New Tasting Notes
April Sipdown Challenge – raise your cup to the tea farmers for Earth Day – bonus points for an earthy tea!
I didn’t add this to my cupboard because it is a sample that I received as a gift from Whiteantlers. Many thanks, and I miss you!
I decided to go with ripe puerh for this prompt because most of them have some earthy notes. Little did I know I was about to drink the earthiest puerh I have ever had.
Dry aroma was pure dirt, in the best way possible. I love the smell of freshly plowed fields and of petrichor. We live on the border between the Sandhills of NC and the Piedmont. Our soil is sandy and dry, and this puerh smells like when I crawl under a house into the dry, undisturbed crawlspace. (Yes, I have had to do this quite a few times as the elderly ladies on the street used to call on me to hit the reset button on their oil furnaces. Ha ha!)
There is no fishiness and no real aged manure/horse barn scent here, other than the dusty smell of a barn with an earthen floor. There is no mushroom scent. There is a strong minty or camphor tingle that builds as you drink but dissipates fairly quickly. Pleasant.
I have had four steeps thus far and will be having more throughout the day. I am glad I tried this one. It is a very enjoyable ripe pu.
This is my first pu’er and maybe my last dark pu’er for a while,
I’m only starting in tea but it’s a though one for me, perhaps my steeping was wrong but while the earthiness wasn’t too strong and I could distinctly sense the typical puer aroma, I admit it’s just too out there for me.
It is, however, an overall good tea that needs to be tried.
30s steeps, 4g/100mL, it’s okay.
Flavors: Earthy, Viscous
Preparation
Sometimes I have to let a puerh “air out” for a few hours or even a day or two if it has strong fishy odor but otherwise has potential and good flavor. That might help make this one more enjoyable! I just take out as much as I think I will use in the next session rather than the while batch, unless it is SUPER fishy. Then I will air the batch a while and put it back in its container or wrapper.
Thank you for the information ! I tried it out and it was a lot less fishy ! Thanks :))
That’s awesome! I am glad it helped!
Sipdown
This is a public service announcement. Lupicia has posted their line up of Mother’s Day teas, floral special edition tea tins, and cherry blossom/cherry flavored teas!
I was hoarding the last bit of this and planned to have it with Ashman for afternoon tea today. There was less in my tin than I thought so we had Decaf Muscat instead and I made this to go with ice cream tonight.
The aroma is pure Luden’s cherry cough drops. I love it. But I will admit that it did not go as well with ice cream as I thought it would. I usually have lapsang, hojicha, or a plain black tea with ice cream and this one got a little lost because it comes off sweet and the ice cream was sweet, of course. Not enough contrast.
I will admit here that I have already ordered two new bags of this. I am a little ashamed to admit I also ordered two new-to-me teas to try but one of them is for Ashman really so maybe that makes it a little better.
Ahhh….tea with quiet on top! After a rather rowdy afternoon (more on that in a minute), I grabbed the first viable pouch of decaf in the bin. While I won’t repeat it, because the only pecan I’m getting is in the scent, the roo is mild and the additives are smooth, if not flavor accurate. I wrote in a previous review that it’s more fruity than nutty and I’m sticking with that.
Nutty—that was the afternoon. Field trip to a new local entertainment center with 11 preteens. Half bowling alley, half indoor playground for bigg’uns (I am going to walk like a gorilla tomorrow morning), I bowled, climbed, slid, and lifted a two-year-old (my teaching assistants’ little one). Probably none of that was advisable, all of it was just goofy fun. Come with us next time.
5.7g, 140mL tokoname teapot, poland spring water.
160f, 30s: toasty, sweet pea, corn
176s, 15s, then 30s: honey, light floral, sharper green tea taste
185f, 1 min: stewed taste
Who drinks green tea 2 years after harvest and expects anything from it? Oops. I opened this to try with a friend at the time two summers ago, and forgot about it until I was looking through old boxes last night. I can see wisps of what this might have been at the time, but it’s definitely not living up to what I paid for it at the time any more and justifiably so, lol. I didn’t have the self control to not participate in tea buy korea this year, but this might be the first in several years since I’ve been drinking tea that I will not buy any greens given multiple bags of pricey green teas from years past haunting me…
(Summer 2023) Wow, far out. Super malty, nutty, with a fresh-baked baklava nose. A real generous earthy mouthful, with hay and dry leaf matter, and a beautiful honeyed, layered smoothness. Paired with sexy generous roast fruit. Keeps delivering and changing through many steeps. Love.
I haven’t gotten into pu’erh yet and find it fairly overwhelming, but your note has enticed me for this one haha!
PM your address and I will send what is left!
It is good resteeper, so even what I send will be small, I have made four more good steeps already!