Mandala Tea

This is my first Mandala Tea!
The Aroma of the dry leaf is very mushroomy, very savory, with a chocolate background & a hint of ammonia.
My formula: 5G + 4oz (rinse)
1. 10 sec = a very dark brew with a savory earthy flavor, definitely mushroomy!
2. 20 sec = The flavor of shroom is still present, but a creamy vanilla sweetness begins to rise
3. 30 sec = creamy & mildly sweet, with a lite milk chocolate at the very back of the tongue as I swallow
4. 40 sec = Chaqi sensations are creeping up on me! The flavor is the essence of vanilla pastry.
5 – 8 were combined in a pitcher. This tea kind of reminds me of Yanxin’s Reserve, at least in some ways.
9 was allowed to steep for 2 or 3 minutes…and it was nice too!

Next time I think I’ll try it with more leaf.
It will be interesting to see how this one ages.

Thank you mrmopar for this sample tea!

I gave this pu-erh a real good tasting at several steep times. Shorter at first as I usually do (30 seconds), then increasing to a minute and longer still after a few steepings.

The flavor was very, very mild at first. I thought there was something wrong…maybe I needed to rinse this puerh more than one time to open it up.

I poked my puerh knife at the rough bark, encouraging the breakdown of the leaves and more contact with the boiling water.

The tea was still bland.

I increased the steep time. 1 minute, then more after that.

Finally, I had to admit that this was one mild, mellow puerh that was just going to be what it was.

The flavor was juniper berry, (a little on the sour side) not very sweet and smooth. I didn’t find complexity or texture.

Too light a tea for additions too.

Blah

I saved the leaves from late last night and made two steeps to go with my breakfast with morning. These two were still plenty strong enough to enjoy – I am not a fan of washed out tasting tea. And today I feel more like I am drinking green tea when I taste this. I don’t mean green oolong, I mean actual green tea.

It was tasty enough that these leaves are still on hold for some resteeping later today.

We are on another campaign to clean out samples and odds and ends. My daughter was going through the ones I have sorted and said she had planned to drink some of the meh teas to get rid of them, but found that everything we had set out was really good stuff. That’s a great problem to have.

This was the last of a sample and there was very little left in the bag. There was so little that I used my small Kamjove and didn’t fill the 7 ounce steeping cup all the way. I released the liquid and resteeped twice more but filled all the way since the color was so strong. The leaves had expanded well, and all three steeps looked rich and dark.

The wet leaves of this tea have a deceptive aroma to me. The scent seems hard-edged and cutting, like you are about to take a sip of something astringent or sour. But instead it is such a sweet and lovely tea. It just blooms with such a pleasant, round flavor when you sip. I paired it with the last few Marcolini chocolates. It made a really pampering late night snack.

Thank you, Garret, for the lovely sample!

This was a free sample that was included with the order hubby had me place for Christmas! Thank you, Garret!

We had a busy day. I was up before six to take the foster puppy outside to piddle, in the rain, barefoot. Fortunately it has been rather warm here. Then school with youngest daughter and more rain piddles. Just after lunch hubby came home and we went to Raleigh to pick up a few things and drop something off at my eldest daughter’s apartment.

Now I am so tired I can hardly wait to go to bed! As my mother used to say, “No one will have to rock me to sleep tonight!”

But I really need a late night libation, something special to drink before nodding off. I poked through my sample basket and found this, and apparently I am the first to log it!

Middle daughter just ground some wheat and made chocolate chip cookies and of course I had to grab one or three to much on while I made this tea! Thus, my tasting of the tea may not be perfectly accurate since I began with cookie.

What it does tell me is that I enjoy this tea with food. The tiny pellets expanded magnificently into bright green leaves that filled the little pot. The liquor of the first few steeps carried a sharp, root vegetable scent, but the taste was not sharp. I find it somewhat mineral, which always tastes very fresh to me, lightly floral, and green. It is not astringent or drying.

I am now on steep four and it is smoother and sweeter than ever. The taste is now lingering long, warm and pleasant. There is a taste of delicate green vegetables more so now, but it is a very delicate green taste, not grassy, sour, or harsh. This was a very nice “night night” cup, and I have enough sample left to do this a couple more times!

Thank you again, Garret!

This was a free sample included in my Christmas order from Mandala Tea. Thank you, Garret!

It is tea party day! We didn’t have a tea party last week since it was the day after Christmas, and I wanted today to keep the holiday festivity vibe going! My middle daughter made a pan of brownies with freshly ground whole wheat, which makes really yummy fudge brownies, and we served it with homemade vanilla ice cream.

I also served Bonne Maman Fig Preserves. Ysaurella said she liked it best with goat cheese but I have none at this time so I served it with my warm homemade cheese spread that has a bit of onion in it.

I told youngest I would make this pot personally because I couldn’t believe we were going to get enough strength in a black tea in just one minute, but at one minute the color was nice and dark and the aroma was strong, so I did pull the basket.

I think this was the favorite tea of my guest today. She said it left behind a creamy feeling and had the most enduring aftertaste of our teas today. There is something rather unique about the aroma and flavor of this one that I couldn’t quite pin down and I hope someone more experienced will be able to describe accurately. This is fruity without being sharp, not a Darjeeling type of fruitiness but rather a baked fruit that has been mellowed and sweetened by the heat of baking.

It paired nicely with our food. We drank it without additions and it was sweet and smooth.
I look forward to trying further steeps of this!

I have been watching Teahouse Ghost videos and then boring my dear husband to tears with lots of tea talk. He mentioned that he couldn’t remember what sheng pu’er tastes like, and I told him that was probably because I never made him any. I didn’t think he would like it much. He was mildly affronted, or pretended to be, so I set up the tea tray for a gong fu session tonight.

After warming the gaiwan, I put in the leaves to rest and release their aroma. Peaches with ginger, heavy on the ginger!

My husband says his reviews are usually, “It was hot and had tea-like qualities.” This time he got creative, saying it smelled like wet hair – probably a good assessment since I use organic herbal shampoo bars. Then he said maybe what he really meant was earthy. Also not a bad descriptor for this tea, as there is a hint of distant smoke. He said it “had a wang”. When I told him that I tasted camphor, he said he definitely agreed and that was what he was calling the wang, but I think the astringency contributed to the wang. Ha! So sheng pu is what drew him out of his shell to attempt a real description of a tea!

Now for mine….I found this to have a lot of peach/apricot aroma with ginger, a little more ginger than I care for in the early steeps. We did many. The camphor I already mentioned, and the briskness reminded me of darjeeling.

The liquor grew smoother and sweeter as we steeped. I used 200F rather than boiling. The color was light gold, fading with later steeps.

I am left with a warm glow and feel very sleepy and so peaceful, which I really needed tonight. I may check back in on this in a year, but I don’t know. I own very little sheng and I want to start getting to know sheng better.

Perhaps I will hit up mrmopar for some recommendations since he first recommended this one to me.

I am very excited that I used my gaiwan and didn’t burn myself! Ha ha! I have hardly ever used it, and have not felt very successful with it, but it is coming a little more naturally to me now and I really enjoyed it. I see more gaiwans in my future…

I have not been taking the time to sit quietly and resteep tea, focusing on the experience. Tonight I remedied that with a long and fruitful gong fu session with this tea. It looks like I am going to try it once a year until the cake is gone! I got out a knife but the cake is loosely compressed and I realized I could just break off a chunk with my hands rather easily. Yay! I plan to order a breaking tray from Garrett really soon.

For such a young sheng, this is very drinkable. My favorite steeps were the later ones, and I actually felt almost as if I were drinking warm wine. About five steeps in I heard my stomach start gurgling. Ah yes, the tea was working its magic! Puerh usually gives me the gurgles and it makes my tummy happy.

This was a fabulous way to end a nice day of shopping out of town with hubby, and technically, also a nice way to start Tuesday since technically it is after midnight now! This is tasting more like white wine with each steep and especially as the temperature is dropping.

I think I am on steep eleven and still going. There is a lot of flavor here. I will probably wait a year again to taste it and experience it!

I chose four puerh teas for Christmas from my hubby. Three were shu puerh, and one was a sheng.
Furthermore, this is a very young sheng. I chose it because I thought it would have tons of potential for aging based on its origins, and I confess also because the paper wrapper is beautiful and I love that a friend of Garret lent her talents and designed it!

I think the papers wrapped around puerh are beautiful. Perhaps they also look exotic to me because the language is completely mystifying! There are no letters we can pick out similar to ours, so no hope of finding a word or two similar to English or other languages we may speak. The message on the wrapper is a complete mystery to me! I save my wrappers because I hope to one day cover a tea chest in them.

Concerning wrappers, I also will probably never qualify to be a puerh con artist. You know, those people who buy expensive puerh, keep it, and wrap the nice wrapper around a cheap puerh and sell it for a lot of money? Well, I wouldn’t, but I also couldn’t, because I can never get the wrapper back on the cake with the beautiful tight pleats that it had to begin with! Deft and nimble hands wrapped these cakes! Maybe with practice….

I took Garret’s suggestion and poured some boiling water into my little pot. After the pot had warmed a moment, I poured out the water and added the leaf to the empty pot. I put the lid on for a few seconds and then lifted it and sniffed. Root vegetables! Rutabagas, I think! I am going to try this with a lot of my teas.

I gave the leaves a thirty second steep. There is still the root vegetable aroma, but it is milder and it isn’t “biting” at all. The liquor is a pale golden yellow. The flavor matches the aroma rather well. I am drinking the third steep now and there has been no diminishing of flavor. I think this would also be great with food.

I am really excited to be moving forward in my puerh journey. I hope to live a long time so I can try this tea over many years and see how it matures. I must say it is a well-behaved child, though. :)

Thank you, Garret and mrmopar, for helping me choose my Christmas tea!

I have stopped going to the Mexican restaurant because as much as I love the cheese and cheese and cheese dip and cheese! I can’t digest it very well anymore and I have two days of misery! or at least one night of reflux. But daughter visited tonight and really wanted to go, so we did. As a preventative measure, we made a huge pot of puerh tonight and we all drank it. Within minutes, the heaviness was lifting and the meal was not making miserable. (Oh, how I love hot melty cheese!)

My cake of puerh is now officially gone, expended, no longer in existence. I told hubby this means I get to panic and replace it with an order of ten more cakes of puerh. ( I do have a few more already here at home, so I will work on those!)

This has been an earthy, rich, delightful treat.

I made a new recipe for supper tonight. I sauteed onions in butter, added mushrooms, then garlic, added flour and milk to make a roux, then spinach. It was served on angel hair pasta. Baked sweet potato was the side.

The problem is we don’t usually eat this much butter or fat. Before he could even start eating, hubby had an attack of esophageal spasms which happens occasionally. He had Schotzki’s Ring long ago, I think that is what it was called, and it still acts up sometimes even though he takes Prilosec daily.

Then I ate waaaaaay too much, so there we were, hubby with horrible, powerful hiccoughs from the spasm and me burping garlic. Could puerh tea help both of us?

The short answer is YES! I made three steeps western style in the 22 ounce pot. Partway into the first steep his hiccoughs stopped, and these are not normal hiccoughs. And I feel much lighter. Hooray!

This is much better than taking medicine. My next batch will be the end of this cake, so I guess I had better start looking at my next order!

Backlog: we drank this ALL DAY yesterday, one pot after another, each one a resteep. It stayed nice and strong. I was going to drink the lincang at first, which is really luscious, but I wanted to use the beautiful puerh knife mrmopar gave me and the breaking tray my daughter gave me for Christmas. Hubby hung the tray on the tea wall for me so it is in easy reach and yet out of the way when not in use. I will post a pic if I can get it to work!

We had Writers’ Group at my house last night instead of Thursday due to a scheduling conflict. For a while now, we have mostly been drinking oolongs. Last night, one of the ladies told me that she had become unable to tolerate eating beef because of digestion problems, but when she drank “that other tea” at my house she could eat anything she wanted and was just fine. She asked if I could make some of it, especially since she was going to a chili cook-off today.

I showed her the remains of this Phatty cake, let her sniff, and she said it was indeed the kind of tea that had helped her. I pried a bit off and steeped it seven times, for a total of about 150 ounces. Everyone liked it, obviously, since we kept steeping and kept drinking!

I really wanted to order a breaking tray, so getting this close to running out of my Phatty cake is a GREAT excuse to go ahead and place that order. :)

My Phatty Cake is becoming a skinny cake.

I decided to make a big pot of puerh to experiment with tonight. I rarely cook red meat even though I have chronic anemia, but tonight I promised my girls steak. I knew I might need some help with digestion and decided to take care of that naturally, and do it early so I won’t be miserable when I go to bed.

I made this nice and strong, but something kept picking at my brain. Everyone talks about puerh lattes, or just puerh with milk and sugar, so I decided to give it a try even though I usually don’t add sugar to my tea.

First of all, wow. Wow. I added some sugar to the hot puerh and it was as rich and satisfying as a dessert. Then I added a lot of milk and ice, and I think it was too much. The ice melted really quickly and made my drink a bit watery. I added some more puerh and it is a little more balanced now, but I think my favorite way to have this is either plain and hot, or plain with sugar, or cold steeped with no sugar. The latte isn’t bad, it just isn’t my favorite way to drink this. Perhaps if I had sweetened it and then cooled it so I wouldn’t need so much ice it would be better.

I made 24 ounces and have some resteeps to go, so I will definitely be drinking this rest of this hot and probably with a sprinkle of sugar. This is my dessert tonight, and I do not feel deprived at all!

On that note, hubby’s dessert was something I saw on the menu for a local deli. S’Mores sandwich, made with wheat bread buttered on the outside, Nutella and Marshmallow Creme inside with fine crumbles of graham cracker sprinkled on the Nutella, then toasted in my Breville. He loved it, but I think I like my dessert just as well!

My two eldest kids once never liked tea of any kind. Even growing up here in the South they never took to sweet iced tea. But now that they are grown and I have tried nearly tea there is on them, they both like puerh and matcha! Yay! Go figure!

My son has been coming every weekend to help his dad build a fence and it is brutally hot. In addition to the iced matcha water they drink while working, I have been making cold steeps of puerh for the rest of the time. My son is pretty health conscious. Yes, he loves his Mountain Dew and Taco Bell, but he exercises moderation and makes sure he gets something healthy every day, too.

He has really been enjoying the cold steep puerh, and even texted me for directions on ow to make it with some puerh I had sent home with him.

Cold steeped puerh is truly refreshing, light, and cooling. It feels good to drink something that I enjoy this much that is also so good for me. Many thanks to Bonnie for showing me how good it is this way!

I spent about half the day yesterday getting our taxes ready. I have been putting it off, dreading it, when I should have gotten it over with. I just felt like I could not face that chore! Finally, I knew we were getting down to the wire and I had no choice. And when I was done, it felt like a great weight had been lifted. I should have done it sooner!

I wanted to celebrate, and since we don’t drink alcohol plus I was wanting to give hubby a treat for working on my chicken tractor, I suggested Five Guys Fries. OY! I think a pint of liquor would have been better for me. I waited to eat until almost noon, but still I was a bit reflux-y. I am just not used to eating fried foods anymore! (On a happy note, I have lost all the weight I gained over the holidays and a little more to boot!)

I needed puerh, so I have been drinking this all day and my stomach is quite happy now. Puerh really works for me when I eat too much fatty or greasy food. I made this western style with a nice long steep so it was quite dark in the cup. It was sweet and smooth.

On a side note – the names for the chickens have been tentatively chosen…Nom Nom Nom de Plume (she will be Samwise’s hen, probably a Buff Orpington to match his spot), Darles Chickens (ruminate on that a while, you’ll get it), and Dame Digby Chicken Caesar.

This is one of my Christmas present cakes from hubby! We drank it tonight while playing Star Trek Settlers of Catan with my son and godson.

First of all, I have had loose puerh and mini Tuocha in the past. I liked puerh right from the first time I tried it, even though the first ones I bought at A Southern Season were really fishy smelling. (Not fishy tasting, though.)

Tuocha are easy! Just drop it in! Getting the amount you need detached from the cake is a challenge and I don’t have a puerh pick or knife. I had read that a butter knife would do and that is what I used last night but it didn’t work so well.

Tonight I tried Granny Stella’s tomato knife, a cheap little white knife my husband got when his granny died. It has a serrated edge and a very pointy tip for piercing.

Now I don’t know if this cake is not as compact and hard as the other one, but that knife worked a treat and in no time I had pried off what I needed for steeping.

I am not an experienced and learned puerh drinker, though I hope to be some day, but I can give my impression of this. It was not fishy at all. It was rather mild and the liquor lighter than others I have tried. I used only a little leaf in an eight ounce pot and we got about six steeps that were pretty good strength from it. I was keeping it around thirty seconds per steep. A final steep was really pale but still tasted nice.

This is very good, and I think it would be a great unflavored puerh to start the fearful on the path.

Many thanks to mrmopar and Garret for their help in choosing my Christmas teas!

This is truly such a surprising tea. It smells like lilac. I have never had tea that smells quite like that. The taste delicate and yet flavorful and buttery. It is a must-try.

Got this as a sample. Thanks!
It’s deliciously sweet and floral and VERY creamy. Creaminess and smoothness are too qualities that I really enjoy in my tea. I would definitely consider buying a larger amount. So far everything from Mandala Tea has been fantastic!

I do not. Like this tea.
First cup was grainy, bready, and a touch floral. Kindof a Jasmine floral that stuck in the back of my throat. Some sugar spruced it up, but even then I had trouble sipping it down.
Then… I made the mistake of brewing a second cup. MORE Jasmine! eeek. Added some sugar. Well that didn’t work so I tried it with milk. Still bad. Down the drain it went.
This came from the traveling tea box and it’s the first one from the pile I didn’t like at all. Ah well, can’t win’em all :)
Thanks to whoever gave me the chance to try it!!
Rating: 60

EDIT: and now I’ve made another cup of tea, a White Peony from STE and I can still taste the jasmine and none of the delicate notes I was craving. Dang that stuff is potent!

I’ve been drinking this for a long time and bought another package yet again. I love it because it allows me to brew tea with very little fuss, it lasts forever and there is variety.
I would highly recommend it.

I’ve been so busy with work that I feel like a design ninja handling multiple projects at once.
There is, however, always some time for tea.
I’m really happy with this purchase. Mini-tuochas look like super cute little bonbons + it’s a generous amount. I think it’s great deal, highly recommended!

Just had oven roasted beets and brussel sprouts with balsamic vinegar and pistachios. Finishing it all with a large cup of Wild Monk – it’s sweet, creamy and delicious.