Scottish Caramel Toffee Puerh

This is earthy, but… more like dirt. The caramel toffee flavor is delicate but pleasant. The aftertaste, on the other hand, is less than pleasant. I think this might be what people mean when they complain of pu’erh tasting fishy. I was going to play around with multiple steepings. I couldn’t even finish the first one. Thankfully, I only picked up a little bit of this during BrewTEAlly Sweet’s stash sale. This is a sipdown.

I got this in a mystery swap with, err….Shelley_Lorraine I think? I’m not completely sure, but this wasn’t really something I would’ve swapped for on my own and she’s the only one I did a mystery box swap with. Lol.
Tea #1 for the night since I’d like to try to get through some of this pile of tea that I have yet to try before considering buying new tea. Not that it’ll stop me from buying, or considering buying, more tea, but I can tell myself this in the hope I’d one day believe it. XD
The dry tea smells nicely of caramel, with an almost dusty quality. The wet leaves have an unpleasant musky/earthy smell to them. The brew itself was very dark, looked more like coffee than tea though thankfully didn’t smell like it. It did have a pleasant caramel smell, which was nice. The taste was also nicely caramel/toffee, though it was very light. There was a vaguely spicy taste on the back of the sip and it had a weird earthy mouthfeel/aftertaste to it. Maybe that’s the puerh, but it was very strange. Very mild astringency.
Strangely enough, this is the only tea I’ve had so far that adding sugar to it actually made it worse (to me at least). It became very musky and undrinkable. And before y’all get out the tar and feathers for putting sugar in a puerh, I try all my teas with sugar after I’ve tried the first half of the cup plain. So no violence please. Lol!
Overall, I wasn’t that impressed with this. It wasn’t something I’d have bought to begin with, but it was certainly something that I’m glad I tried.

Anyone know of a palate cleanser between tasting cups of tea? I’m trying to get a feel for this tea, but I can’t get the lime puerh catastrophe taste out of my mouth! A little bit of malt o meal seems to be doing the trick. I’m not tasting too much puehr here, just a little earthiness. I’m not getting too much caramel or toffee either. it is more like a whisper or lingering smoke of flavor. Not awful, but not my fav either.

TTB Tea 9: I saw that the other reviews were not so great for this one, but I still wanted to give it a try. One of the reviews mentioned a fishy taste, so I decided to go with a ten second rinse beforehand. On the first sip, I mostly got an earthy puerh flavor. The more I sipped, the more I could taste the other flavors come in. The puerh definitely dominates here, so if you’re not a fan of that flavor, definitely avoid this one!