3403 Tasting Notes
November Sipdown Prompt – a tea for which you are especially thankful
Happy Thanksgiving for those who celebrate! I am thankful for all my Steepster peeps – more than you know.
Apparently the point of this tea is that they don’t tell you what the flavors are, and I am a bit rubbish at pinning flavors down. What I do know, and Ashman concurred, is that it tastes like a black tea version of Jardin Sauvage, a green rooibos tea that we both enjoy very much. Mostly I get mango but I thought I got a bit of banana once in the first cup.
This morning I asked Ashman what he wanted for our breakfast tea and he said he wanted something with fruit or berry flavors. We only drank about half of the big pot because we had a lot to do to get lunch ready.
After lunch, we wanted to have tea with our pound cake and instead of making a new pot I offered to heat it (calm down calm down) by mixing it with my cold steeped English Breakfast from Rare Tea Co. Cache-cache was room temp at that point. The strange thing was that even with 12 ounces of a good black tea added, I fully tasted Cache-cache. It was delicious with our pound cake and homemade ice cream.
November Sipdown Prompt – drink your cheapest tea
We go through a quite a bit of this one and the decaf version. Ashman takes this one to work and we drink the decaf at night – sweet and iced. Not bad, but not great. Just serviceable and quenches thirst. I think I had the decaf today but I am too lazy to add it to the database.
Ugh, life is too short to drink just serviceable tea. Taylor’s Assam, Irish breakfast, and Scottish breakfast are inexpensive and make a a great no fuss cup if you watch the steep time.
These are being made by the gallon! I do occasionally use “the good stuff” for the tea for glugging, though!
November Sipdown Prompt – your oldest black tea
After buying tons of this tea during the pandemic, I was shocked to see that our current tin is past the best by date. This was the first black tea that Ashman enjoyed without milk and sugar so we bought tons of it, and at the beginning of lockdown there were articles circulating that said black and puerh tea might have a small amount of efficacy against those types of viruses, preventing high viral load, so Ashman drank some each day.
He expanded his palate and now he drinks a lot of black teas plain, so I guess that is how this one started to get neglected. It is delicious, though not a breakfast favorite for me because I like the oomph of Keemun and such. It is definitely nice gong fu style, and a very good tea, and we will probably repurchase it one day when the cupboard gets lower. It is a nice afternoon or summer time breakfast tea, for sure.
Now that’s more like it!
This was a sample I received with my Lupicia Christmas (mostly) and I was really excited to get it.
A while back I purchased Harney and Sons Salted Caramel tea blend with high hopes, but they were dashed. The aroma was fantastic but the base tea was weak and the caramel flavor was just meh. I added black tea to it to make it more drinkable.
This was just what I was hoping for. The tea base is plenty strong enough but doesn’t need additives to tame it. The caramel is rich and true in aroma AND taste. I would definitely purchase this so the sample worked. I will wait until my cupboard is a little more in control, though.
Sipdown!
We have had big pots of this in the evening with snacks. It is one of the few red rooibos teas I like. I haven’t had red velvet cake in many years – decades, even. I don’t really remember what it tasted like so I don’t know how authentic this is. Definitely dessert-like and would be even more so with milk and sugar, but we like it plain.
*November 11 Sipdown Challenge Prompt – World Origami Day: drink a puerh and admire the wrapping job!”
Yes, this is really late. I got the prompt wrong and drank the entirely wrong thing on the 11th but better late than never. We really needed this today as we had pizza for lunch and at our age and with our stomachs we can always use help digesting pizza.
I have seen videos of puerh cakes being wrapped at the factories and it is so satisfying to watch. I try so hard to re-wrap it nicely after we drink some but to no avail.
I have had this cake for over a decade and when you break a piece off it really lasts, steep after steep. This is woodsy and sweet, without fishiness.
Sipdown
I have a tin of the grade just below this one ready to open, but it is time to finish off this tin so even though we are having matcha lattes today I used the good stuff. We are having a little cool spell and the holidays are fast approaching, so I thought this would be a great afternoon snack with whipped cream and sprinkles on top.
I do plan to repurchase this one eventually. If I am having hot matcha whisked in the traditional style, I prefer this one, the “extra thick”. The “thick” grade is very good and I usually use it for great lattes since it is higher grade than one would normally relegate for such a purchase.
Tea gift from my daughter – for World Kindness Day!
I decided to have this with breakfast but was so struck by it that I made more after breakfast. When I went to add it to the database, I saw that it is presently sold out. I can see why!
This would be a great puerh for someone who is wanting to try shu but is a little apprehensive. Because I was having it with food, the first impression was that I was drinking an unflavored black tea, but then the taste of rich, pure, wet garden soil blossomed. Earth.
Some pu has lots of barn notes, or camphor, or outright manure. Most smell like freshly plowed earth to me at some point on some level, and some have cedar notes like an old country church whose pews have been polished with Murphy’s Oil Soap. I have had puerh that smells sharp just like the leaves of our pecan tree when they crunch under you feet in late fall. Some smell like the dry dirt in the crawlspace under a house and I like that, too.
For breakfast I made three steeps in a row and combined them in one pot. That was when I had the sense of black tea with soft hints of fruit followed by rich earth experience. fruit? But which?
This is not the dry dirt under the house at all. This is rich, like when I water the house plants that are in the east window, or the richest, most desirable garden soil, but a little more subtle. I was kicking myself for not at least giving a little sip to the individual steeps and decided to make more after breakfast so I can really notice more without distraction and competition from food. (It was a tortilla egg bake today.)
This is silky with a hint of cream followed by rich earth. I have only done two steeps so far and they were a little different but I absolutely can not pinpoint one thing I am tasting in the second steep. It is intriguing and familiar. It reminds me of the vibe of Brown Sugar Cubes from white2tea without tasting like it. (BSC had a lot more high notes and mint with camphor.) This is definitely a tea of middle tones – a mezzo soprano if you will. Any Dame Cleo Laine fans here? Not as thick and rich as her voice but definitely a mezzo.
Third steep is on and I am finishing steep two cold. Lots of high notes cool. Quickly warmed it and…found the elusive note. Blackberry – specifically the flavor of Mûre Sauvage from Dammann Freres, so much so that I had to think quickly whether it could be contamination of this pot, but it can’t be, so natural blackberry notes, it is.
Third steep – piping hot, I get the aroma of soil on the roots of a huge pile of weeds you have pulled, aroma of soil and plant and root. I find that the flavors of puerh blossom most for me after it has cooled for a few minutes. After letting it rest I get a rich earth taste that lingers well. No mushroom really. Maybe some sharper fallen leaf coming through now.
This is lovely and I would 100% buy it again.
