This one was an easy swap pick – I wanted to try some more flavoured pu’erhs, and this had that good old, bad old pu’erh smell. I didn’t get much orange then and still don’t, but it’s clear that some kind of flavouring is at play, rather than this being a straight-up pu’erh.
It brews up murky and a little filmy, with surprisingly little presence in the cup. While I understand why people frequently seem to characterize pu’erh as fishy (that is, smelling of fish, rather than being shifty and unreliable) I don’t really agree, but I guess it’s more fit for polite conversation than my own scent analogy that ties in with summers spent next door to a big farm in the country. While there are certainly hints of that organic, earthy, sun-warmed farm animal urine scent, this, overall, mostly comes off a little flat, with no traces of orange.
This might just be one of those flavourings that fail to register for me, but I enjoyed trying it out – if nothing else, it has inspired me to keep looking for flavoured pu’erhs to enjoy.
[Sample from the EU Travelling Box, autumn 2013.]
Boiling, 4 min