Mr. White2tea is an amazing guy. Very patient, writes well, knows his stuff. If you don’t know him online yet, you should.
He saw a post that I made where I expressed my strange and unexplainable sort of fear of puerh. And since then he has been helping me get past it. A lot of what has helped is that he has assured me that what I feel is normal and I can get past it.
I told him that I think pu is like red wine. Like, at one point I decided I wanted to learn to like wine, and I started with the really sweet ones, like Malvasia (which is a red for people who don’t like reds). By now I like any type of red, even the really oaky and bold ones. But it took a while of sipping and appreciating.
That’s where I think this pu thing is heading. Last week I had a session with this tea and I enjoyed it. Now, I don’t think it tastes like any other tea. It’s its own THING. It tastes like it tastes. And I speculate that is what trips people up – they expect it to taste familiar and when it doesn’t, they just stop. But I’m willing to keep going. I ended up drinking two infusions of this tea while at work one day, and then saved it and took the next four infusions in a modified gong fu, all in one mug. There was no magical qi and nothing life changing, but I enjoyed it, so I consider it a success. I only used about 40% of the tuocha so I’m going to pass the rest of it to Stephanie so she can try it, and move on to the next pu in the flight.
Every journey starts with a single step, right?
