Gongfu!
I’m trying out a new tea and cheese pairing with this smoked sheng pu’erh and some Saint Agur blue cheese!! I’m a huge fan of both blue cheese and smoked teas, and combining the former with a robustly smoky Lapsang Souchong is a pairing I’m quite intimately familiar with and deeply fond of. So, with that in mind, I wanted to see what this polarizing cheese would he like when tried with a different sort of smoked tea.
Honestly, this was so good! I mean, you 100% have to love both strong smoky tobacco-like flavours and the funk of blue cheese already because I definitely don’t think this was transformative in a way that would win over a skeptic of either flavour. But the intense flavours of both tea and cheese were able to hold up to one another, with neither eclipsing the other. The Saint Agar is a double cream cheese, so the very high fat content actually did soften a lot of the rougher, more astringent edges of the sheng pu’erh without smothering the smoke and interestingly the duo both came off as much sweeter and slightly fruity in the finish and aftertaste – and that was unexpected but really lovely. It worked really well with the notes of oak and anise that also come through in this greener, smoky raw pu’erh.
Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/C-Yfb-OOxX/?imgindex=1
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yvr0cKeooc