2009 Dayi V93 Pu-erh Tuocha

This review is going to be done in my new yixing teapot from teavivre so some of the points I’m making will be about the teapot.

Dry smell: This tea has a very nice dry smell. It has no fishiness. It is lighter and sweeter smelling than various other puerhs I’ve tried. It has a light aroma of wet tree bark and a dough like smell.

Taste: This tea has a nice dry flavor. I can sense a woody flavor and also a wet earthy flavor. It is a lot darker flavor than I expected. Although it is not sweet like it smelled, it has no astringency and is very smooth. I can still taste what I sensed as the doughy smell. It tastes like a cracker. This is a nice smooth Puerh and I’ll be ordering more soon.

Wet smell: The wet smell is a lot like the dry smell, it is just lacking the sweet scent. The pot adds a deep earthy smell

What the pot does: I drank this tea a couple times before I got my yixing pot from my gaiwan. I was somewhat skeptical of how much the yixing would actually affect the flavor but there is a notable difference. It gets rid of the natural sharpness the tea has and flattens it out. I can tell it is absorbing some of the flavor because it is slightly lighter, and I am very excited to see what the pot provides after it is fully seasoned.

Hi everyone! I’ve been AWOL….Absent With Out Leaves yesterday and today (until now) doing TASKS mostly. I rarely disappear.

My daughter’s house is getting new carpeting. They’re house is 3500 sq. feet and even the bathrooms are being tiled so everyone had to get out!
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH 8 KIDS AND NO HOUSE?
I know, because yesterday, they came to GRANDMA’S!

And I went to a Greek (yummy food) dinner about schools being built in Northern Kenya (I talked about tea at dinner…obsessively!)

AND….I put together a hardwood desk with bookshelves on both sides and a keyboard shelf ALL BY MYSELF! (I put the shelf sliders on backwards the first time).
I now have a proper place to write instead of the dining table (which has caused me a fair bit of pain this year).

I was so exhausted by 5pm today that I stopped by Happy Lucky’s Tea House and asked Eric for a pot of this V98 Puerh that they have in big baseball size tuo cha’s.
There was a Friday evening concert in the Plaza a block away this last warm evening. People were wandering in and out of the shop ordering iced tea’s until concert time. Then things got quiet. I was dragging…a real mop at the bar. I needed CAFFEINE!

Eric steeped my pot of Puerh at 30 seconds and the first sip was smooth, sweet without bitterness or earthiness. I thought about a sweet mushroom flavor but couldn’t remember what kind, and at first there was a sense of furry redwood bark in the texture. I thought about bread but this is such a common taste comment in Puerh reviews that I stopped myself. Was this bread? No. A cracker like a saltine but without the salt…a water cracker. Yes.
Towards the end of the first pot, when the Puerh became almost buttery, I added a bit of raw sugar and loved the flavor of a just cracked Cream Brulee crust.

I asked for the leaves to be put in a Gaiwan to steep for 3-4 minutes. I wanted to taste a strong brew.
The liquor had a touch of purple around the edges and the aroma was
blackberry and a sweet wet mulch.
When I took a sip I was so amazed at the smoothness and lack of bitterness for such a long steep. Everyone tried some because they had never tried steeping it that long either.

Really good!

This is one of those everyday tea’s that (as the previous reviewer stated) would be a great beginner Puerh. It would be hard to mess up.

I certainly perked up and I’m back!

A lighter fermentation ripe puerh with a clean smooth taste. While I have had better this is a good cheap everyday tea that would be ideal for a beginner to puerh.