Sometimes I can't be bothered with cakes
"Ok, it's not like pu-erh cakes are a terribly inconvenient thing to deal with, but there are just times when I'm completely devoid of energy or I have a headache so bad it makes normal tasks feel like someone is poking my brain with an icepick. When those situations arise, I typically make some matcha so I can at least get my fix without having to do much (I just stir it with a spoon. . . no ceremony), but the problem with that is the fact that I far prefer pu-erh. So what am I to do? Until recently, nothing. Then one day I noticed a pu-erh mao cha for sale and my radar immediately poked up out of one of the icepick holes in my head. Yes! Loose leaf raw pu-erh for me! Not only that, but it's already 10 years old, and given that it's loose, that means it's aged considerably faster than a cake. I couldn't order it quickly enough. It arrived today, and despite the fact that I know I should give it time to acclimate to its new surroundings, I went ahead and had three sessions with this tea throughout the day. The first thing that came to my mind during my first session was "is this Heaven or Las Vegas?" and then I realized that that made no sense outside of the context of the Cocteau Twins album by that name. At that point, I pushed the radar back into the icepick hole, and doing so fixed my brain and I was able to come up with "is this heaven or pu-erh?" Ah ha! Now we're getting somewhere! The truth is, it's both. It's pu-erh, and it's heaven. Heavenly, if I'm going to be grammatically correct, but then that wouldn't have allowed me to make the Heaven or Las Vegas reference, and heaven knows we all could use more of those. But I digress. This is a really good pu-erh that happens to be in loose leaf form. It's quite well-aged, and if I had to pick one word to describe it, I'd have to say "no, I need at least two words, so it's two words or none at all. " That brings me to the words "smooth" and "mellow," both of which describe this tea to a T. See what I did there? Call me butter because I'm on a roll! Anyway, if you like good aged raw pu-erh, I definitely recommend giving this one a try. It is tasty!"
— Sean F. (5/5)
