Scottish Caramel Toffee Pu-erh

Soooo..let’s talk about stress..and pms and being in a foreign country when over tired and reacting to the pollution. It’s called, dinner is made up of some chips, a cheese bagel and z-up followed by chocolate and sugar donut and yes..this tea. And a bath. And god damnit that’s what’s what.

lol But let me tell you…nothing in this world is better than that donut and chocolate and tea when you’re enjoying it. I’ll pay for it later i’m sure but tonight i needed anything but noodles or rice or beef or lamb or fried anything. Also it doesn’t help that i had a bunch of work to do tonight before my evening call with toronto. So i didn’t really have a chance to go to a sit down restaurant.

And this tea? While not something i drink often in toronto, was just what the doctor ordered tonight. Maybe it bonded with the water better than back home but it was just a creamy delicious cup of toffee and dark brood-y tea. So good.

Thanks again to Sil for this sample.
This is an interesting tea, an earthy woody Shu puerh with the addition of caramel. The flavor is rustic & kind of wild, but as it cools it becomes very smooth & sweeter. An interesting tea to sample, a sweet & savory dessert.
Excuse me, my tea & I are headed to the bubble bath. :)

Once upon a time when I had only just discovered flavoured pu-erh someone told me that sweet flavours tends to go very well with that type of tea. It was the first time I had my orange flavoured pu-erh and I can’t remember who it was, but I definitely remember thinking at the time that they were somebody who ought to know what they were talking about.

Since then a long time has passed and the number of flavoured pu-erhs that I have seen have been very limited indeed. And I’ve never seen one of these sweet flavoured ones.

Not until Sil asked me, “what would you like to try?” and I saw this in her cupboard. I’m afraid my reaction might have been ever so slightly undignified. It involved gasping and flailing. I may even have begged a little bit. So yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this one a lot and I’m ever so glad that Sil was willing to share with me.

The aroma of the leaf reminds me of that toffee flavoured black from Le Palais des Thes. It’s obviously not the same base at all, but they both have that smell that reminds me of fudge. I’m not really picking up any notes of the base tea in this one at all. Just fudge. (Actually, that’s quite inspiring. I’d like to try and make my own. How hard can it be? I’d like to try and make my own caramel sweeties as well. We did that in school once, and it was totally easy)

After steeping the pu-erh comes through and mixes well with the toffee notes. I can see already now that whoever it was told me that about pu-erhs and sweet flavours really did know their business. These notes mix so well, it doesn’t feel like it’s added flavouring at all. A bit too much on the sweet side to be entirely natural, of course, but it smells like it could have been if it had wanted to.

If this stuff tastes as awesome as it smells, I’m going to be in deep trouble because I know of no way to source some for myself. I’m suddenly faced with the possibility of my perfect caramel/toffee flavoured tea not being a regular black at all. I mean I thought I’d already found my perfect one. Now I’m concerned that I’m in for a bit of a shock. O.o

So I took a couple of sips and have suddenly found myself at a loss for words. I don’t know how to continue. This has never happened to me before.

Either I’ve actually discovered a new perfect caramel-y/toffee tea, or it has an enormous flaw in order to be a candidate for perfection. And I don’t know which of these statements is true.

This is my very first impression of this tea. Complete ambivalence. How the plock am I supposed to even begin to determine the score??? O.o

I’m going to try and describe my experience of it here. Perhaps that’s going to help me.

I’m getting a lot of pu-erh flavour here. It’s a wood-y, kind of dry flavour without much in the way of earthy notes. It’s not the smoothest tea in the world at all and it feels a bit rough around the edges. I’m even getting something which, under other circumstances, I would describe as borderline pseudo-smoky.

Then the toffee flavour gradually takes over, and we are talking about a very seamless transition here. I really couldn’t say where one notes stops and the other begins. It’s vanilla-y and cocoa-y and it really suits the base flavour. It sort of feels like they’re the same ‘family’ of flavours, if you know what I mean. A bit like how various citrus fruits have very different flavours, but they are still all taste citrus-y.

The flavouring in this one is fantastic, but I’m not completely sold on the base. I would have liked a smoother base, I think, and that is at the root of my ambivalence. I should dearly love to see this exact flavouring on a super-smooth Chinese base, or a friendly Assam, perhaps.

So here I am. Wondering what to do about something I could rate at an absolute top score and feel I had scored it honestly, or I could rate it at 60 and still feel that I been honest. What to do? I’m going to go straight for the middle of the two with a bias towards the higher end because the flavouring is so extremely well done.

Conundrum in a cup.

smells like a divine dessert as it steeps, however if you are a puerh lover (which i am), then you want the flavour to work WITH the puerh and not banish it, which this one did. now, it could be my fault: my standard M/O with puerh is to overleaf and to oversteep… i like it strong! possibly i compounded the over strong flavour because of that. i’ll try another steep and reserve numerical rating until then (i have had A LOT of those in the last 3 days!!!)

if you want a straight up dessert tea, with pudding in your cup regardless of the base then you will enjoy this. seriously, you don’t even need dessert with this one. however, if like me you prefer a flavour that respectfully nods its head to the puerh, you will not like this tea.

atypical flavour breakdown: my wife woke up, stumbled into the kitchen and mutter/snarled (you know when you’re half asleep and everything sounds angry?) ‘what smells like vanilla?’ the smell woke her up in our bedroom 30 feet away. with the door closed.

definitely caramel. reminds me of the kraft caramels from halloween when i was a kid. very sweet. no salt flavour. also no puerh. strong flavour, strong colour… fully opaque (ahem… as opposed to verdant’s 2010 xingyang… you did NOT just hear me make that comparison though!)

i should note that what i do and do not appreciate is not necessarily on par with the goal of the tea blender. a strong dessert tea may be precisely what they were trying to accomplish, in which case ‘mazel tov! mission accomplished!’ …. i just overempathize with puerh. lol.

ARGH!!! i have my guerilla tea buddy SCRIBBLES to thank for this dessert experience. it came in my surprise package this week. THANK YOU!!!

UPDATE: got nothing at all from the resteep. so, i’ll go back to previous statement: if you’re looking for a dessert tea, but it’s not a puerh by my definition. i will continue to abstain from a numerical definition….

I had a tea very much like this one before, and I remember thinking that this tasted a bit like Coffee Pu Erh frm Davids, sans the coffee beans.

This one did have a little more coffee-ish notes than the last one, but not much really. I noticed the pu erh base in this one fairly prominently. It is more of an earthy pu erh than fishy, but straddled that line a bit,

I think that caramel and pu erh are a great mix. I love starting my day with a bold pu erh with some sweet tones like this. It’s a little like a coffee, but not. I might do a rinse next time, just out of curiosity, as this is a strong blend.

Many thanks to sil for satisfying a sweet tooth with this sample.

Thanks for this one, Sil!

Naturally, I didn’t save my sample of this one from the English Tea Store to compare… but they’re totally the same tea. So, I love the caramelly flavours and wish it was a bit lighter on the pu’erh, but would definitely drink this again (but not keep a great deal on hand as I’d prefer a black blend).

Every time I drink this tea I think of butterscotch ripple ice cream. I don’t add any sugar to this, it doesn’t really need it – it’s quite sweet on it’s own.

I thought at one time this would become part of my permanent stash. Funny how tastes change and evolve. I won’t have any trouble finishing what I have left, but it is no longer necessary to always have on hand.

Re-steep is not great.

I should like this tea. When I saw it in the AMAZING swap box that scribbles sent me, I was really excited.
I’m not getting much pu’erh, there is some dark base under the sweet caramel, but I wouldn’t have been able to say that it was pu’erh. I don’t think think this is sweet enough. There is a little astringency to it, I find that odd in a dessert tea. Maybe it needs a touch of sugar to bring out the flavors. I’m not sure, what I want to say it that it’s “flat”. one dimensional.
Thank you so much scribbles for sending this to me. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for it tonight. Will try again another night, but my initial impressions of this is just ok.

I picked up a sample of this last weekend at Majesteas (they had some of the samples on sale and I’m a sucker for a good deal). The dry leaf smells like a delicious dessert: sweet caramel and toffee. The earthy pu-erh flavour really comes out when the leaves are steeped. The first steep was a little too fishy for me (maybe I should have rinsed the leaves?). So I steeped the leaves again, and I really enjoyed the second cup.