Rice Pu-Er Tuo Cha (Shou)

Pu-er congee!! yes, that is what this reminds me of. Congee is an Asian (Chinese? Vietnamese?) porridge often consumed when one is sick or needs comforting. I usually get it with chicken and preserved egg. Yummy. So it seems natural that pu-erh, a digestive aid, should be combined with Congee!
For those who haven’t had congee before, picture cream of wheat with a ricey sortof taste.
The background is rather mild for a pu-er, I suppose the tea blender (Tao) chose that in case it overwhelmed the rice flavour.
By the time I got to my sixth steep though, I was still getting rice flavour, along with a mild sweet breadiness without the usual heft. Odd, tasting rice and bread at the same time.
Oh and the scent! a coworker of mine remarked that is smells like chicken soup. Funny, given that I likened it in my head to the Asian alternative version! ha!
Also, it must be a pu-er thing… I didn’t get hungry til more than an hour after I normally do. This happens to me every time make a cooked pu-er. Appetite control perhaps? I usually eat at 10:30am, so this could be useful for those days I need to save myself for lunch out with the girls! :P
and now I am sad that this was only a sample. One tuocha in the packet! and since I don’t own a pu-er pick I just plunked the whole thing down and went for shorter infusions. What a waste… I think it could have gone atleast three or four more times. Oh well!
Rating: 87

New company to me, and a new type of shou pu-erh. By the title, I assumed it was made with rice, but the product had no listing on the website as of yet. That is, unless it went by a different name, and I simply didn’t see it. (I wrote the vendor to clarify.)

That said, it was perhaps the best shou pu-erh I’ve tried to date. After four infusions, I detected nutty, woody, earthy, citrus, and rice-like notes. Very nuanced for a robust drink. It also darkens pretty quickly for the steeper on the go. For a guy that usually goes for sheng first, this was a game-changer.

Full Review: http://www.teaviews.com/2011/01/08/review-tao-tea-leaf-rice-pu-er-tuo-cha-shou/

Yum. Working on a review for It’s All About the Leaf for this tea – it’s really nice. :)

The dry tuo cha smells of a smooth, cooked pu-er, but after rinsing this mini tuo in my gaiwan, the aromas of rice start to come out. Using just-boiled water, I prepare the first steeping. Light, golden-brown, the liquor is a bit cloudy and mingles a faint hint of rice with tea. The taste of this first steeping is not a flavourful as the aroma would suggest.

The second steeping gives off a darker brown infusion. This time it is hard to distinguish whether the tea is just very smooth or whether it lacks a lot of flavour. I suspect this is on account of the intense rice flavour, which seems to camouflage a lot of the pu-er nuances. Hopefully the rice flavours will give way soon and let the tea itself shine through.

Finally, with this third steeping, I am getting more of the flavour of the shou pu on which this tea is built. It is good, though perhaps not as amazing as I had hoped. I go ahead and put this tea through a couple more infusions. It is good, but I am left with the impression that it is lacking something. On my personal enjoyment scale, I would give it a 75/100.