Nature's Bloom Pu-erh Tea

Landscape outside is steel-stone gray and gloomy. From now until April I will be starved for COLOR. This little floral pu-erh blend has it! Looks just like potpourri with pinky-tip sized rose blooms; more blooms than tea in this little sample.

This is a floral tea done properly. Plenty of rose and lavender, but it’s sweet and natural, not chemically-perfumey. Can’t really taste the pu-erh independently: my conclusion is that it’s providing the balance this needs to keep from getting too cloying.

My thanks to Azzrian for a little promise of spring on a cold and bleakish January morning.

Getting back to the samples from Nature’s Tea Leaf, this was the top bag so I am drinking it. There aren’t any ingredients listed on the bag so I was surprised to see lavender. The rosebuds are so pretty in here though, but I am not a big fan of lavender.

And I can’t say I’m a big fan of this tea either. I can do rose, I can do jasmine, but I draw the line at lavender. I only steeped this for about 2 min, 20 seconds to try to avoid the strong qualities of puerh I don’t like, but even worse for me is puerh combined with lavender.

I guess maybe I’ll give it one more shot as a cold brew since that worked with another puerh blend but LAVENDER. Always just tastes like soap to me. At least it’s a more palatable soap than cilantro.

About a week or so ago I was browsing through teas and this one caught my eye. Looking back, I can’t really remember how I found it: maybe in the Steepster database? Or I was linked to Nature’s Tea’s main website? In any case, I love floral teas so I really wanted to order it but I am broke so I held off on it. Miraculously, a few days after lusting after this tea, NTL announced that they were looking for people to do reviews—and this tea was included in the ones they’d be sending! I crossed my fingers and applied, and lo and behold I was chosen and got my teas 2 days later! Of course this is the one I wanted to try the most, but I really wanted to cold brew it so I ended up trying two of their teas hot while this one was in the fridge.

Like the Slimming Tea, it’s a really pretty blend, lots of whole rosebuds and jasmine flowers studded with lavender blossoms. Of course there’s pu-erh too, more in this blend considerably than in the Slimming Tea. I gave it a 12-hour steep, and it brewed up to a lovely golden color. Lighter than usual for a pu-erh, but I chalk that up to all the pretty flowers!

This is a VERY floral tea. Of course I love floral blends so I really enjoyed it: the rose and lavender are definitely the most prominent, with little wisps of jasmine coming in at the end of the sip. Rose and lavender can be really overpowering, but I don’t think either one outshines the other. They do seem to be significantly stronger than the jasmine, but not in an entirely negative way. I feel like I can taste other flavors “through” rose and lavender, but jasmine usually seems kind of overpowering so I’m glad it isn’t heavy-handed in this tea.

Finally there’s, of course, the pu-erh! I wouldn’t say this is a very strongly pu-erh blend, it’s more used as a base for the other flavors. It does add a distinctly earthy tone, and really grounds the floral taste. There’s a little bit of hay and a nutty background, which I’d attribute to the base tea. I do think it was a better choice than a straight black, since really we’ve all had floral blacks a million times. But the combo of floral tastes as well as the pu-erh really make this a pretty unique floral blend!

Thanks again to Nature’s Tea Leaf for choosing me to sample their teas! Very excited to try this one! It sounded so unique! It’s like a holy trinity of delicious flowers: lavender, jasmine, and tiny rosebuds.. just gorgeous. All on the base of a pu-erh. It’s kind of like beauty and the beast, since pu-erh is the tea that seems most unfitting with flowers! This is actually the second pu-erh I’ve tried… the first one was a couple days ago. I find that they don’t have too much flavor… a typical black tea has way more flavor. But this is perfect here, as I would much rather be able to appreciate the flowers instead of them being drowned in a black tea. My infuser was FULL of flowers, even though I tried to get as much pu-erh in there as possible. The steep color is a medium brown. The first sip, I get a ton of lavender flavor, which is interesting because I didn’t notice too much lavender in the infuser, but the lavender is delicious. I don’t taste a ton of jasmine and rose, and the second infusion doesn’t have much of them either.. maybe it’s just my palate! Looking at the infused tea, the roses have lost most of their pink color! I’m very happy that hibiscus wasn’t included in this one — it would have ruined it. Another great tea! Naturestealeaf.com

Oh this is neat: a floral and approachable pu’erh blend. The lavender is distinctive (prominent and unusual) and blends with the pu’erh in very interesting ways – reminds me of cinnamon, somehow, with the combination of earthiness and menthol. The flavors meld quite well overall, which I didn’t expect from rose, jasmine, lavender and pu’erh. The jasmine is probably the hardest for me to pick out. I was dubious about the steeping instructions too, but it came out just right. I’m quite curious to see if this will resteep well, as that’s one of the things I like about pu-erh

A second steep (higher temp, longer time since I forgot about it..) is mostly pu’erh, with only a hint of flowers to soften it. Still quite tasty! but the first steep is the one I’d hand to someone dubious about pu’erh :)

This is the second of my free samples from Nature’s Tea Leaf, and my favorite so far! I also really like the steeping instructions on their packaging, customized for each tea and right on the front label.

2 generous tsp leaf to 8oz water