28 Tasting Notes
I found this tea really disappointing. Since I really like yellow tea, and this tea comes as little disks, shaped differently from but ultimately the same idea as pu-erh tuo cha, I thought it would be a great way to take yellow tea with me when traveling or going out. But a) it doesn’t taste like yellow tea, and b) it has no redeeming taste features. So it’s not even worth trying. In fact, I’m going to throw the remaining ones out.
I first has this tea from Silk Road Teas. The Norbu version is virtually identical. I love this tea. It took me about two years of drinking black pu-erh to come to appreciate green pu-erh, but now I love it. This Mao Cha has a quality of intense, delicate, pleasurable bitterness unlike any other tea I’ve tasted. The word that comes to mind is “bracing”. There is something about its lovely, pure bitterness that cuts through you like a painless knife: sort of what I imagine what it would be like to undergo “psychic surgergy”. Anyway, it has become one of my staples. And it holds up well to multiple steepings and can be drunk in large quantities.
Preparation
This is one of my staple black pu-erhs and is really the tea through which i came to like pu-erh tea after initially thinking it tasted like a mixture of mold, seaweed, and dirt. It is similar to Imperial Pu-erh from Silk Road Tea. Both of these are great dinner and after-dinner teas. I tend to drink pu-erh teas in the evening.
This tea has an amazing, subtle delicacy — sort of like angelic white peony. Have never had anything quite like it. If you like scented teas, such as jasmine, this pao blossom white peony is like an ethereal version of such teas — like being transported to a higher plane. I gave some to a woman who works in my building and she said it cured her of a bunch of physical ailments!
Both of Shang’s jasmine white teas are exquisite and intoxicating. My wife is not a real tea drinker but Shang’s jasmine whites are the only ones she ever requests. Also maintains that they make her feel generally better. i myself prefer unscented white peony, I concede that this jasmine white is lovely.
