earthy sort of cup, but a definitely too weak one – very intense color and a sort of thick texture to the liquor (there has to be a word for it, but totally escapes me), and a nice mellow yeasty almost type of flavour, with some vague vanilla and peach-mango hints, but very watery somehow. I amped up the temperature to 95 degrees, and steeping time to 4 or 5 degrees and used 50% more leaf than I would think to use and it was much better. A nice cup of tea. But still not particularly fruity. And my brain finds the different tea-ness of pu-er baffling.