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A nice light and smooth green puerh that comes off as sweet and not harsh. Enjoyable to drink as a free sample but not something that I would want to buy to have around as a regular tea.

Lipton Black Pearl is a very pleasant surprise in good quality, especially since it is coming from the tea company whose name is often used as an adjective to describe poor quality tea. Black Pearl is a surprisingly smooth black tea that does not have any traces of bitterness and one that I would view as being worth buying again. Sure it would be easy to find a better quality black tea but the fact remains for its price range and being a grocery store black tea I think it would be hard to beat.

After being surprised by how good Lipton Black Pearl was I decided to try their pyramid chai tea. Sadly this is not made out of the same high quality tea base as Black Pearl but it is still drinkable at least. The spice level is a bit low and bland when it comes to chai teas but not too bad as to give away the rest of the box. But it is a given that I will not be buying this tea again once it is empty.

A very interesting and summer feeling herbal tea, which reminds me of a mix of fresh spearmint and watermelon. Which I find all the more interesting considering that the tea contains spearmint but not any watermelon so it must be the mix of the citrus and other herbs that when mixed together recreates the flavor of watermelon.

This sample comes off to me as being an unusually sweet and smooth young puerh. Quite honestly if it was not labeled as and brewed as puerh, I would believe it was a green tea if somebody were to hand me a cup of it and not tell me what it was first. Or at least the early infusions after which while it kept up on the same smooth sweet taste it started to turn my stomach in not such a good way so I threw out the rest of it.

Yum a fine example of the older style of ripe puerh that caused me to fall in love with puerh tea. It has a slightly earthy taste to it but a good earthy taste to it that is not musty and has a nice sweetness to it.

Twinings Irish breakfast was my other favorite tea back in college and after starting to drink Twinings Prince of Wales again in the loose version I figured it was worth a try to give Twinings Irish Breakfast a second chance as well in its loose leaf incarnation. My initial impression upon opening the tin was surprised to see that it is a CTC (crush-tear-curl) processed leaf into little tea pellets so I hoped that it would not be too strong considering that the blacks that I’ve drank in the last decade have all been Chinese. I brewed this tea in a mug infuser and I think it turned out fairly strong as the ending result was a strong malty brew that had not crossed the line into bitter when drunk straight. Overall a good tea but one that I know I can not drink too often as Assam and Ceylon blacks in large amounts are not as easy on the stomach as Chinese blacks.

I never thought about how the sweetness of chamomile can blend in with pineapple to create a nice light and sweet herbal brew.

First off I want to state that the only reason why I have this $88 ripe puerh brick is because it was given to me as a gift as it is way beyond what I would be willing to spend on tea myself. So the big question that the answer is finally within our grasp is how much if any ripe puerh drinkers that have a limited tea budget are missing out. I’d start by saying that this ultimate puerh brick also turned out to be the ultimate iron brick as I haven’t encountered a brick that was compressed this hard in ages. This not only made it really hard to break off brewing chunks but was also hard enough to crush a lot of the puerh leves, so if they were top of the line premium whole leaves when they are pressed they are now manly broken leaves. The brew overall reveals that it is a medium light fermentation level ripe puerh, with slight smoothness when being ultra clean in taste. Overall I have to admit that it is a good quality puerh but it is clean to the point of being boring as compared to some of the more earthy but not musty ones that are more interesting in my opinion. Regardless unless you have extra money to burn and would really like the metal tin that it is packaged in I would not recommend spending $88 of your own money for 500 grams of ripe puerh.

Yet another free sample from the large pile of Puerhshop samples that I’m finally getting around to drink. I gaiwan brewed this one with short infusions and I have to agree with the vendor description that this one is easy to drink due to its aroma and taste, as the tea comes off as light and sweet with a medium body and a semi floral taste. Although in terms of storage it is still very green as it is hard to believe that this tea is 5 years old.