Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Pu-erh & White Tea Blend
Where to Buy: The Whistling Kettle
Tea Description:
This Pu-Erh is flavorful, mild and with an addition of silver needles, makes a great iced tea. Dr. Oz has recommended this tea as a way to help lose weight. Pu-Erh also help reduce cholesterol and great after a meal to help “cut the grease”. Pu-Erh has probiotic properties no other type of tea has.
Ingredients: Puerh, Silver Needle White Tea, Orange blossoms, cornflowers, raspberry bits and flavoring.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
I love pu-erh, puerh, pu’er, however you want to spell it. Adore it. This has to be one of the deepest, darkest, richest looking brews I have ever seen in a puerh!
The aroma of this steeped tea is lovely, earthy, but more so fruity. It smells like a beginners puerh. Sweet, tart, tangy, yet with the undertones of a puerh’s earthiness just to ease a new puerh drinker into that world. I absolutely pick up the citrus in the aroma.
The sip is surprisingly creamy! I like this! The raspberry is present but not too tart which is nice. Its sweet but not cloying whatsoever. There is almost a vanilla flavor peeking through which must be more due to the puerh used rather than flavors or ingredients added as I see nothing to indicate vanilla in the description.
The only downside of purchasing puerh tea in this form is not really knowing what type of puerh base is being used but that is okay because I don’t see this as a puerh meant for puerh connoisseurs although certainly good enough to be enjoyed by one! Granted it is not a straight tea, so some may snub the idea of drinking a puerh blend but I tend to enjoy the best of both worlds as long as a tea is good it need not be unadulterated!
I am truly enjoying this tea and it is distinctively puerh yet lends a lovely fruity and creamy note that those who would normally not learn toward a puerh would enjoy. Again an excellent beginners puerh yet good enough for puerh enthusiasts to love as well.
As the tea cools more of the raspberry notes pop out, the citrus takes the background and the puerh gives a slight drying effect in the throat. There are woodsy notes, oak moss, peat, and a slight note of mushroom. The nice thing about this blend is that it allows the notes of the puerh to come through, is not muted by the other ingredients.
I am not sure how the silver needle white tea lends a hand in here unless it is added for health benefits or a boost to the creamy texture in some way but one would have no idea it was present in the flavor.
I give two thumbs up to The Whistling Kettle for this wonderful blend! It has indeed been done well!
Wild Raspberry Pu-erh from The Whistling Kettle
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Pu-erh & White Tea Blend
Where to Buy: The Whistling Kettle
Tea Description:
This Pu-Erh is flavorful, mild and with an addition of silver needles, makes a great iced tea. Dr. Oz has recommended this tea as a way to help lose weight. Pu-Erh also help reduce cholesterol and great after a meal to help “cut the grease”. Pu-Erh has probiotic properties no other type of tea has.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
As those of you who read this blog pretty regularly are probably aware, I’ve pretty much come around when it comes to Pu-erh. There was a time when I DID NOT like Pu-erh … or at least I didn’t think I did. I was even “afraid” of Pu-erh, so much so that when someone would send me some in a swap package, I’d send it off to someone else without even tasting it! And that REALLY doesn’t sound like me, does it? But it’s true.
Now, I’m not afraid of Pu-erh any more, although I do often cringe when I receive Pu-erh … worried that I will have a bad experience with it. But truth be told, I have far more positive experiences with Pu-erh than negative ones. The negative experiences are indeed very few and very far between!
This Pu-erh blend … is amazing. And let me just say that if my first tasting of Pu-erh tasted anything like this … I would not have been so afraid of Pu-erh for so many years! This is so good!
The raspberry notes are sweet with just a twinge of tartness to them – just enough to make it taste like a true berry taste. There are hints of flower in the blend as well as a softness. Soft is generally not a flavor I associate with Pu-erh so this is a characteristic I attribute to the white tea. The white tea really offers little else to this blend, other than some visual interest to the dry leaf. As I taste this, there isn’t a moment when I can say definitively “there’s the white tea.” However, I don’t think that this blend would be quite the same without the white tea in it. It adds something … a creaminess, perhaps?
However, the Pu-erh offers the majority of the flavor here. And while it does have that distinctive Pu-erh earthiness, it is slight. Instead, this simply tastes rich and mellow and smooth. Almost like coffee, but without the bitterness of coffee.
A very enjoyable tea from the Whistling Kettle … and it’s a good one!
