Puerh Shop

Delicious, beautiful and affordable, this sheng pu’er is sweet, savory, and complex in flavors as it transforms with each steep. The tea broth is very pure tasting, fruity, spicy and smooth. I’m inclined to say it has an oolong-like quality to it.

I’m willing to wait for teas that need to age a few years, but this one is perfect now. It may be one of the best teas I’ve ordered from Puerh Shop yet. See flavor profile below. I recommend using more leaf to experience the full potential of its flavor profile.

Very strong stuff. Pleasant and pungent honey-like fragrance, deep complex flavors, with notes of citrus and a long sweet finish. Fine for current consumption if you have a strong stomach like me (I prefer strong flavors in general). Highly recommended for those who can wait 5 years for that cha qi to mellow out into something amazing.

Recommendation: Don’t be like me and store it next to a box of bar soap. Though it had no effect on the brewed tea, I now have to air out that bar soap smell. Must store in a place with no odors!

5 steeps: rinse, rinse, 5s, 10s, 20s, 30s, 60s, 4min

5s: Generic puerh taste

10s: Generic puerh taste

20s: Puerh that’s beginning to lose it’s flavor on the 3rd steep

30s: Generic puerh taste (once again on the weak side)

1 min: Generic puerh taste

4 min: Surprisingly weak after 4 minutes

Woooow I am floored. The leaves on this were large and flat and I wasn’t sure how much to add so I decided to put in extra just in case. I ended up filling the whole 90ml gaiwan by accident. Wasn’t expecting the leaves to expand that much I guess. Anyway, since the gaiwan was full, I was expecting to end up with tea that was very strong, dark, and maybe a bit bitter. What did I end up with? Just barely decent tea. I kept thinking to myself “what does it say about a ripe puerh if the gaiwan is full and it still barely gives any flavor?” I’lllll tell you what it means. I means I’m a sucker. This was one of 4 teas that I bought as my first puerh purchase. Puerhshop was recommended and I didn’t have much to spend so I selected 4 teas from their clearance section. I thought “Clearance” meant “marked down” teas, not “crap” teas. Literally all four teas (3 tous, and this brick) turned up extremely bland. sigh Lessons learned:

1. You get what you pay for
2. Sample, sample, sample

This is one of the top ripes I’ve tasted from Puershop. It started off a little bitter, but that faded and it became quite smooth. It has a velvety thick texture and very good flavor. Moderately earthy and dark, but not too much. Kind of safe tasting and a pleasure to drink. As is typical with ripes from Puershop, it is very reasonably priced.

Now this is a really interesting tea. I am working through a set of samples from Puerhshop.com and I’ve been steeping through them. Some I have to go back to, but this one really turned my head.

I took the first sip and thought I must be drinking an oolong! This has a much different flavor profile from many young shengs. Instead of apricots and smoke, I got more floral notes. It didn’t just remind me of an oolong, it quite literally tastes oolongy.

If cakes of this remain when I order again, I’ll probably grab one. Good stuff!

A pretty unique tasting tea for me compared to my other shus. It tastes very much like raw pastry—more so when blended with butter/coconut oil. On its own it also has a bit of a rubber taste (and not entirely in a bad way). Definitely creamy.

This is an excellent ripe puerh. And despite it being a “2014” tea is is aged well. It is actually year 2000 tea that was pressed into a brick in 2014 so it is well aged. It has not developed any odd or off flavors in that time. It is sweet with no taste of camphor. There is virtually no fermentation flavor left at all, just as you would expect. It is not expensive for an aged ancient tree brick at only $50 a brick too. There were some complex notes of chocolate and the like in this tea as well as a few others I couldn’t quite place. It held up well through eight steeps and would have taken more but I am at my caffeine limit for the night. It was not very weak even in the eighth steep and I think it would have taken at least twelve or more total. That being said it was not quite as tasty as the 2008 Song of Chi Tse but it was close, relatively close.

I steeped this eight times in a 130ml Yixing teapot with 6g leaf and boiling water. I steeped it for 15 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec, 1 min, 2 min, and 5 min. It held a nice strength even in steep number eight but was of course not real strong. There was only a bare touch of fermentation flavor in steeps two and three.

Thanks to Cookies for letting me try this.

I tried make this shorter with my Western mug. Rinse, and brewed for about 45 seconds. My stove clock is digital. It has an interesting scent. It’s both earthy and ricey. Like if I had mushroom and rice soup. That comes out in the flavour too.

I thought this tea was kind of boring tasting. Then I realized I was brewing in 5s increments instead of 10s. Whoops!

Another awesome puerh from boychik! I’m so grateful to have had all these really excellent samples to try :)

My guts are still recovering from my crazy weekend so shu is in order again today. This one started out very earthy/woodsy. Later steeps became a lot sweeter and almost fruity with some earthiness left over in the background. I love experiencing how these develop into different flavors as they go.

Also I know lots of people on Steepster have been saying that shu really helps with belly issues, but yesterday was the first time I’d experienced it first hand! I’ve been drinking shu for a while but generally my tummy is pretty tough so I’ve never tried to use it sort of medicinally like that. It really seems to help though! No more rumbly guts :)

When I first got this tea a few years ago it had a strange mix of being a bit mellow like a ripe puerh but with a harsh edge like young green puerh which was too much for me to be able to handle. Now around 6 years later those harsh edges have left and the resulting tea resemble the samples of aged dry storage puerh but in a lot less time. So it looks like the “half cooked puerh” theory worked out as the tea was able to age much faster than green puerh. Worthwhile to pick up a cake of if you get the chance but if you prefer wet storage puerh like I do chances are you will not be drinking too much of it over the long term either.

I have been sicker than a dog all day, and I honestly wasn’t up to par for multiple short steepings in my lil gaiwan…So, I opted instead, for 1-45second steeping, and 2-1 minute steepings in a glass pot. Mysterious, earthy and lightly smokey.
I am sure this has many more infusions left and while this particular puerh is not especially complex, it feels to me like classic puerh without any bitterness or other distractions~ straightforward.
This is good

This is one of those times where I wish I had the ability to accurately describe the flavor of a tea. At first this tea has a very woody taste to it. At steeping four the taste goes from woody to, for lack of a better word, woodsy. At steeping six the taste goes from woodsy to earthy. The neat thing is, none of the changes were gradual, they happened all at once. Besides the above flavors, there is some very nice and complex undertones in the background. I really like this tea!!!

I was lucky to receive some of this tea as a sample and enjoyed it so much I had to buy some! The tea broth is lovely and thick with a tasty malt overtone and low astringency in early infusions that is almost sweet. There is an aroma and flavor of cocoa, though not nearly as strong as in the Yi Mei Ren. There is also an aroma and flavor that reminds me of cassia, but it was faint in the first steeping. The cassia aroma and flavor intensifies with later, longer infusions, but doesn’t become at all overpowering. The malty taste recedes some after the 3rd or 4th infusion. This tea doesn’t lose flavor after several steepings and the tea broth continues to be a dark, clear red-brown. Later infusions become slightly astringent due to the length of infusion needed, but not unpleasantly so.

The caffeine content of this tea is moderate enough that I can actually enjoy many infusions and not get the headache caused by too much caffeine that I get with most other teas, which makes it a great every day tea. I hope Puerh Shop continues to carry this tea, because I really enjoy it!

This was a one brew sized sample so I’m not sure if it was my brewing or not but this one is a bit different. It has an unusually strong taste for a shu that is more woody instead of earthy which I would expect for what the vendor describes as being wet stores. Too bad the sample was a one brew size as it is one of those teas that it takes a second time or so to try before knowing if you want to buy a whole cake or not.

Wow this one is surprisingly smooth and mellow which is really impressive as smoother puerh seems to be harder to find. I would not call this an amazing tea but more of a good everyday tea.

I must say, this tea is one of the finest young puerhs I’ve had. It is truly impeccable. The wet leaves are a treat to my eyes. They are, in general, intact with beautiful little white hairs and hardy veins – usually an indication of arbor material. Pleasure to watch these leaves perform a wonderful Baroque dance to Bachs concerto #5. The consequence of such a beautiful performance by these little leaves is a brilliant golden soup – a soup that has various dimensions, thick yet silky smooth body and a slight bitterness that transforms into a heavenly sweetness. The Hui Gan is practically instantaneous with a half life of a good five minutes. In a nutshell, this is a tea with a lot going on. A fine tea.

Parameters : 4.5g to 100 mL in a Porcelain Gaiwan

I brewed a heaping teaspoon in a mug infuser of this tea. It comes off to me as a typical and decent Yunnan Black tea, not bitter but a bit of a peppery taste to it that in my experience is unique to Yunnan black tea.

This tea definitely holds up well to multiple steepings. While I did detect a slight note of that “fishy” smell, it had a very pleasant numbing sensation on the back of my throat. This almost had a “bite” to it. Not exactly what I would call wonderful, but a nice change of pace overall.

The folks at Puer Shop weren’t kidding when they said this green had a pleasant smell. It has a wonderfully sweet scent after steeping, as well. It is smooth and vegetal, and a great everyday tea. And such a value!

Just tried this one. Very delicate, not much bitterness, but a flavorful finish. Delicious.