Sometimes, I drink tea to learn about its nuance and to get excited about the complexities it can hold. Other times, I drink tea for comfort. I’ve got quite a few teas like that in my cupboard, straightforward teas and tisanes that I go to whenever I need something comforting. Recently, I realised that I can add one more tea to the list: ripe puer.

It’s a bit weird for me to think of puer as a comfort tea because I spend so much time talking about how I am unfamiliar with it. That’s true, I don’t drink puer on a daily basis and I haven’t even scratched the surface for raw puer.

But ripe puer is a slightly different story.

A friend of mine gave me this bottle of puer the other day. It’s nothing special and it tastes like how you’d expect loose ripe puer to taste like: earthy, pretty mellow, and somewhat sweet. But when I drank it, I thought of the trip to Zhuhai we made where we bought a cake of ripe puer and all family dinners out where puer would be served. I realised that I have drunk this tea, many times, and always in happy conditions.

This may not be the exact tea, but it tastes close enough that it reminds me of those times. I suppose this is the tea form of Proust’s madeleine?

It’s a small thing, but I’ve realised that there’ no need to always chase after the latest thing or the most exciting tea experience. Sometimes, what you need isn’t the excitement of trying a new tea, but the taste of something familiar.

In the end, I curled up with a pot of this tea and a book from the Fairacre series. Both of these things are cosy, comforting, and the perfect way to end the day.