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After concluding my previous note, I plugged in the phone and decided to go for a third steep on these leaves. Yesterday I started a new library book, Uncomfortable Conversations With A Jew by Emmanuel Acho and Noa Tishby; today I continued reading it, and the steeping time on the third infusion was “until my eyes next slid out of focus.” The cup that resulted was a mix of freshly-snapped beans (the smell as a taste, rather than tasting like a bean) and flora with a soft but distinct note of something like whipped cream underneath it. Encouraged by this, I decided to really risk wasting six ounces of water and put the leaves on for a fourth steep, which was allowed to steep while I walked around outside for a few minutes to absorb some sun. I once again have no idea how long I let the steep go, but it was almost surely at least as long as the third steep. This time, the flavor I ultimately consumed was all dark green leafy vegetables (which is also what the leaves, now fully unfurled, now looked like; my mother asked if I was trying to drink poke salad!) and minerals, which paired surprisingly well with my supper potatoes.

Could I wring a fifth steep out of this tea? To my surprise, I actually think I probably could. I’m feeling quite ‘full’ now, though, satiated and hydrated, and four western-style steeps is already a more than respectable amount of tea to get out of such a small sample packet. I am quite pleased with it, as it stayed interesting throughout and leveled out into a steady level of clear flavor after the first steep. I’m not sure what this one costs, but if it’s reasonable, I might consider it for a work tea sometime, something that lasts a good while and can take some fairly rough treatment when I get distracted. I doubt it would win many elite oolong competitions, but it’s a solid drink and I think it really would work well as an introduction to the world of lighter oolongs for someone just discovering the delights of the teas between black and green.

I bought a few portions samplers as part of my Journey Back Into Tea, and this was the packet at the top of the oolong box. Out came the six-and-a-half ounce glass teapot and the Whittard of Chelsea “English Breakfast” teacup and saucer, lower went the temperature knob on my kettle, and off we went!

I’ve had several Ali Shans before, prepared both western and gong fu style, and I debated breaking out one of my gaiwans for a moment before I decided to stick to the instructions on the packet, which were for western brewing. Once I tipped the leaves out into my little glass pot, I felt assured I had made the right call there, as it just didn’t seem like there was quite enough leaf there for…what my hands can remember of gong fu, at least. The dry leaf smelled strongly vegetal, but this turned into a very thin, light scent somewhere between the smell you get when shelling peas and something floral. After a three-minute steep, I poured the tea up and found a very pale yellow brew with more or less the same scent as the leaves had when they first touched water, only a bit stronger. It’s still far from the most fragrant oolong I’ve ever had, I have to put my nose quite close to the cup to smell it at all, but it does smell good. One of my kittens even seems slightly intrigued, looking back at the cup a few times between pets, though without any particularly obvious signs of either desire or disgust.

When I first started reviewing my teas on tumblr a few weeks ago, I used the time it took me to write up my introductory notes to let the cup cool just a touch to drinking temperature, and I employed the same policy here. Then, with my teacup in my right hand and my entire left arm occupied with ten pounds of cat who needed a snuggle, I took a sip and got…

Crispy hot water?

Sounds strange, but that’s the best description I can come up with. You know how lettuce is basically crispy water with only a faint trace of flavor to it? It was like that, except hot. Since there was nobody about to witness my impending act of poor manners except for the cat, I slurped on the second mouthful like a proper tea taster and got, this time, a taste – delicate, but a taste. It was pretty much exactly the taste version of that smell you smell when you are shelling peas or snapping up fresh green beans – clean and clearly plant-like, not entirely dissimilar to what I remember cut grass smelling like before I developed a painful allergy to it…Or maybe it’s closer to when I would pick dandelions out of the yard when I was little, and that smell which came with the white “plant milk” substance that would seep from where the stem had broken off. There’s also just a hint of something I interpret as “the smell of mud,” which, given that we’re on red clay here, I’m going to tentatively identify as a mineral note.

Well, that was a pleasant little drift down memory lane – in addition to the childhood dandelion memory, it also brought to mind how my family, it used to be the custom for all the women and girls to sit around shelling peas or snapping up beans together, as the work went much faster if you had people to talk with as you worked. Same went for shucking corn, though I never could help as much with that because I have a reaction to corn silk (and just corn silk, for some reason. I can and do eat popcorn all the time, and have done since I grew my first couple teeth, but let corn silk touch me and I’m going to go to itching all over and being unable to shake the headache I’ll suddenly have no matter how many times I sneeze). One more swallow, and the cup was empty. In the interests of science, though, I did not wrap up my tea session there and go put my phone on the charger, where it very much needs to be. Instead, I lowered the cat to the floor, heated the kettle again, and put the leaves on to resteep for three minutes plus as long as it took me to type out all the above notes about taste with one finger, since although I’m a good typist, I never got the hang of texting properly. This all done, I poured the tea up again and think it is a slightly deeper shade of yellow than the first cup. It also has a more pronounced floral smell. Excellent. And my mouth was just getting a tad uncomfortably dry from the finish of my first cup, so it was an excellent time to put more liquid in there, and so I did. And it tasted like….

Multiple things!

As I sipped on this cup, I remembered what Ali Shan is supposed to taste like – those cream and floral notes. I was able to find them in the cup this time, with the sweet floral notes particularly clear on the swallow. They were not as strong as I would have liked (though Ali Shan is, if I recall correctly, supposed to be a fairly delicately-flavored tea), and there was a now slightly bitter vegetal note on top, but it was nevertheless a pleasant cup that reminded me why I used to love a good oolong so. I think I could get along quite well with this tea, if I just upped the amount of leaf involved the tiniest bit…

Do I dare attempt a third steep? If I do, it’ll have to be documented later, because my phone is very dying and I don’t want to lose this whole note to a battery shutdown. To the charger with me!

I have an old box of this in teabags, which I have decided to drink down over the next few nights. One Royal Albert 1990 – Bouquet mug of approximately 400ml, two teabags at a time, just a way to keep my mouth busy so I don’t snack or drink Sprite all through the evening now that my caffeine sensitivity’s gotten a tad too high to allow for anything caffeinated after four.

The bags, I must say, smell lovely. Vanilla and winter spices are balanced and all this needs is a hint of pine to smell very much like an ideal Christmas, at least to me, a very overenthusiastic-about-Christmas sort of person. Another of my interests is perfumery, and although I don’t usually go in too heavily for gourmands, I could see myself wearing this a lot in winter, if it was a perfume. Since it’s a tea, though….

I’m going to blame the effects of the decaffeination process on the leaves for why I struggle a bit with it as a tea. If I drink it straight, it tastes a bit harsh. If I put some milk in it, it tastes too thin, as though I were just drinking 1% milk with the ghosts of some spices in it. Neither experience is what I hope for when I smell the teabags. It does serve its function of keeping me out of the Sprite and the food, though, and there’s only a couple of more days worth left in the box, so it’s all right.

Since a Harney and Sons sample bag contains more than just one serving of leaves, I got to perform a second experiment on this one back on Monday. I had to drive for a really long time on Monday – 140 miles round trip; it was supposed to take three hours, and I was very proud of myself when it really only took four, as I am not exactly God’s gift to vehicle usage – so I decided to make up the rest of the sample and try it out with a very light drizzle of honey in my glass water bottle I just got.

Brewing went well, pouring went well…and then I merrily sailed out of the door without picking up the bottle. Naturally. Ah, well. I guess I get to find out something of what it would taste like as an iced tea, then!

My first thought was “milder”, though I can’t say whether this was due to the honey or the temperature. The honey did seem to stay mixed, though, so I’m confident I at least didn’t overload it. It was pleasant and not as dramatically flavorful as the original, hot version, but would have made a nice thing to sip on during the horrors of my attempt to get both into and out of Atlanta alive on the same day. On the swallow, it also assumed an interestingly spicy note that it hadn’t had before. Still wouldn’t buy a full tin, I don’t think, but the next time Harney has samples of black Gulou available, I might grab another to compare, just based on the breadth of behavior seen from this one sample bag.

This tea, I fear, did not receive care nearly as good as it probably deserved. Specifically, it sat in a Harney’s sample bag for…???? I really have no idea, but it’s longer than it should have. Still, at least those things are opaque and pretty airtight, so such a bag is hopefully not the worst storage the leaves could have endured.

When I opened the bag, I was immediately hit by a rush of nostalgia. I don’t know how to describe it, but whenever I’ve ever opened one of those little black Harney and Sons sample packets containing any sort of unflavored black tea, there’s always initially been virtually the same smell. Good thing it’s a pleasant smell! The dry leaf, as you can see in my not-quite-seven-ounce glass teapot pictured in the tea image, was pretty but not especially distinctive.

I was making this tea on my ‘day off,’ away from my usual setup, so I had to time the three minutes on my phone. At first sip, all I could think of was “Keemun.” It wasn’t as winey, and lacked as strong of a certain indescribable note I call the “Keemun Edge,” but it was strikingly similar to my memories of Keemun. Keemun with less wine and Edge is, for me, a good thing, since I dislike wine and the “Keemun Edge” makes me feel inexplicably queasy after about one cup, but the resemblance to Keemun – a certain multigrain bread note underneath something sharpish and liquidy; yes, I know this is not a great description – was strong enough that I decided to do a little quick-googling to find out if they were from the same province. This specific Gulou is long gone from the Harney and Sons website, but they had some other Gulous, so I was able to confirm the tea is probably from Hunan Province. Another google, because I really have forgotten almost as much as I ever knew, revealed that Keemun is from Anhui Province, so nope, they aren’t from the same province. Time for a bit more google….

Just pulling up a provincial political map of China, I…initially took a really long time to find Hunan, to the point that I had to check that it didn’t have any alternative spellings. Eventually, though, I found it, and it is not adjacent to Anhui Province. Anhui is further north, and parts of two other, side-by-side provinces – Hubei and Jiangxi – stand between it and Hunan. Since the resemblance between the two really was striking, though, I googled around some more to find an elevation map. I couldn’t immediately find one with the provincial lines laid out over the topography, but by using the Sichuan Basin and the coastline as guideposts, I managed to make what felt like a reasonably plausible guess about which bits of the topographical map were Anhui and Hunan. If I’m right about where they are, then they share almost the exact same, very low elevation, just above sea level, so I suppose that plus proximity could contribute a lot to the two teas’ similarity.

I drank this a few days ago, so I can’t comment on the exact color, which only survives in a photograph taken for a tumblr review which the Internet ate. Thanks for that, Internet. It looks like it was a pretty, clear medium brown, though. Since it was a Chinese tea, I decided on a whim to try resteeping the leaves for a while, which is when I noticed that the wet leaves smelled remarkably much like Cadbury Egg! This was a good thing from my point of view, as I am very, very partial to Cadbury Eggs every spring. For this second steeping, I left the tea to its own devices for as long as it took me to walk around the house to the basement, unload the dryer, reload the dryer with wet clothes from the washer, and then put more dirty clothes in the washer. This was at least five minutes, probably a bit longer. When I poured the second cup, the color was exactly the same as the first, though now with bubbles around the edges for some reason. As I drank the tea, it retained strong flavors that were pretty distinct from each other – more distinct from each other than they were in the first cup, really. I got a bit of chocolate (sadly, not the sweet Cadbury kind, but chocolate) and a lot of that multigrain bread impression. Unfortunately, I also started really tasting the Keemun Edge on this one, so I didn’t attempt a third steeping. The leaves felt like they were close to ‘done’ anyway, though, and 12oz of a Keemun-like taste without feeling sick seemed like a reasonable amount of tea to get out of one spoonful of leaves. It’s not something I think I’d buy a whole tin of, but it was pleasant enough for special-tea Saturday, anyway.

Confession time – on my first journey through the world of tea, Adagio somehow flew completely past my radar. By the time I even heard of them, I was a bit of a tea snob, in fact, and so I’d never ordered anything from them. This time, though, the journey was kicked off by another member of the Gravity Falls fandom, who made a number of unofficial custom blends around characters from the show, all of which I decided I ought to sample all eleven of them. There was only one I flat-out disliked and I considered most of them above average, but only three drew me in enough for full-tin purchases. This is one of those teas.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Stan is the tritagonist of Gravity Falls. He’s the great-uncle of the two central characters, has become their caretaker during their summer vacation in either 2012 or 2013, and is a former jack-of-all-criminal-trades (Sovo Night, who blended this tea, described Stan as “a man who’s held many names and heard his own the least”) turned operator of a tourist attraction, along with hosting the county fair and occasionally dances for the youth of the town – all, of course, in the interests of getting yet more money. He’s a massive personality who I cannot properly describe here – I’m working on a monograph on the subject, actually – and whose tragic backstory is about one-fourth of the reason the show even has a plot, which therefore makes him also quite a lot of the reason why it has such a large adult fanbase despite being, er, originally made for Disney XD.

It’s clear enough how the elements of the tea are meant to reference Stan’s personality. Ginger – he comes across as quite prickly and has an extremely hot temper, so much so that he nearly ends the world by accident due to it. I couldn’t find any references to Wuyi black teas when I was adding the ingredients to this description, but they and Yunnan make up a blend Adagio calls “Mambo” – fitting enough for a guy who spent a decent chunk of his life in South America and also can break out the dance moves every once in a while. Lapsang Souchong could refer to one of two things – either the recurring theme of fire as a destructive force which surrounds Stan in general, or the fact that he apparently liked smoking cigars a lot, before having a couple of twelve-year-olds dumped on him for three months made him feel obliged to give up smoking, drinking, and the freedom to “swear for real” all at the same time – teaching them to be card sharks and run scams, that’s fine, but he wouldn’t want to encourage substance abuse or bad language in children. And as for caramel…‘burnt sugar’ isn’t the worst analogy in the world for the man. Sweet kid, but life put him through it, which both resulted in sweetness sometimes manifesting in a different way than it originally did and also made him a lot clingier.

All that, though, is character analysis, not tea analysis. The flavors seem to work pretty well together as a description of Stan, but do they actually taste good together?

Yes.

I have the vague idea that I have mixed caramel or vanilla with lapsang souchong myself, back in the day, and that it was good, but it wasn’t quite like this. One can just taste the smoke and just taste the caramel, but they come together in such a way, presumably along with the base notes and the ginger, to taste…well, the first thought that comes to mind is that it tastes fun. Fun is not, of course, a proper tasting note, so I’ve tried to analyze it properly and come up with things close to various sweets (I started off on ‘candy corn’ and moved to ‘maple syrup’ before settling on ‘butterscotch’) but the overall impression is just of…fun! Which is good, because now I have five ounces of it.