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So, I will preface this by saying I have very little experience at all with pu-erh. I’ve mostly just had pu-erh as the base in flavored blends, but have only had a few generic undated shous from various vendors that I only ever steeped western style. I’ve never really dabbled in pu-erh, certainly not the way the real pu-heads do. I have no knowledge of what is considered good, or expensive, or rare, and what isn’t. That’s why I signed up for Liquid Proust’s really awesome pu-erh sampler program this year. I really don’t need any more tea right now, but it is the one tea (followed by whites) that I just haven’t really tried much of and have any opinions on. So thank you so much to Liquid Proust (and the group of volunteers that helped break up cakes and package up the tea)!

This is the first sampler from that lot I’m trying. None of the samplers had any detailed information about the names/places the tea came from (I think that may have been intentional?) so I’m just going to log all of these under the Random Steepings rather than guess on anything and log something under the wrong pu-erh/vendor record. But hey, if someone actually knows for a fact on one of these (LP or co. wants to come forth and identify one) feel free and I’ll gladly move the review to the proper place!)

This one was simply labeled as “Cheap.” Yup. Just that. No year, no sheng/shou differentiation, but I guess whoever got this didn’t pay much for it! Fair enough. I never judge a tea by it’s price anyway. Taste is what’s important!

So, being new to gong fu, and pu-erh, I ended up having to do this one twice. I typically always use the OCTea app website for my tea-to-water ratio measurements, but White2Tea suggested much higher ratios for brewing pu-erh, and everyone loves White2Tea, right?! So they couldn’t be wrong! So I decided to go with their measurements, aaaaaaaaaaaand… yup. Overleafed. SIGH. Why do I always end up with overleafed, bitter, deadly-astringent gong fu on my first try? So frusterating…

So my first go used 3 grams of tea in my 50ml baby gaiwan. I went through 6 steeps before I ditched that session and started over, so what I ended up with was the following:

2.5g / 50ml / 212F / Rinse|5s|10s|15s|20s|30s|40s|45s|50s|60s|65s

The tea aroma was that of wetlands and char and smoke. When I had overleafed, the first steep was pretty much unpalatable for me; it was so heavy in a tobacco smoke flavor, with an extremely bitter sharp vegetal astringency left on my tongue following the sip, that even that tiny cup of tea was daunting. When I restarted the session with less leaf, the smoky note had been tamed back, and more of the wet earth flavor was present, and the tea only carried a mild astringency. By the third steep the aroma started to smell a little spicier, reminding me of the lingering scent of incense in the air, especially with the subtle smokiness present, and I noticed a slight spice note in the finish. By the fourth steep the tea was starting to mellow out for me, the smokiness started to taste less like that awful tobacco note that I hate and more camp fire or BBQ-like, the wet earth flavor started to become more of a rainy petrichor note, and the astrigency following the sip was noticably fading. The smoke and astrigency continued to fade while the wet earth/petrichor continued to build in subsequent steeps. Around the seventh steep I started to taste vegetal notes like cucumber, celery, and watercress.

It took later steeps to push flavors out of this that I personally preferred; the reason why I knew I needed to ditch my first attempt is it just kept getting worse and worse (it was getting ashy, tart, and sour, rather than improving at all). I felt a bit sluggish/tea full by the time the tea picked up for me, and didn’t really want to keep up with the session by the time I was starting to finally like where things were headed. I can also see myself not really looking forward to having to get through the unpleasant smoky early steeps in the future to get to more mellow vegetal/petrichor flavored steeps later. So all in all, I don’t think the mysterious “Cheap” pu-erh is my cuppa.

I am definitely glad I started here though, since it allowed me to experiment with leaf amounts in the baby gaiwan and find my sweet spot with a pu-erh I’m not very impressed with rather than potentially waste leaf from a sampler that might be freaking amazing. I’m on a big learning curve here!