Fall does seem to bring out the chai reviews, doesn’t it? We can’t help it – tea drinkers in the northern hemisphere just naturally find that spices combined with tea call themselves to our attention as the weather gets chillier.

You’ve seen several reviews of chai over the last couple of weeks, and will see more – sometimes, you’ll get more than one reviewer’s take on a particular chai. I hope you aren’t tired of it yet, because here’s another chai!

The earthy taste of Pu-erh tea, an aged black tea, always tastes to me something like fancy mushrooms, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. (And I love mushrooms, too, while we’re at it!) Pu-erh tastes deeper than other black tea, and has a unique aroma. And as such, its aroma and taste are more evident even when accompanied by lots of chai spices, than the usual base tea for chai. Regular black tea sort of blends into the spices; white tea or herbal leaves such as rooibos usually disappear entirely underneath the spices – but Pu-erh keeps its character.

Here’s Golden Moon’s description of the tea, and notice that they emphasize the earthiness, too:

Dark leaves, aged to perfection, produce a deep, russet-brown liquor. An exotic blend of rich, earthy notes enlivened by aromatic cinnamon bark and elegant green cardamom pods, highlighted with a smooth citrus bouquet. Sweet and full bodied. A mysterious adventure in every cup. Excellent for health.

The flavor of this tea is more like a spicy tea broth, than like spice-flavored tea. The spices are ground – at least in the bag I got, I did not have any whole cardamom pods, only small pieces, even of the cinnamon. This is not a bad thing, either, though – ground spices release more flavor than whole ones (assume I have inserted here the lecture about increased surface area, with notes from physics as well as biology) and the spices are strong enough to complement, though not overcome, the Pu-erh. The earthy note of the Pu-erh makes the combination taste, oh, almost as if one were eating a spicy meal rather than sipping a calorie-free drink.

Speaking of which, it’s common to add milk to chai, but I really didn’t feel that this one needed any milk. Nonetheless, in a couple of cups I did try some, and at least to my taste, if one is going to add something to this tea, non-dairy milk such as almond milk is a better choice than dairy milk; the taste of regular milk just doesn’t seem to blend as comfortably with Pu-erh as a “plantier” milk does. A little bit of sugar tastes good in this – and some people might find, if they aren’t used to the taste of Pu-erh, that a bit more sugar than usual will soften the earthiness a bit.

If you haven’t tried a Pu-erh tea yet, a flavored one such as this is a great way to introduce yourself to the taste – and if you are a chai lover, you owe it to yourself to try this definitely-not-run-of-the-mill chai.

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