New tea with an attractive description, lets try it!
It does indeed come pressed in a sort of ’hershey’s bar’ look like in the image, which is a first for me.
I started off with no wash, but also using less amount of tea that most people would do (around 3g instead of 5g). Using around 110 ml at around 205 F.
Steeps were 10s, 12s, 17s, 24s, 30s, 45s, 1min, 1min30s, 2 min, 3min
First steep was faint, probably due to low time and low leaves. It has a flavour very similiar to whispering pine’s Huron Gold Needle Shou Pu-ers, with Cacao, Coffee, Creamy being present. However, it is much smoother and has a very flowery feel to it. Steep was a relatively light color
The smell of the tea (after first steep, no wash) was like freshly turned over dirty with floral hints. Quite nice.
Second steep has a very rich red-brown look to it and smells very sweet. Flavours are more pronounced and contains an underlying floral layer to it. More ‘earthy’ and ‘fresh dirt’ taste to it.
Third steep has a primary earthy and flowery taste to it. Also by now the tea has fully ‘disassembled’ in the gaiwan, making it pretty easy to see what’s pue-erh and what’s honeysuckle. Quite a nice little thing.
Fourth steep is primary a mineral/earth taste with floral hint. A little bit of a honey taste but not much.
Fifth steep is the same as fourth, but no more honey!
And all the rest of the steeps keep the earthy + floral taste to it. The last few steeps started getting lower on flavour, but much sweeter instead.
This tea is pretty interesting considering you can see the honeysuckle flowers in it, and I mean literally. You do see the stems but you can actually see the entire flowers as well, which is really neat considering it was incredibly compressed in the first place!
Overall I think this is just an average earthy puer-erh that has a novelty regarding the honeysuckle. I’ll try this again with 5g and see if there’s any major difference that occurs.
Edit: Still on the 3g but I’m steeping for very long times (about 5 minutes). It now has a super sweet, vanilla taste. I will definitely have to revisit this with 5g and see what’s up
Edit 2: Did another session with 5g. Consistant with the earth-dirt taste throughout, and because of the increase amount of tea, it’s harder to get to the ‘end stage’ steep. Overall, an amazing tea if you like drinking dirt, mediocre one otherwise.
Flavors: Cacao, Dirt, Earth, Floral, Honey, Honeysuckle, Mineral, Smooth, Vanilla