Spiced Elderberry Pu’er

I can’t believe that it’s only been a few months since I reviewed this pu’er blend the first time. It seems like ages. Maybe there is some time warp when you’re a tea drinker (I swear I’m getting younger and I’ve also lost 20 lb’s in the last 3 months).

This week I turn 64. Yes. Those birthdays keep a-comin…year after year and there’s nothing you can do about it. The good thing about being 64 is that you don’t have to worry about your looks anymore and I don’t have to go out and get a job or worry about getting pregnant. I can say what I want and stay up late and sleep in. Not bad. So, my daughter Annalisa took me to an Eritrean dinner (a fundraiser for African Charities) at her church last night and we had a great time…I dressed in my Eritrean dress and I danced and had fresh roasted coffee. (Ethiopians and Eritreans roast and serve coffee in a ceremony that is closer to a tea ceremony and can last all day).
Here’s a photo of Annalisa and I http://www.flickr.com/photos/disabilitea/7243230384/
and the coffee…http://www.flickr.com/photos/disabilitea/7243230558/

So this morning I was sore! My legs hurt from dancing just a bit because of my fibromyalgia but it was worth it. You’ve got to live!
I really wanted a shot of good Pu’er with a wake up kick. I hadn’t had this Spiced Elderberry Pu’er is months and it sounded just right for soothing the after effects of spicy lamb, chicken, greens and injera bread from last night. I was so right!
How soothing the ginger and elderberry would be. Now that I’ve tasted several of the alchemy blends from Verdant, I delight in the restraint used when creating each blend. There is caution used so that no one herb or spice overwhelms another. This blend is warming and sweet while comforting to my stomach (a good thing) because of the mellow Pu’er. Um, this is a blend that I should be drinking more often (making that note to self).

okay I got a slew of new stuff from Verdant, pretty soon I’ll have tried every tea in their entire line… lol

I like pu-erh tea but I also like pu-erh blends, especially with fruit so I thought I’d check this one out. I steeped this one in my infuser mug at around 200F for 3 minutes.

This is really nice! It has many layers of intriguing flavor. The pu-erh is dark and earthy, the orange and elderberry are tart and fruity, and the ginger and galangal add a nice spicy kick. This will definitely warm you up. With the first steep I felt like the ginger really overpowers the cup but I didn’t mind as I really like ginger.

On the second steep the spiciness is starting to retreat and the pu-erh is coming out a lot more. I couldn’t help myself, I had to try it with soymilk. Yummy! Definitely check this out if you’re an adventurous sort of person that likes spices and fruit…

What a lovely chai!
First steep was WAY too strong for me. All ginger, nothing else. But then I oversteeped, being at work and all. Boo!!
Second steep is more balanced, and actually allows the Pu-er and orange to peek out. Rindy. Yum!
It’s nice and warming, and spicy. Not getting any berry yet, maybe that will happen in my third cup :)
Overall, this reminds me of DTs ginger puer, only this is far more complex and yummy!
Mucho thanks to the lovely Azzrian for this cuppa.
Rating: High eigties/low nineties. Not sure exactly where just yet!

When I pulled the brew basket out of the water, I smelled such an interesting aroma. Definitely reminded of thai food, which is probably the ginger/galangal.

Although I rinsed it kinda twice, I just ran water through the infuser basket, and am not sure this is appropriate. I still haven’t looked up how to rinse a tea properly. Anyhow, I’m getting a bit of a fishy smell from it. Which oddly works with the ginger/galangal, but is weird to smell from tea. Hopefully I haven’t ruined it by a lack of rinsing!

Tasty and spicy, I can taste both the ginger and galangal, but neither is overwhelming – I have to say that this is probably the best use of ginger in a tea I’ve ever encountered. There’s also a berry note, which must be elderberry. A lingering savoury flavour remains on the tongue after one swallows, which is quite nice. I can’t pick out the pu’er in here, but it’s obviously tying everything together. Once I have a better idea of what straight pu’er tastes like I might be able to say a bit more as to that aspect.

Overall, I’m finding this to be a very savoury, interesting tea. The spicing is very well done, with everything blending together perfectly and nothing sticking out or overwhelming the rest. Definitely would help with a craving for thai food, imo. Probably not something I’ll keep in stock, but a fabulous tea to have tried!

ETA: Second infusion (same parameters): A little weaker perhaps, but the spices are all present and I can pick up the pu’er now (possibly because of a bit of an oversteep – it may have had more like 3.5-4 minutes as I got confused when the timer went off and thought I had water in the microwave… yeaahhhh). Still smells a little fishy, but it doesn’t carry over to the flavour. Just makes me think of fish sauce here though (as I said above, it works with this flavour combo).

This is quite tasty! I had it a few days ago so I can’t describe in detail, but I enjoyed the ginger and puerh combination. Very warm and sweet and comforting. Like an internal hug. It was also quite caffeine-y. I think I’ll save the rest for a cold day. :)

Thanks for this kittenna!

This is a great blend and a great intro to pu’er if you don’t want to dive head first into the world of pu’er. I am not a huge pu’er fan, but I have been trying to get more into them. It seems that verdant’s pu’ers are the only ones that I like. I have already purchased more of the Diyi Cornfields Shu that I got from Steepster Select, and I wanted to look at the other pu’ers that they had to offer. I told myself that while the descriptions of them were enticing I thought I should look more into the Alchemy Blended pu’ers to start off with.

It was hard to choose between this one and the Chrysanthemum Pu’er, but the word “spiced” tipped me over to this one. Me being a chai lover I had to try this one first.
The dry leaf smells amazing. No mustiness that has stopped me before, but pure spice. I put two nuggets and 2 teaspoons of the spices. Did a quick rinse and brewed it for 5 mins. The wet leaf was so sweet and spicy smelling that I almost forgot that it was pu’er. The first sip was smooth and clean. Clean dirt with ginger and orange. I could not make out much of the elderberry, but the galangal was in the background.

Very nice Verdant:)

Oh my goodness. I meant to request a sample of this but forgot to email before the package was shipped, boo. Imagine my happiness when I opened the box to find a sample of it included anyway! Yay!! Squee!!!!

I had a rough afternoon, and my wonderful wife made a pot of tea for us to split. it was this little gem and I fell in love. Ordering more tonight. So much love. It was just juicy and gingery and a lovely cuppa. And when I came back to my computer, I found a message from a dear, dear friend who I hadn’t talked to in a year! My day perked right up, in part to this lovely tea.

So this blend was at the top of my wish list and when I heard it was being discontinued I had to pounce and order all the other blends for good measure. Elderberry intrigues me and while I believe I’ve had it’s root in some medicinal tinsanes, I don’t think I’ve really experienced its flavor before. I was a bit unprepared for the intensity of the spice notes though. Again I don’t think I have much experience with ganghal and while I love me some ginger, for some reason I was imagining clove. The smell of the dry tea is potent and did nearly make me sneeze. The husband was actually standing next to me in the kitchen when I opened it and based on the expression on my face, he declined the offer to sniff. I inhaled again more carefully this time and found it to be rich, exotic, culinary and comforting.

I probably brewed this different than most, choosing short steeps in hopes of getting the most out of the pu’erh. The first infusion was the most spicy and I could barely make out the elderberry or pu’erh. I probably would have been happier treating this as a rinse, however I think I would have loved it as a fall/winter blend, just not what I was expecting from this one. The second infusion still carried quite a bit of heat but notes of dark tart and swee berry started coming through with a bit of earthy pu’erh. The third was probably my favorite, a nice balance of all three elements and with a nice mustyness that carried over into the fourth infusion as well.

I didn’t get to spend as much time with this tea as I would have liked, it being Father’s Day and all (brewed up the husband a cuppa Scottish Breakfast in the morning). However I look forward to experiencing this western style, maybe with a quick rinse to lessen the spice. More than anything though I want to try the 2008 nuggets this is based on and see if I can find some of these notes in it, which I suppose is the point. Really should have ordered it at the same time.

I wanted to meditate today on the idea of blending teas. You can probably tell from the Verdant website that we love straight up tea with a passion. So what’s with the blends? I see a lot of back and forth about blending in general on the forums here and elsewhere. Some people find it to be fun and interesting to try blends, looking forward to the additional flavor dimensions, while others feel that it distracts from the subtlety of the base tea.

For me, a blend is a commentary, a literary criticism, an essay, on the tea I am using as a base. The tea is the theme of the essay, the main thesis statement. The spices, herbs and flowers are all supporting paragraphs. A good essay will hash out all the possibilities of the thesis in several paragraphs before returning to the theme with a new understanding. For me, a good blend will use things like elderberry or galangal to help clarify the taste of the tea.

When I drink Xingyang Nuggets, I taste the dark sweetness of elderberry and the slight floral spice of galangal already. They are there in the tea. By adding the spices, I am giving those hazy feelings a place to “crystallize” and make themselves known. A blend for me is always going to be exploring and pushing the basic flavors of a straight up tea with the goal of helping the taster come to a new understanding of what the base tea has to offer.

For that reason, it is sometimes especially fun to try a tea by itself, and then try one of the blends and see how the flavors relate. This also means that every time I drink a base tea on its own and taste a new flavor it gives me new ideas for blending.

Hopefully this makes sense. There are a lot of reasons to drink straight up tea and a lot of reasons to drink blended tea. This is just one perspective that I have been thinking about a lot recently that has been guiding my “play” with new blending.

Best Wishes!

The description, which states that in many ways this could be a straight up pu’ehr, is totally spot-on. The flavoring is really subtle, and don’t let the elderberry scare you away if you’re a bit wary of berries in tea, as I am. The berry is certainly as mild as the other flavor components- yay, no kool-aid taste. This seems to be a decent pu’ehr, and the flavoring softens it a bit, and sweetens it too.

Second steeping is actually even less flavored and more straight pu’ehr.

I’m so into flavored pu-ehrs lately… open to anyone who wants to swap me one of these for just about anything.