368 Tasting Notes
Like Liz, I’m always amazed at the work that goes into preparing dry teas like this one.
The dry “pearls” are redolent with the scent of the flowers. It is like being in a flower shop, blooming meadow or a perfume counter — if you’re into that kind of thing.
The steeped cup is no less floral. In a way, more so. Fresh flowers instead of dried flowers.
The liqueur is a delicate pale.
Happily, the cup is far less floral in the mouth than on the nose — less room to move around or something. There is a big, thick sweetness to this tea.
Jasmine teas are never going to be my thing. But this is a very good one and I’m glad I tried it so that I can confirm that the issue really just is the flowers, not the quality of the tea hiding under them.
This pi lo chun, like many I have had, seems more like a white tea than a green. A fuzzy, fluffy dry life, not entirely unlike the silver needles, but curled in on itself rather than straight.
The scent on both the dry leaf and the brewed cup is also much like the silver needles. Sunny hay on the dry and sweet roundness coming off the cup — but the flavor on the tongue is more astringent and not nearly as sweet.
As much as I love big, strong, bold, dark teas, my favorite dry leaf is white needles. Big, fuzzy, white buds that look cool, and always smell like freshly rolled hay drying in the sun.
The steeped aroma is quieter, almost shy. There’s a kind of sweet grain essence to it, like opening a fresh box of corn flakes, but not nearly that strong. Like someone opening a fresh box of corn flakes in the other room. Down the hall.
The cup is round, and wet and sweet almost like fresh snow peas or papaya. But again, from very far away. Like you’re tasting what your identical twin is eating downstairs while you sleep in under a huge, downy duvet.
Preparation
The dry leaf of this tea has a powerful aroma. Stronger than anything I’ve had on hand in a good long while. Oddly, the smell is all Yunnan golden. Deeply sweet, like roasted figs.
The cup isn’t nearly as bold on a short steep but there’s a very pleasant round, full presence of the tea from start to finish.
I don’t have nearly as much astringency as I did from this tea the other day. Maybe I did over-cook it a bit, then?
This is an incredibly light cup. The liqueur is almost completely clear. Just a faint hint of a pale, sea foam green.
The flavor is similarly delicate, bright, fresh and clean. No bitterness or vegetal notes, and yet also no sweetness. It does have a surprising astringency to it, however.
A very pleasing tea, but I have a mind that I ought to be serving it and sipping it from very fine, very thin, very fragile, delicate, white, bone china.
I could see this making a truly excellent iced tea.
Today is going to be all about the fact that our lawns have spent the past 18 months being abused by landscapers, contractors and the worst drought Texas has on record. I basically have to get an entire year’s worth of dead grass out of the thatch in the hopes that the St. Augustine will run one more time before going dormant until March. With any luck, the spot treatment for the weeds (an eco-friendly variety of weed killer) will arrive tomorrow and I can follow-up the weed whacking and raking with weed treatment.
Oh, and I’ll be drinking this tea while I do all that work because we aren’t supposed to break 60 degrees until afternoon.
Maybe I’ll back the car into the driveway and listen to the Arabic version of the liturgy as inspiration…
As homage to the great tradition of martial arts films which at a tender age first planted the seeds of my obsession with all things East Asian, I call this “Gongfu Madness”.
We got a second pouch of this pu-erh in our second round of samples. I suspect we were supposed to get the other pu-erh which TeaVivre offers, the rose scented one, and we got this one in error. But that is not a problem because I don’t know as either Liz or I would have cared for that one very much and we liked this one a lot.
To expand the tasting boundaries the second time around, I came up with another heretical steeping idea which is so crazy it just might be genius.
I got a my smallest tea pot (close to 2 cups) as well as my largest (close to ten cups).
I set the electric kettle to boiling, and dropped the toucha into the warmed small pot. For this process I did “rinse” the tea, because the steepings would be so short I needed the leaves to losen up.
Then, in quick succession I made five steepings and transferred them to the larger tea pot. That is to say, I combined them. The timing for the steeps was 5 seconds, 3 seconds, 3 seconds, 4 seconds and then 5 seconds.
My thinking? If the idea behind this long series of short steeps is to expose various profiles of the tea, if you combine them, you should get a deeply complex, multi-dimensional flavor matrix that is distinct both from any one steeping or from a single, long steeping of the combined 20 seconds.
And it seems to have worked!
This cup is all at once soft and loamy, bright and sweet, and yet still dry and dusty. The liqueur has a thick, almost broth like mouth feel and coats not only the tongue, but the whole mouth.
Fun!
I wish I had a 20 cup pot (or a teensy 1 cup pot) so I could try what 10 steepings tastes like.
