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I suppose last night was the last time I will ever have this particular tea, because it appears that Tea Avenue has closed. It was paired with Humboldt Fog goat cheese, which is delicious, but this is one time that the cheese really was not a good pairing for the tea, as this tea is delicate and floral and I was eating the strongest parts of the cheese since those are my husband’s least favroite parts.

A long time ago I got a Yixing pot and seasoned it with Harney and Son’s Wenshan Baozhong. Once I ran out of that tea, I just didn’t use the pot. It may even have been a couple of years.

I decided to test the pot as I had read, leaving some water in overnight to see if the taste of the water had changed. This is really for testing an unseasoned pot, but I didn’t think I had used this pot enough for there to be a real difference. Wow! Was the taste ever changed! At first I thought the water tasted soapy. I rinsed the pot and tried again. Still a flavor. Not unpleasant. Floral.

So I went ahead and made this tea sample in it, and it tasted so much like the ghost tea!

The tea was very floral with no astringency. We had quite a few steeps from it, and my husband said he was getting lots of flavor even after I felt it was all steeped out. That may have been the rind and mold stripe overpowering the tea for me.

We finished the session with a tiny bit of Godiva salted caramel chocolate bar.

Now…since I obviously don’t keep this tea on hand all the time, do you guys think it would be okay to use it for green oolongs in general? It obviously kept its seasoning, so I am thinking it may not work and I need to either keep buying WB or re-season the pot for another tea.

It is a middling quality pot with good heat retention, good porousness to season, decent pour, and it held a vacuum last night with hot water, which it did not do with cold. My best pot holds a vaccum even with cold water.