Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Pu-erh
Where to Buy: Le Palais des Thés
Tea Description:
Pure Indulgences Cinnamon is an exceptional new flavored tea featuring a single natural ingredient.
This deliciously novel pairing combines a magnificent Chinese Pu Erh with subtle, sweet cinnamon for an exceptional blend.
Pu Erh, also called dark tea in reference to the deep brown infusion it produces, gets better with age. These teas come from the Yunnan Province in China and are widely renowned in the Asian pharmacopoeia for their many beneficial properties.
Pure Indulgences are the result of a lengthy process of selection and development, motivated by the quest to find the perfect balance between the tea leaves, which have their own gustatory characteristics, and the finest ingredients (delicate pieces of fruit and flowers and only all-natural extracts).
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
This Pure Indulgences Cinnamon Tea from Le Palais des Thés is a little misidentified on the website, as it’s called a black tea as well as a Pu-erh, and while there are some that consider these two teas to be one in the same, to those serious about tea, they certainly are not the same thing.
I love the aroma of this tea. That’s not something I generally say when it comes to Pu-erh teas, especially darker Pu-erh like this one. But the cinnamon overpowers the earthiness of the loose Pu-erh and the two intermingling parts that comprise this tea create a sweet cinnamon note. It doesn’t smell spicy, it smells like a sweet cinnamon, like the smell of cinnamon baking in a peach cobbler or something.
When I received this tea, I thought it was this tea that I reviewed back in 2012. But I think that this is a wee bit different. The cinnamon here seems to have a stronger presence in the cup than in the tea in the Cinnamon Wood Caddy.
I love the way the cinnamon is represented in this tea. It’s a smooth, rich flavor. Sweet and spicy, but it’s a true to the spice flavor – that is to say, it tastes like something that would come out of your spice cabinet and not something that came out of a bag of candy.
The tea is a mellow tasting tea. It’s slightly earthy … but here is where this tea becomes very interesting to me. This is where the cinnamon really shines because the earthiness that I can sometimes find off-putting in a Pu-erh melds in a very harmonious way with the earthiness of the spice.
The first two infusions were like this. I found these two infusions to be pleasantly balanced between the two components – tea and cinnamon- and I liked the way they played together on the palate.
In the later infusions, I noticed the cinnamon notes began to wane and I started to notice more of the Pu-erh notes. The tea is deep and very smooth with no bitterness or astringency.
I enjoyed this tea, and was pleasantly surprised to find that this tea is different than the aformentioned Pu-erh in the Cinnamon Wood Caddy, and even though I really love that beautiful wooden “tin”, I preferred the flavors of this Pure Indulgences Cinnamon Pu-erh, especially the earliest infusions where there was such a perfect balance between cinnamon and tea. It was quite a lovely experience!
