Sipdown (283)
So Roswell Strange shared this with me (thank you!) and its a puerh and a non-flavored one at that so I was particularly worried about trying it. I don’t like puerhs so I didn’t have high hopes here. Yet I decided to brew it up yesterday as part of september sipdown.
I decided to use my gaiwan to brew it and full disclosure…I didn’t like it. However, I was incredibly surprised at my reasoning for not liking it because it was not for the usual puerh/muddy/mushroom/dirt/etc. reasons.
I tried really hard to write this note yesterday by the way but could not access the page. Kept getting a 404 error so instead I took very brief jot notes.
When I started drinking this, the first thing I noticed was a very drying floral quality to it. Like potpourri or like when you get something like the tiniest bit of sanitizer or deodorant in your mouth and it has this horrible drying/bitter quality to it. I got that for the first 5 steeps so those mostly got dumped.
At the 6th steep, I noted that it was still floral but the drying aspect was going away . I also thought it was maybe buttery or possibly had a pea note.
My notes for steep 7 are: floral, but better though still not great. Beans and grass. I then wrote “green tea?” since once I got through the more bitter steeps, it started to have straight green tea qualities. I am not a huge fan of straight green teas either but I do prefer them to puerhs so it was weird to be getting those tasting notes here.
Steeps 8-10 were similar to steep 7 but with a fuller body. They were also less floral. The more I steeped, the more I got oolong instead of green tea.
Ultimately, it was fine. I don’t think I would flag it as a puerh based on the flavors I got. In my case, that is a huge compliment. With that said though, it was not really a tea that possessed flavors I would want anyways. As such, I didn’t like it but I liked it more than expected. Is that a success? Who knows…
