I got this with the tea club, and have tried it 3 times so far, with 3 very different experiences.
1st session: Drank it with a friend who’s not really into pu, didn’t take great notes. Mostly I remember that I thought it was fairly bitter during the sip, with a fairly sweet aftertaste.
2nd session: This was after I broke it up and left the bag sitting open airing out in my super dry apartment for weeks, then sealed the bag up again and forgot about it for weeks more. It smelled wonderfully fruity, like roasted red grapes and peaches, but the taste was sour plum with emphasis on the sour, some surprisingly unpleasant bitterness (I usually like bitter!) and astringency, and a sort of gross vomitous note that made me stop after the 4th steep.
3rd session: This was after I let it sit in my new pumidor (a plastic tub with some 62% boveda packs) for a while. And oh, wow, it’s really lovely now. The flavor is all plums and resinous incense, in varying proportions. There’s some sweetness in the throat afterwards, some dryness/astringency in the mouth (but fairly mild, totally fine by me), and some lingering plum breath. There’s more roughness in the back of the throat in later steeps as the intense flavors start to wind down, but it remained solidly enjoyable overall. Which I would never have predicted! I’m honestly not sure why I even tried it again, but I’m so glad that I did.
I think the moral of this story for me is that storage matters even in the short term.
Flavors: Plum, Resin
