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Once upon a time I lived in a place where there was a little tea shop. The little tea shop sold something they called ‘Krudtblanding’, which translates directly to Gunpowder Blend. The name referred to the Lapsang Souchong in it, rather than the gunpowder green tea. Anyway, it was a blend of English breakfast tea with Lapsang Souchong and an unknown green tea that didn’t look like Gunpowder. Just to hammer that home. It was not, as many people on this site reasonably assumed (and it was sometimes difficult to convince them otherwise even though the name was a translation and the original name wouldn’t work as a gunpowder tea reference in the first place).

Aaaaaaaanyway.

This was an absolutely lovely tea, but LS is fairly obscure in this country. Unless someone is actually into tea, they’ll likely never have heard of it before and the term ‘smoked tea’ is likely to make them make this face. —> O.o
And this was more than ten years ago.

So in other words, one day I went in to stock up on this wonderful blend, they told me they were discontinuing it, but they’d let me buy up the remainder that they had. I think basically I was the only one ever buying it. So that’s how I came home with some 600g of one tea.

I have never been able to find a blend quite like it again.

UNTIL NOW!

This is a blend of Earl grey with LS, Ceylon and Nilgiri and some gunpowder green. Ceylon and Nilgiri together sounds like something on the road to a standard breakfast blend. And then there’s the LS and then there’s the green tea. Which slightly confusingly in this case is actually confirmed gunpowder. It basically sounded just like that old blend with added EG flavouring.

The Earl Grey aspect is quite subtle. It’s there, but it’s not overwhelming and if you didn’t know it was there, you’d be too focused on the LS element to pay it much attention. And the LS element isn’t even actually all that strong either. I mean, it’s clearly there, but it’s not like drinking a regular LS either. All together this becomes a fairly smooth blend with a strong umami element to it. It’s actually not entirely unlike the top notes of a mild pu-erh. It’s like everything sort of evens everything else out.

To be honest, I haven’t got a whisper of a chance of remembering how this holds up to that blend of old, but when I’m drinking this, I’m thinking it’s definitely close enough. It’s right up my alley.