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I think I’ve mentioned that my latest tea-drinking pattern is that I drink only green tea and fruit blends or herbals during the week and black and other teas on weekends and holidays.

There are some variations. For example, last week I found an empty storage tin, so went into my stash to find a tea in a bag to transfer to it. That one happened to be the coconut white from Teafrog, but the tin wasn’t big enough to hold all the tea. So I decided to drink up the excess — I am alternating green tea and white tea at work until the excess is gone (unless I decide to cold brew it, which is also a possibility).

I’ve also mentioned my logic for how I select the next cold brew experiment (I find the lowest rated tea in my cupboard that I have enough of to cold brew, and if it seems like it would work as a cold brew, into the fridge it goes).

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned that there is a micro-pattern to my weekend black tea drinking. This is likely interesting only to me, but I’m recording it here for posterity.

I start with an unflavored black, sometimes one I haven’t tried before, sometimes one I have. After that, I move to a flavored black that I haven’t tried yet. Today, that’s this tea.

The third cup is a flavored black that I’ve had before, and is in active sipdown mode. The fourth is a lapsang, which has its own separate project going on (project Lapsang sipdown).

Today I recorded things a bit out of order. This is my second tea, but my third note. I have the Violet in steeping at the moment, though I recorded it as a sipdown first because I didn’t have a lot more to say about it.

That’s the method to my current madness. It’s making a dent, I think, particularly in the lapsangs.

Now, for this tea. The dry leaf smells like the melange of Simpson teas that shared their essential oils through the paper packing bags they came in, so there’s not a lot of interest there.

Steeped, the aroma is of — plum! Maybe tending a bit toward the prune-like. It’s a dark flavor for the synesthetes out there, a bit darker than I associate with plum which is why I’m going toward prune.

Now that I have prune in my head, it’s hard to get it out and that’s pretty much what I’m tasting as well. But it’s not a scary prune. Scary prune is shriveled and dry. This is juicy prune. If you’ve ever eaten prunes out of a package, you know when you get that one that’s really soft and juicy and reminds you of the plum from whence it came? It’s like that.

The tea is dark, reddish brown, and clear.

I am not sure I’d buy this again, but it’s a fun change.