Warning: mini rant below
I’m pretty sure that this is the right source since the leaf looks the same and the other tea’s from the company are from here or Culinary Teas.
I got this tea down at the beach and couldn’t decide between this one or the Irish Cream. I asked a family member which one I should go with and of course my impatient grandfather just said go with that one while pointing to the Caramel Pu-erh. So I went with this one. I’m the type of person who weighs the pros and cons and found that they were tied when picking between these two teas. I definitely need someone to come into my life who has great reasoning and can make these types of decisions for me.
Prep: I used one Teavana perfect spoonful. Steeped this western style using 9 oz of boiling water to be exact for 3:15 minutes covered. I used no additives as this tea is best without any milk or sweetener in my opinion.
Steep #2: 6 oz of water for maybe 7 minutes
Steep #3: 4 oz of water for maybe 12 minutes
Taste Wise- This is sweet in a burnt sugar sort of way. It definitely has a syrupy sweetness of sorts to it but I wouldn’t necessarily identify it as caramel. The Pu-erh base is earthy, mineral-y and perhaps slightly fishy but that might just be because the dry leaf smelled somewhat fishy. It’s an interesting tea for sure. I didn’t pay a ton of attention to it while drinking it so this tasting note will be expanded on in the future.
I definitely would like to explore some higher grade pu-erhs but unfortunately western steeping is often more convenient for me. I’m holding off on rating this for now until I try it again. I enjoyed it but it was a bit bizarre and I’m not in love with it.
Flavors: Burnt Sugar, Mineral, Sweet, Wet Earth
Preparation
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I believe that most of the teas from Culinary Teas are also Metropolitan Teas. Metropolitan Teas is a wholesale company – that is, they don’t sell retail. They sell retail products – wholesale – to retailers that will sell their products but they do not have a retail outlet of their own. (At least that’s been my understanding over the course of the many years that I’ve been involved in the tea business.)
That makes sense. Thanks for the information. (:
So, I have a confession to make, as for the decision-making. My online friends and I hang out in an old IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server. One of them has a bot on our chatroom that can do misc. things using commands. One thing she programmed Silvie (the bot) to do for me is decide my tea. If I use the !tea command, I get a response like, “Silvie runs to the cupboard and fumbles around with many different bags. She bounds back and presents a bag of Oolong” (with the choices being “black” “green” “white” “chai” “oolong” “yerba mate” “pu-erh” “rooibos” “herbal” “bagged tea” “mixed blends” and “Silvie’s Special Blend”). That narrows my collection of over 400 teas down to a category, and sometimes if I really want to narrow down my choice, I’ll put the teas into an Excel sheet, and use her random number command to select one from the sheet for me, too. I hate to admit how often I do that to select my tea choices! But you aren’t the only indecisive one!
That sounds amazing! We definitely need a feature on Steepster like that, that picks a random tea from our cupboard.
I found an online spinning wheel that picks things and populated it with common types of tea. You can customize it however you like and save the URL. Note that it makes noise when you click to spin the wheel, but you can turn that off. http://wheeldecide.com/index.php?c1=black&c2=green&c3=white&c4=oolong&c5=pu%27er&c6=herbal&c7=rooibos&c8=yerba+m%C3%A1te&c9=chai&t=Tea&time=5
Thanks! (:
I believe that most of the teas from Culinary Teas are also Metropolitan Teas. Metropolitan Teas is a wholesale company – that is, they don’t sell retail. They sell retail products – wholesale – to retailers that will sell their products but they do not have a retail outlet of their own. (At least that’s been my understanding over the course of the many years that I’ve been involved in the tea business.)
That makes sense. Thanks for the information. (:
So, I have a confession to make, as for the decision-making. My online friends and I hang out in an old IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server. One of them has a bot on our chatroom that can do misc. things using commands. One thing she programmed Silvie (the bot) to do for me is decide my tea. If I use the !tea command, I get a response like, “Silvie runs to the cupboard and fumbles around with many different bags. She bounds back and presents a bag of Oolong” (with the choices being “black” “green” “white” “chai” “oolong” “yerba mate” “pu-erh” “rooibos” “herbal” “bagged tea” “mixed blends” and “Silvie’s Special Blend”). That narrows my collection of over 400 teas down to a category, and sometimes if I really want to narrow down my choice, I’ll put the teas into an Excel sheet, and use her random number command to select one from the sheet for me, too. I hate to admit how often I do that to select my tea choices! But you aren’t the only indecisive one!
That sounds amazing! We definitely need a feature on Steepster like that, that picks a random tea from our cupboard.
I found an online spinning wheel that picks things and populated it with common types of tea. You can customize it however you like and save the URL. Note that it makes noise when you click to spin the wheel, but you can turn that off. http://wheeldecide.com/index.php?c1=black&c2=green&c3=white&c4=oolong&c5=pu%27er&c6=herbal&c7=rooibos&c8=yerba+m%C3%A1te&c9=chai&t=Tea&time=5
Thanks! (: