Tea 3 of 5 from Teavivre’s pu-erh sampler.
As usual, I didn’t do a rinse on this, which maybe I should have done. Because I’m impatient, I will probably do separate tasting notes for the second (and third?) steeps of this.
With its thin reddish-brown leaves, it looks like a pretty typical pu-erh. Since I got the sample, it’s in loose form rather than cake form, although there are a few clumps. I boiled the water and didn’t do a super-long steep on this one; didn’t use a timer, but it was around 3 minutes.
This is very pleasant. It’s one of the mellower shus I’ve had. The earthiness is on the deep, sweet side. There’s a bit of fishiness, but not really enough to put me off. The flavor is pretty understated, possibly because of my relatively short steep time, which I don’t really regret but my only concern is that it’ll become too understated in the later steeps. We’ll just have to find out, won’t we?
