White 2 Tea

While I have enjoyed some puer’s lately, its been a while since I’ve written a review of a new one. Today is so cold outside, I wanted something thick and warm to heat me back up. What better than trying a new a shou I’ve been resting?

6 g leaf
5-6 oz water
boiling
2 rinses at 10 sec each

The piece I received is a dark walnut brown, the leaves compact but fairly easy to split a piece off of. I only created a small amount of dust, happily. The dry leaf is brittle and smells sweet, dark, a rich earthy aroma that calls to mind a bed of dry forest leaves and mushrooms.

After two short rinses, the compact chunk has fallen apart into thin, rectangular leaves — not quite fully open yet. The liquid itself is a rich color reminiscent of coffee, although far more pleasant in my opinion. It smells similar to the dry leaf, whereas the wet leaf calls to mind the same scents but heavier on the mushroom side and more wet.

1st cup, 10 sec: Mmm exactly the heaviness and warmth I needed. Throughout the sip, it is smooth and rich, the heaviness starting in the middle and bearing in on the end of the sip. I don’t taste any bitterness, not even a trace; instead its sweeter, the aromas brought to life as taste, although more on a woodsy side than a dirt/leaf side.

Had this tea again and was pleasantly reminded how good it is. This tea is very simple, dirt cheap and totally unfancy. Extremely reliable too: you can be absolutely lackadaisical about the water temperature, amount or steeping times: the result is always more or less the same. The taste is always simple, comforting and relaxing.

It is very much like interacting with an old man who is simple, at piece with himself, cordial, and full of unprepossessing life wisdom. I want to be like this tea when I am old.

It is a very calming and forgiving tea. True to its name, the taste changes little based on the time of steeping. One of the other reviewers said that its main quality is smoothness and I agree. Not much in terms of the flavor, but there is that soothing taste of earth, rotten wood and mushrooms with some sweetness in the background. Unlike some forgettable puers I had before (Upton and Teavivre, I am looking at you!) this one has a definite depth and “volume”.

All in all, it is a very relaxing and forgiving tea that is not going to disappoint a lot of people. And it comes in convenient balls for traveling and drinking on the go. A keeper.

I find this to be a decent simple tea. Nothing in your face about it. Has plenty of light floral hints and the slightest bit of sweetness during the swallow and dry mouth after. There doesn’t seem to be any shifts in flavor worth noting over the steeps (on my 8th as I write this). I recommend pairing it with your favorite fruit to snack on.

Hard to say if I can recommend this or not. There is just more interesting things to taste out there for me. So I’ll leave it at neutral.

Pulled a session’s worth of this maocha out of the Puerh TTB when it came through last. I was not part of the W2T Teaclub when this one came. The dry leaf had a soft and green sweetness to the aroma – after a rinse, it smelled more like wet corn and alfalfa, with a sour undercurrent.

The flavor of this one was beany and vegetal – very sweet. There is a relatively small amount of bitterness, mostly in the front of the palate. As the session went on, the flavor turned extremely floral, and some astringency built up as well. When I spilled some of the liquid on my tea tray, I was surprised by how sticky it was – almost more like juice. Very sugary young tea.

This is my first tasting note on steepster – low stakes, since this tea is now sold out at White2Tea, and, in any case, had more than 30 pretty well-considered notes already. I drank through a cake of this very pleasant tea, and, though calling it easy to drink sounds condescending, it is (or, it was). There’s something worth paying attention to there – and some good feeling, in my experience – but you have to push it absurdly hard to get even a hint of bitterness, which means that you can brew it badly (or, say, absent-mindedly; interrupted by, part of, rather than in retreat from, the rest of life – of course, one drinks tea both ways) with good results. Again, in my experience, it tends to fade really quickly around steep 7 or 8 (sometimes earlier) – not necessarily a weakness, since not all tea sessions need to stretch.

009/365

I picked this one up with my first White2Tea order, partly as a novelty as I’ve not tried a compressed pu’erh before. It’s a pretty young sheng, with greenish leaves and a lightly perfumed fragrance. From what I can gather, it’s supposed to be a convenient way to brew pu’erh while travelling, and I imagine it could be (depending how quickly the ball unfurls…) It’s still pretty compact after the first steep (around 1.5m, western-style.)

The first steep is sweet and mostly smooth, with a hint of floral. It’s a little grassy, with just a touch of astringency towards the end of the sip. It’s not remarkably distinctive or flavourful, at this point.

Second steep for 1 minute. The ball disintegrates completely at this point, and so I’m not entirely sold on the suggestion that this is supposed to be much more convenient than a cake. I wouldn’t find it so, but I don’t typically attempt to lug around a whole cake anyway. I’d take a fragment on holiday, in a ziplock bag, and use an infuser – but I’m using an infuser for this also, so it would make little difference to my personal set-up.

The flavour this time is more distinctively “sheng” – earthy/grassy, with an edge of bitterness. It’s still mostly smooth, more so as it cools, but there’s just that bit of “bite”. This one reminds me most of Teavivre’s Fengqing Raw Cake from 2006, which I seem to possess in quantity but don’t particularly enjoy. It’s pretty hard to describe, but it has the same brassy, almost-metallic background flavour.

Third steep for 50 seconds. The flavour, at this point, seems fairly fixed. Once again, it’s earthy/grassy with a background brassiness, and just a touch of bitterness. It’s still very easy to drink, although it’s not particularly distinctive. There are definitely more exciting sheng pu’erhs out there – this one strikes me as very routine.

I might try one more steep after lunch before I call it a day with this one.

I made it gongfu style, but I didn’t break the squares or did one full square. I treated it like I would with any cake. I find it a very good tea with some stevia sweetness, some wood notes and a linen texture at the first steps. Throughout steps 4 to 7 it started to feel it more honey like and the wood taste got more subtle.

7 g leaf
200 F water
small gaiwan, 6-8 oz

I did not rinse the leaves, since they were fairly loose. I think I should have, though. The first steep is weak in color and taste; the color is a light yellowy brown after a 15-20 sec steep. The dry leaves smelled sweet but musty, a bit like tobacco. The liquid smelled less musty, but something reminiscent of tobacco and dust still held. Perhaps a second steeping will bring out a stronger flavor.

Second steep about the same length. Color is a bit darker, more like honey now. The initial sweetness is gone, replaced by a touch of astringency on the end of the sip. No particular flavors stand out to me, although I am holding out for future steeps.

Gongfu Sipdown (648)!

Yes, Gongfu – not Grandpa. It’s just what I was in the mood for.

Recently picked up a few of the 2019 version of this tea during W2T’s latest product drop, so I figured I’d finish this tea off to make some room in my stash for more tea while also giving myself a bit of a refresher on the tea and what I might expect to see from the 2019 version…

I drank it along with some pretty overripe Quebec strawberries, and the result was a highly sloppy but deeply delicious tea session – very thick and dense infusions, with a sweet and kind of molasses-y earthy note. Lots of dark, wet wood and hints of dark fruits as well, which were exaggerated slightly from my fruit pairing. Really good!

Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/BzluF3VAepQ/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgu46uI9XU

Sipdown (372)!

It’s a very lazy kind of day, so I figured what better than just milking a tea for all it’s worth and doing a big pot of something Grandpa style. What could be more perfect for this than White2Tea’s 2017 Grandpa (named for this style of drinking it!), which I recieved as a free sample in one of my orders this year!

I’ve been sipping on this one for close to three hours now; in total I’ve probably refilled my pot with hot water three times now, though definitely broken up into many, many different top ups and not just three ‘blanket’ sort of refills.

Overall, this was been incredibly smooth, pleasant and flavourful! It’s got a lot of really sweet elements to it overall too! Obviously, it’s got quite an earthy element but also I’m getting different natural notes too; wet wood, and truffles mostly. The undertones are really fruity but in a deep, rich sort of way evocative of strewed fruits, dates/figs, and really deep stonefruit notes like plum and black cherry. I’d say the date notes in particular have been particularly strong as I sip on this.

Part of the sweetness also comes from a more confectionery/bakery rooted place: a mix of dark chocolate/baker’s chocolate, barley and oats. I’m surprised a little bit by the presence of an oat-like flavour but I’m not turned off by it either. I did notice it much later into this ‘session’, if you can call it that. At this point in the session a lot of the initial wave of robust earthy elements had more mellowed out and the soup produced from the tea was getting thinner/weaker.

Overall, I don’t know that this is a particularly unique or standout tea, but it’s incredibly smooth and I appreciate the sweetness in it a lot too. It works really well for the Grandpa style of brewing, and I think it would be a good intro into Shou as well because it’s so smooth/sweet with those fruity elements.

10/10 – would definitely recommend.

Here’s Hoping Teabox – Round Seven- Tea #20
Oh how I’d love to do some walking in the woods. The name of this sheng is lovely and the flavor is lovely too. Full of sweetness! But that is because I keep it tame with the 30 second steeps. Maybe wispy hints of the lightest fruit flavor, like apricot or something similar. A good one!

This tea came unlabeled in my order, making for an interesting adventure and practice in identifying an unknown.

Compressed into a nearly perfect sphere I was almost certain it was a blooming tea at first. Can you make a blooming pu’erh? Doesn’t smell green, not very dark and doesn’t smell much like a black either, is it a flowering oolong? A search for “bloom” and “flower” on the white2tea site reveals no results. Upon closer inspection I decide it’s not a blooming tea at all but rather a tightly and neatly compressed cake, almost definitely a pu’erh then. I’m not very pu’erh experienced… is this a raw sample? Or just young? I guess I don’t actually know the difference but I’m pretty certain it’s not very aged in any case. I decide it’s probably a raw.

Breaking it up confirms that it’s a compressed tea rather than a flowering ball. It has a very light scent, maybe a little bit bready, a little vegetal. Brewed in a gaiwan at 200F for 10 seconds reveals a much lighter liqueur than anticipated! Definitely not an aged tea! Brews up gently floral and sweet with an underlying vegetal flavor that quickly strengthens with more steepings. By the third steep it’s already too bitter for me.

Sorting through the raw pu’erh section on the white2tea site I finally find my tea! Turns out it’s not necessary to break it up, I’m sure that contributed to the bitterness. It is certainly not to my taste, being fairly bitter, but I had a surprisingly fun time unraveling the mystery as well as trying out a new kind of tea.

A gentle giant. That’s how I’d describe this tea.

It’s because when you see it for the first time it looks so big and imposing: for 250 grams this tuo is huge; I wasn’t even sure if I got the right tea when I opened the box it came in. And then, the overwhelming minty and woody smell. You’d think man, this bad boy will give a rough time even to the experienced drinker.

But then you drink it. And realize how mellow and kind it is. It’s a tea you’d constantly want to push in order to get an even brew and rise the brew time exponentially. If you challenge this tea, it’s a fight you’ll always win. Definitely a tea for people who want to try puerh but feel overwhelmed by it. Not to be underestimated though as the mid steeps have some potency. These infusions are characterized by thick, whiskey, dark wood and even coffee-like notes. It’s just that it gives up a little too fast, leaving you with a sweet leathery taste.

After having several sessions with it it’d say this tea could use just a few more years of aging in order to become great rather than good. On the surface the tuo is very easy to break loose but the more you get to the center the harder it gets and the tea seems “younger” overall. The teenager on the wrapper is very fitting for the tea: intimidating, temperamental but not that scary once you get to know it. A hothead, just like I’d imagine Kunio-kun would be in real life.

For all intends and purposes, this tea should be called Very Often.

Recommended soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WC4bzUhDwQ&list=PL068985D7A912F97A

Pretty Girls is a pretty solid puer that starts off with a dirty mushroom taste. With each infusion, it gets more sweet, mineral, and chocolate in flavor. I got 13 infusions, though I felt I should have leafed a bit more.

If you have a silver tea cup, Pretty Girls comes out really nice as it cuts through the early mushroom infusions.

Full review on Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/2015-pretty-girls-shou-puer-white2tea/

A pretty nice black tea, reminiscent of a good quality Keemun mixed with Little Red, at least to my untrained Hong palate. Comes in a bag labeled “anburn black tea” for extra confusion. The caffeine hit Dos Dogs mentioned is real, at least at my dosage.

This is the first white2tea production I’ve ever tried. Before we proceed, it should be noted that I may be an extremely biased reviewer and you may want to disregard everything I have to say about this tea or any other white2tea production. To explain my weird relationship with this company, I may not know very much about them apart from that Paul who runs it started out as a blogger and that their teas are extremely well regarded by many people in the Western online tea community based on information I’ve passively accumulated browsing the web, but browsing their site, looking at the names and artwork for their cakes and the vague product descriptions paired with often frankly quite ridiculous prices, I can’t help but get a sense of a pretentious hipster label. Yes, there are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around by vendors when it comes to pu’er and ultimately none of those things matter because what it all boils down to is whether you like the tea or not. But informed tea drinkers do want to know certain things about the material they are buying, especially if they are paying a lot of money for it. People want to be able to try to gauge how the tea might age and they’d also like to be able to compare the cost of the tea to the base cost of similar material. And if they like the tea they’d like to possibly seek out similar material from the same region and so forth to see if it shares any similar characteristics. I can agree with white2tea’s philosophy of letting the tea speak for itself on paper, but they lost any right to make such statements after releasing a product like The Treachery of Story Telling that costs an absolutely absurd amount of money, features no product description whatsoever and they sell no samples for.

Another reason why I’ve been avoiding their products up till now is because I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to tea and while I appreciate people like Glen from Crimson Lotus Tea who create blends and consider tea their art, I don’t mind experiencing the flaws and imperfections of single origin material, and what white2tea offers is exactly that, blends. To use an analogy, while I love music but don’t listen to that much classical apart from modern classical and minimalism in particular, when I do listen to classical, what I very much want to hear is music recorded live in the studio or live in concert, none of that modern over-producer, over-edited crap that is all too prevalent nowadays. You’d be shocked if you saw what the Pro Tools sessions for a modern digital classical recording look like and how many edits there can be in just a single track. To continue the music analogy, those audiophiles who understand the breathtaking beauty that well recorded analog recordings can offer know that “hiss is your friend”. A little tape hiss never killed anyone, and as long as we are talking about hiss that’s within reasonable bounds, making hiss part of the discussion about sound quality is just nonsense. In tea, I think one could liken noise to bitterness and astringency perhaps to digital clipping. As long as bitterness is within tolerable levers (too much of anything in life is a bad thing), it is not an issue and can enhance the experience and even be very pleasurable and desired. Astringency, like digital clipping, is generally not desired or found pleasant. Some amount of astringency can be okay and digital clipping can be used creatively to create a certain sound, but when digital clipping is introduced as a product of trying to simply make the record sound louder, most people find it unpleasant and undesirable. Of course from a young sheng a certain amount of bitterness or astringency is expected and generally desired to give assurance of its ageing potential. Anyway, to get off this tangent, while I acknowledge that blended teas may be better than the sum of their parts, I, while a perfectionist of sorts when it comes to certain things, don’t mind imperfections, in fact I welcome them. Imperfection is in itself perfection. There’s nothing more boring than perfection. It is the pursuit of perfection that drives and motivates us, but I don’t think we’d actually ever want to attain it.

By now you have hopefully gathered that my extreme distaste for white2tea without ever having tasted any of their teas is part rational, part irrational, or perhaps just purely irrational. In any event, up till now I’ve avoided handing over any of my money to white2tea even though I’ve been curious to try out their products, but in the end I ended up ordering a couple of samples from different price points. Originally I’d planned to taste these teas blind and have a person pick teas for me at random from various pu’er samples from different vendors to remove any biases I may have, but right now I’m doing a small experiment to see how much (or little) letting a pu’er sample chill out and hydrate in your pumidor impacts the tea. I may still do the blind test for the other samples, unless I deem it too much hassle, we’ll see. Regardless, this tea was drunk the same day I received the sample, so that along with my potential bias may affect my findings. I will be having another session once the sample has spent some time in my pumidor and if the results differ notably from these initial ones I will do a follow-up review.

To finally get to my actual tasting notes, I brewed around 8.4g of this tea in a 140ml gaiwan. The sample I received was prepared exemplarily, consisting of really nice looking large intact leaves and a few larger chunks. No dust, no debris. I don’t know how they detached so many so nice looking leaves from the cake. I got hardly any smell trying to sniff the sample bag, but once in the preheated gaiwan my nose was greeted by the scent of… cotton candy? Maybe. I’ve seen the words cotton candy floating around in the list of flavor notes for some young pu’er teas recently and that was actually on my mind right when I sniffed the leaves so I may have been influenced by that. I haven’t actually had cotton candy in a decade or more so I can’t really say I can recall off the top of my head how it smells like. After a 10s rinse the smell of the wet leaves was green, darkish and buttery. Pretty typical for some young raws. Since this was such an expensive tea, I did drink the rinse. It was extremely light, but had a nice body, which is not that unusual for a lot of teas if you rinse them with a relatively small amount of water like I did. The taste that I could discern was sweet, buttery, with a finish that was… maybe fruity would be a more conventional way of putting it, but I’d describe it as kind of perfumey. I don’t want to use the word artificial, but it had this “unnatural” quality to it, like it consisted of an impossible combination of flavor notes. The finish turned mineral after some time passed. After it died down, there wasn’t really any kind of lasting aftertaste. I can’t really say if the rinse had any effect on me, but if it did, I’d probably describe it as calming/grounding.

I carried on with the brewing after giving the leaves a 10 minute rest. I did a total of nine more steeps, for 7s, 7s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 30s, 45s, 75s and 2 min. The first proper infusion had a nice milky/juicy body. It was still very, very light in flavor. Despite my extreme preconceived biases, I actually secretly had really, really high expectations for this tea and I expected it to blow me away. This was evident when I thought I could feel cha qi from just the first sip, before I’d even swallowed the tea. I assume all of that was just pure placebo. After this I never felt any cha qi over the course of the entire sessions (spoiler). The flavor wasn’t exactly like water, but water is the closest thing I can think of to describe it. I couldn’t really discern if it was mineraly, perfumey, astringent or what. The finish was sort of unpleasant, but in like the mildest way possible. Again I happened to pay attention to how the finish dies rather quickly and leaves your palate relatively clean without any sort of real aftertaste. At this point I drew the conclusion this is probably a tea you don’t drink for taste. I was basing this on expectancy of plenty of body and cha qi. Things didn’t quite turn out that way (spoilers).

After doing the second steep, I noticed a leaf with clear black spots/burn marks on it in the gaiwan. This wasn’t anything like the scorching you can see in tea leaves that have been hit with boiling water over and over again over the course of a session in the form of mild discoloration, etc. I can only assume the black marks are from the wok. I’ve heard you can get burnt leaves if the frying isn’t done correctly, but I’ve never actually seen it myself before. If the spots are indeed from the pan frying, I find that a very big no-no for material that otherwise looks quite nice and is being asked such a steep price for.

The second infusion itself lacked any real flavor initially. The first thing it reminded me of was fat-free milk, but the milkiness went away with time. There was an underlying young greenness and astringency, but both were very faint. There was also a mineral character. The body was lighter now, which even though the tea was still probably thicker than some other teas was kinda disappointing after the last “two” steeps. Even though the flavors weren’t strong, I wasn’t enjoying the tea very much. The very last gulp had a very rocky taste to it, literally like licking a rock. That was a first one for me. Although the tea left some stuff residing in the mouth, there was once again no real lasting aftertaste to the tea.

After the third steeping the leaves were finally starting to open up. I noted that the material does look rather good, healthy is the word I would use. Sadly the body of the soup was even lighter now, not too far from water. D: The flavor wasn’t too far off from water either. It wasn’t really super mineraly anymore. There was a very, very lightly green aspect to it, but overall the tea stayed impressively neutral in flavor, like it was trying its damnedest to be Switzerland and not taste like anything, not even water. I could see someone calling the flavor a super, super, super light white chocolate if you ignore the slight green tinge. The taste was soft and the astringency was kept surprisingly well under control for now. Since it had become a habit by this point, I noted that there was once again no aftertaste, the taste just dies down like soft drinks for example are designed to do to keep you drinking them. This tea was no battery acid like some young shengs can be for your stomach, but I noted it starting to affect me somewhat, although I hadn’t actually eaten anything so it could have also been my growing hunger.

As I continued steeping, I noted that the leaves look kinda weird color-wise. I’m not sure if it has to do with the tea being blended. The appearance reminds me of the dry leaf for Oriental Beauty. The fourth steep hit me with a ton of astringency. It was almost more like a flavor than the typical physical sensation you get. The mouth-pucker was actually kept relatively minimal. The tea had perhaps a mineral finish. Albeit I didn’t particularly enjoy it, the tea wasn’t as unpleasant as you might think. Over time the tea became dominantly more mineraly – unfortunately the bad kind – replacing the astringent taste. Once again no aftertaste.

The leaves started looking just about fully open after the fifth steep. I will say again that if nothing else the leaves do look rather pretty, even if different than what I’m used to. The tea was still extremely light. Thankfully it did not have the same astringency from before. It had perhaps a very, very light front vegetal sweetness to it. It tasted greener, more vegetal than before, even though the flavors were still faint. The greenness started to resemble for the first time the typical bad young sheng greenness I don’t enjoy, although it was still lighter than in other teas. At the end of my cup, I could feel some slight pucker on my tongue.

I was scared to lengthen the steeping time for the sixth infusion, but what really surprised me was to find that the flavors had tapered off severely despite me doing that. The tea was mineraly again. You really had to look for the vegetal character to maybe catch a glimpse of it if you were lucky. The tea was starting to taste a bit nasty to me, although it was soft nasty. There was more pucker now after finishing my cup like I’d expected, but the sensation wasn’t as uncomfortable as with other teas.

I didn’t really want to keep drinking the tea, but I went on anyway. Somewhat ironically, I think the flavors were genuinely really strong and bold for the first time in the seventh steep. I’m not sure if the taste was a weird mixture between mineral and vegetal or what. I don’t know why, but I found the taste less enjoyable than the “too young, too green” taste I’ve encountered in so many other young raws. The following eighth steep was equally bold in flavor, flavor that was that epitome young sheng green astringent bad green tea taste. It did have a softer edge to it than other teas though.

In an effort to try to do as many steeps as I could, I did do one final ninth infusion and I was punished gravely for it. The tea was really damn nasty from the moment it hit my tongue and I for the life of me could not finish my cup. It’s not typical for me to toss a cup even if it’s not very enjoyable, but this one I simply could not bring myself to down. Even the half a cup that I did soldier down caused unpleasant prickling on my tongue. The tea was way beyond just simple bad green tea.

And there you have it. A bit of a longer review. If you made it through the whole thing, rant and all, then well done. You’re a real sport. Needless to say I did not enjoy this tea. I’m not sure if saying this is the worst raw pu’er I’ve ever had is going too far, but it’s not far off. One could say that it started off kind of decent, but I think it would be a bit too generous to say that it was genuinely interesting even at that point. As I was drinking this tea I started to ponder what my criteria are for rating a tea “Not Recommended” as that has not come up before, and whether it would be too extreme of me to rate this tea as such. After giving it some thought after the session though, taking into consideration that this is one of the most negative experiences I’ve had with pu’er and pairing that with the extremely high price point of this tea, I think there is actually nothing extreme about my conclusion. I half expect some pu’er connoisseurs to say I don’t know how to appreciate this tea, which could of course very well be true, but I fail to see how that would be the case when I found this tea mainly quite unpleasant to drink after the first few steeps. I got no qi, the body and texture were ultimately disappointing after the initial steeps, and the longevity was really disappointing as well, especially relative to the strength of flavor and the price of the material (bringing up the price again).

Now, it could very well be that this tea will improve dramatically in my pumidor as it hydrates a little. As stated earlier, I am going to session this tea again in a few weeks’ time and if the results differ dramatically I will report on that. It is possible that I will try to do the blind tasting arrangement for the other white2tea samples I have, but as fun as that would be, if I deem it too much hassle I may just end up reviewing the teas regularly. I’d like to be able to trust my own ability to ultimately review teas fairly.

Well, I am sure plenty of people would really enjoy this tea, but it’s not really my type. I’ll admit, it’s very nice to have a mushroom taste in a puer, and to have an amazingly smooth tea. But what I really love most of all is some amount of flavor, which a majority of ripe provide. Might be because I’m a bit sick, but this tea really didn’t provide on that account. It is almost as if I am drinking a thick water, diluted with tea. I drank it for 5 steepings, but after the 5th I really wasn’t enjoying myself so I called it quits.

Although I am sure most of you out there would really enjoy this, and this is totally your thing, but for me, I really enjoy a good flavor more than I do a good texture.

Haha, sorry for the bad review, I will be posting another tommorow.

I think I will take a bit of a break from the puer, as this time of year I really want a good oolong. Expect lots of puer reviews when it gets cold though!