2020 Biscuits

I found this tea to be fairly underwhelming and overtly complicated to set. Just a little off in Temperature or time, and you have a bitter mess or nothing at all. This problem is (as is often) most apparent in the first 4 to 6 steeps.
Let’s say that the handy size only makes it worse. This is because you see the handy dandy size and think to your self: O this is going to be an easy relaxed steeping. Well let me tell you, relaxed is the last thing I would associate with this tea.
I’ve tried everything: more leaf with lower temperature less leaf with higher temperature. There is no getting it perfect. You have to start somewhere in the low 70°c and do like supper short infusions. You can not break the gall bladder for the love of god do not. This is going to take 5 to 6 infusions if lucky up to 7 to 8 if your unlucky to end with 3 to 4 good ones and if you push it an additional 3 to 4 long infusions.

Now is it worth your time? I would like to say its well priced for the quality, and ok it’s not overpriced, but you can find better tea for this price.

I need to play around more with steep times and amount of water with this one. I’m still relatively new to raw pu-erh and not completely sure what works for me and what doesn’t. This one wasn’t overly bitter to me as long as I kept the steeps fairly short. I think I probably should have used less water, though, as the flavor was a little on the weaker side (one 6g half a biscuit with about 150ml water). I was trying not to overdo it because I’ve had some problems lately with raws causing some stomach upset about midway through the session and I already had a headache when I started this one. I was probably a bit over-cautious. Still, I enjoyed the fruity flavors in this even if it wasn’t particularly strong and didn’t have any of the stomach upset I’d been worried about. As a bonus, this tea sent me into a “tea coma” and I was able to sleep off the headache. I’m excited to experiment with steeping parameters and hopefully figure out the best way to steep Biscuits. It’ll be great to have more raw options my stomach doesn’t hate.

Gongfu!

I felt really off yesterday, so I only ended up having one tea over the course of the morning and afternoon. That’s really atypical of me – especially on the weekends – but eventually I started feeling a bit better in the evening, so I scooped up some easily accessible teaware and a blanket/comic and decided to have a second tea; a mid evening tea session outside with some fresh air…

I used a quarter of a single “Biscuit” for this session, which is approximately 3g of sheng. That’s a little bit light for how I usually leaf my Gongfu sessions but 6g was also definitely too much for the 70ml gaiwan that I was using so it was the best compromise. I got five infusions, and they were all nice. Definitely more sweet and fruity than I had expected, with a red fruit (pomegranate?) note throughout and lingering throat sweetness. Also a bit of astringency, and a slight greener note too. I enjoyed it, and am excited to play more with these biscuits!

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/CEiIoNIAUmi/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Sw7ir92mM