the_skua steeps

A gracious 12g sample of this tea was included with my recent purchase from Essence of Tea. Yesterday, I responded to my internal yen for vibrant, bright, green fresh pu’er and drank this tea, a perfect match, with its bright, almost neon yellow soup and clean, sweet buttery flavor. Today, in preparation for an upcoming camping trip, I took tea to the porch and heated my kettle on the venerable camp stove, a test of travel worthiness. Fearing a feeble flame, I was surprised when it brought Lin’s kettle to life and produced a snappy boil in a fraction of the time that my electric element does.

Compared with my two sets of notes from the 2010 Mansai, this tea has gained some thickness and depth, coming across less like a fleeting, young green and more like the rich, funky pu’er that it should be. One preparing for the aging process. I like it. Nada excuses a slightly more fractured leaf set due to a long journey through a remote region. This is slightly noticeable in the dry and steeped leaves, as well as in the very first steep, which shows just enough translucency to be detected. However, this in no way detracts from the tea, a quite tippy pu’er, with lots of buds and budsets visible in the exhausted leaves, which makes for a fresh and enlightening session.

REFERENCES

The Half-Dipper – 2011 Essence of Tea “Mansai”

Essence of Tea – 2011 EoT Mansai

Tags: 2011, mansai, pu'er, sheng

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 at 9:02 AM and is filed under pu'er, sheng. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.