Breather

Thank you River Tea for this sample. I’m just sorry that it’s taken me so long to review this blend.

It’s a nice enough looking blend and each ingredient is easily spotted. The raspberries are rather finely chopped into small pieces but there are quite a few of them scattered around. The blend as a whole has a sweet berry aroma that is rather delicate.

Steeping this blend as per the instructions.

The blend is thickly Pu Erh but it’s nice as a base, like mild damp earth and musk. In the background behind is a sweet fruity flavour, like sweet orange but very mild. Not sure I can taste the raspberry per say but the after taste has a sour, berry like flavour (at a stretch).

I think it would be nice if the fruit was a little stronger but that’s just my personal opinion. Something to lift it up, at times it tastes like an ordinary unflavoured Pu Erh.

Tea o’ the morning t’ ye!

…I apologize for that.

I was very eager to wake up and try this tea, because I knew better than to have a pu-erh late at night, no matter how good it smelled. So of course this was the first tea I reached for today. Sidenote: After my drinking binge yesterday (eight perfect mugs full of tea, yowza), we had to run the dishwasher with the entire top rack filled with teaware XD.

Anyhoo, dry the leaf smelled fruity and light and amazing. Steeped, holy cow pu-erh! Not the most pleasant thing in the world, but I’m not a pu-erh fan. I smelled a hint of fishy, but mostly…leather.

The taste? Very yummy. The fruitiness is toned down by the earthiness of the pu-erh. I get orange, very strong earth, and just a hint of berry. It’s tasty, but I think my wife will like this more than I do, so I’ll save this for her.

So apparently this blend never made it into my cupboard, so I’m back up a blend. It’s kind of a disappointing feeling because it negates the only sipdown I managed to get in all day.

Anyway, this sample comes from aisling of tea – I took advantage of the fact she has a whole bunch of RiverTea blends and I requested this one because it’s something I never would have ordered for myself, and Spring Tea because I wanted to do a comparison between it and Tea Desire’s version (which I still have to do).

This is a really interesting blend. Aesthetically speaking, it’s really beautiful – the colours of the very shapely orange swirls, blue cornflower, and the bright raspberry bits all really pop and make this something fun to look at. It’s something I’d be tempted to serve to guests/company purely because of the presentation of it.

I’m still not really that experienced with Pu’Erh blends, so I don’t know how much my word should be taken on this, but I found that the Pu’Erh really stood out – much in the way I experienced DT’s Chocolate Orange. It was really thick, and the word that springs to mind is “oily”. I also felt like there was a kind of earthy musk to it. The fruit flavours were a little lost under all that ‘weighty’ Pu’Erh, but I could still get a feel of the orange (in a sort of rind like way) and the raspberry in a really subtle, nuanced way.

My overall impression is that as a first cup this was really weird but in an intriguing way where I wanted to keep drinking just to experience all the layers of it. I think it’s the kind of blend that would really grow on you the more you have it; an “acquired taste” type of tea.