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Back logging from this morning before church, half a bowl.

W/ an Italian BMT w/ extra pickle, lettuce, chipotle southwest dressing, and lite ranch. Toasted.

After being disappointed by the fact that Rish thinks “all greens are created equal”, I steeped this the 1st time using their suggestions, but now I’m using the steeping parameters for Kukicha on www.denstea.com. 1 teaspoon instead of one TB and a 6oz cup instead of an 8oz cup. Time and temp differences can be found below.

Of course a shorter steep w/ less leaf produces a lighter liquor. It almost looks like lemon juice. It smells like my 1st try only much lighter. The taste doesn’t surprise me either, their very similar except this one has substantially less bitterness. While it isn’t really bitter, there is still the savory umami notes. It’s definitely not a sweet green.

Conclusion Will probably prepare it using Rishi’s parameters when I make the sole recipe they have on the tea’s profile page, but when it comes to drinking it I’ll be using these parameters.

Well this is my 2nd attempt at Pu Erh. My 1st was adagio’s pu erh dante which was absolutely vile. But ya know… something just dawned on me. It’s almost exactly a year since that experience. I made my 1st online tea purchase, which was w/ Adagio, on Dec. 28th of 2008 and that (along w/ white cucumber which is now one of my faves) was one of them. Although I have to be careful to not analyze this analogy too much cuz then I start thinking about howe my life has changed since then and I get depressed.

Anyway, this is the 1st Numi tea I’ve had so I can’t tell you too much about them beyond what my observations for this particular bag will be. Yes, bag. Now I’m not a fan of bagged tea so bagged pu erh worries me even more. I’m also surpised the front of the bag uses “velvety and vanilla” to describe a chocolate pu erh.

Ingredients: organic Pu Erh, organic cocoa powder, organic vanilla, organic Theo chocolate cocoa nibs, organic rooibos, organic orange peel, organic nutmeg, and cinnamon.

Wow… the ingredients surprise me. This isn’t just a chocolate pu erh, this is more of a chocoalte chai/spice pu erh. Not what I was expecting, but it sounds good! I also love that all of the ingredients except for the cinnamon are organic. I’ve never heard of Theo chocolate before though. As if I couldn’t be more worried, they throw rooibos in here! I’m desperate to learn to love rooibos because it’s so healthy, but I just can’t seem to.

I open the bag and smell it. While I can smell the complexity and depth of the chocolate and pu erh, the only ingredient I can specifiically smell is the nutmeg. Not a bad thing, just interesting.

The odd thing about the steeping directions is they don’t tell you how much water to use. They don’t even use the vague term of a “cup”. So I weigh it. I would have anyway because I’m learning a lot of bagged teas are incredibly light. Wow! 2.5g! I’m impressed! It’s between the weight I prefer for a 6oz cup (2.25oz) and an 8oz cup (3g) so I decide to steep it as an 8oz cup for the higher suggested time of 5 min. (It suggests 3-5). I also steeped it just under boiling (205-210) instead of at boiling because I don’t want to kill the health benefits. I don’t think it’ll make that much of a difference.

The liquor is one of the darkest I’ve seen. Easily mistakable for black coffee. And that’s what it smells like. It smells like a chocolate chai steeped in black coffee. Sweet, spicy, rich, creamy, decedant, and very complex. After a quick stir, I take a sip. I have never been so glad for a tea to taste exactly the way it smells! I LOVE THIS! And pu erh is supposed to help you metabolize fat? this seems like it should add it!

For you to fully grasp what’s going on in my head, you need to understand that not only was I terrified of pu erhs, but aside from chais I don’t care for black teas in general. Normally I say who I think would like a certain tea, but this time I think I’m going to say who I think won’t like this because the list is much shorter. I think the only person that would not like this would be a person who doesn’t like coffee or chocolate.

Serving Suggestion: While this is wonderful on it’s own, this tea would make a wonderful latte steeped in a ratio of 2 parts milk to 1 part water or steeped completely in milk as an adult version of hot chocolate. 1TB of white chocolate creamer instead of milk would also be divine.

Psyching myself up for my 2nd pu erh experience after a really bad one. Half a bowl. 8oz water/1 scoop. Smooth, rich, creamy. Just plain good.:) I’m making this last quite a while Ricky, are you regreting giving it to me yet? LOL.;) Hopefully this’ll make me “worry no mori” about pu erh. Ok, sorry… REALLY bad joke! hehe

This was my 1st order from Rishi and only my 2nd tea that I know of that was Rishi. I’ve had their matcha prepared at a cafe once. But I could have well tried a sample of something at my local tea shop (they have 7 per day) that was indeed Rishi.

While I absolutely loved Rishi’s daily sales they had last month, I wasn’t going to cave because I have neither the money or the storage space. Til I saw this one. The tea itself didn’t really grab me, it’s the recipe for sole they have on the info page that suckered me in. I’m also also determined to learn to be able to define exactly what umami is, specifically in teas so I want to try every umami tea I can get my hands on. When it comes to trying a recipe for the 1st time I’m very anal about making it verbatum, yes even down to the brand of tea.

As I said before, I have very little experience w/ Rishi’s products and even less experience w/ dealing w/ their company directly but my 1st experience wasn’t a very positive one. I learned a very important lesson: when trying a new company, especially if your purchase will be a small one, investigate shipping. My purchase consisted of just this 50g (1oz is ~28g) pouch of tea which I got for only $3.75 (regularly priced $10) which costed $8 to ship an entire 90 miles. What’s worse, it was supposed to take 4 days to get here (quite long in my book), but ended up taking 9! I can order something from Adagio all the way in NJ, only pay $3.75 for shipping, and get it in a week.

Not only was this my 1st experience ordering from Rishi, it was also my first Kukicha. I opened the pouch and was quite surprised to see 2 different kinds of leaves- tiny, dark green grass clipping like leaves and longer, yellowish green blades. And the smell… Now I’m normally very good about not letting the smell of the raw leaves affect my perspective (I am a huge fan of Adagio’s white cucumber after all lol), but this is… how do I even discribe this? Putrid. That’s it. It smells like wet, moldy hay. Yuck. Oh well. I’ll give it a shot.

The steeping instructions suggest 1TB in 8oz of water heated to 185 degrees for 3-4min. Except for the amount of leaf (which seems like a lot), this seems awfully suspicious of the general steeping times for all greens, including Japanese, that most companies suggest so I went to Den’s Tea’s website to see what they suggest because I know their steeping parameters are unique to each type of tea. Yep. I was right. Den’s suggests 1tsp of leaf steeped in 6oz of water heated to 180 degrees for only 45 sec. Well, I’ll try Rishi’s steeping parameters 1st then try Den’s and compare them.

The discription of this says the liquor is emerald, but that isn’t true. It’s more “the person that used the bathroom before me didn’t flush and I can tell they have a urinary tract infection.” Thank God the aroma is virtually nothing like the raw leaves. There is an extremely faint hay like taste but that is easily covered by the bitter sweet (but definitely more sweet) flavor that they said I should expect. I’m also not getting the creamy mouth feel they discribe.

Conclusions: Surprisingly good tea even using their steeping parameters, but I wish they’d have more unique steeping parameters. I can’t wait to make the sole recipe. I’ll try different brands to compare both flavor and price, but if I decide that this is indeed the Kukicha for me, I’ll be buying it my local tea shop for $5.75/oz (and for every $100 spent I get $5 off). I also have 2 pu erh recommendations that are Rishi. I’m absolutely terrified of pu erh and I don’t want to waste money on something I don’t like so I’ll be buying those locally as well. My tea shop has an awesome return policy. The shipping is just absolutely not worth it, even if the products are.

Thick Jasmine matcha. Well… kinda sorta. I say, “kinda sorta” cuz I didn’t use a 1st infusion. Wanted to kill off my Adagio Jasmine #12 (an oolong) leaves from yesterday so I steeped the 5th infusion for 7 min, but in only 3oz water and used that to make my matcha. The result wasn’t all that much different. A little sweeter and smoother.

Made this for my friend Helen today. 2.25g/3oz water and then added 3oz milk. No sweetener.

Made this for myself while visiting w/ my friend Helen. Decide to steep it a lil shorter this time to see what’d happen. Pleasantly surprised at the flavor punch! Yummy. I think I’ll keep steeping it at 3min from now on.

Made a half bowl for my friend Helen. I think she liked it. I know she loved the smell. I think I may send her a pouch to celebrate National Hot Tea Month.