A surprisingly different puerh from Teavivre

So I was in the mood to try another of my new samples from Teavivre when I decided upon the Moonlight Beauty Raw Puerh Loose Tea. I was expecting the usual dark black and brown, earthy-smelling tea leaves, so when I opened the package and saw this, I thought, "Uh-oh. This sample got mislabeled."

Now I rarely have a need to actually *touch* my tea leaves unless I'm photographing a sample for a blog post, as I did here, and the other thing I noticed besides the nice vegetal scent (not one I associate with puerhs at all) was that the leaves were so velvety! I wish you could touch them, because they felt simply glorious!

And just so you don't think the leaves are giant ones, here's a coin for comparison.

Steeped, the tea had a slightly musky scent, and when I sipped it, the tea seemed very much like a smooth, rich-tasting green, with no bitterness and no puerh taste at all. By then I was enormously curious about this new sample and had to go visit the Teavivre site, where I learned the reason for this tea's unique appearance and taste: It is "made from the tender buds of Menghai large-leaf tea in Yunnan and processed with the method similar to White Tea. So it belongs to both Puerh Tea (for its material) and White Tea (for its processing method)." I was also intrigued to find a comment that "Moonlight beauty tea is suitable for women or those tea lovers who prefer a fresh, soft and smooth taste." I must say I agree.

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