TEA WITH JESSE: How to make a PU'ER TEA ORANGE

Hello, tea friends. Today we are going to be making these Pu'er tea oranges. These are eight-year-old aged Pu'er. They come in these oranges from Xinhui, China, which is the capital of fragrant orange peels. Step one, you want to give the orange a little bit of a crack before you unwrap it. That'll help the tea open up as we get into the later steeps and the tea expands. Take it out of the paper. I did have a friend who tried to make the orange in the paper. No good. Also, you can discard this cap if the cap is still there. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Let's go to the jessicam. Trick for this one, pour the first steep in right through the top slowly. This allows the tea to start seeping through rather than just the orange. Yeah, you can just dump it right into a mug or something like that or in through a pot and not worry about this, but the first steeps will be a little bit too orangey and the later steeps will be too tea. If you do it this way, you'll get a good balance of both. And you'll notice that the steep temperature is 100 degrees, just boiling, and the steep time is very short. There's actually a lot of tea in these tea oranges. These are 10 grams of tea and orange together, so that's a lot of tea and so you'll see the steep time is very short. Beautiful color already, even though we're on our first steep. But of course, as with all of the Gong Fu tea traditions, I encourage you to toss out this first steep. You can pour it on your teapets if you have them. I hope you guys have been enjoying your teapets, those of you that have gotten them with your samplers. And enjoy that fragrance. Pu-erh tea, aged Pu-erh, has this really dark, earthy flavor. It's a little bit unusual to people that are just starting, but I think that having the orange fragrance mixed in with the tea flavor really makes this a little bit more approachable. And if you already like Pu-erh, then this is really good Pu-erh. I'm sure you'll enjoy it very much. The tea color is very dark already. You see, you don't need that long of a steep time. Really, 10 seconds is enough. You get this very dark tea. It's very, very flavorful and very fragrant. It has that sort of, like, real body to it. Sometimes people complain tea just tastes like water. This does not taste like water. And you can see here, third steep immediately into a very strong color. You can do 15 steeps of these in your, in a gaiwan, 120 milliliter gaiwan, or even maybe a couple less if you're using a bigger pot. You can get a lot of tea out of this. So enjoy. I know you guys have been waiting a long time to try these. Have a great one.