987 Tasting Notes
Sipdown!
I had just a smidgen of this left – enough to make a single cup. It smells really nice and spicy today, like gingery banana bread.
I think this was my favourite blend out of all the ones I’ve tried from JO. The orange peel adds a subtle touch at the back of the mouth.
Made this as a cold brew a few days ago and I’ve still got a ton of it sitting in the fridge. It brewed up a golden colour with a really strong minty taste after less than 12 hours in the fridge – about 1 tsp per cup.
I also added about 2 tsp of dried lemongrass to the pitcher to see if I could get a lemon mint blend.
However, this tea tastes pretty much the same way cold as it does warm – strong, minty, and with a weird chemical backtaste to it that I dislike. I’m going to try and cold-steep the rest anyway to get it out of my cupboard. (Oh, and there was no taste of lemon at all from the lemongrass. Surprising)
I tried adding some lemon juice and honey to the mix, and that has helped, but I think I added too much lemon and not enough honey.
So, um, this isn’t a tea note so much as an announcement:
I’ve started up a new tea review blog! And I’m doing book reviews too!
Check it out at http://www.booksandtea.ca
#Excited
I brewed some of this before leaving for work this morning. I’ll need to take some time and really sit down with this because the other reviews sound lovely – malt, cherry, wood – and I didn’t really get any of that aside from a generic black malty sweetness. I overleafed slightly and tried to compensate by understeeping. I’ll have to be more careful next time.
Sample sipdown!
I bought a sample of this from Tao last year (along with a lot of other WuYi oolongs) and I’ve been letting them sit for far too long. I ended up putting the whole sample into my gaiwan last night and let the thing steep about 6 or seven times.
I did get a hint of the cinnamon flavour the tea is noted for, but I smelled it more than I tasted it. It hit the back of the palate, and there was a malty flavour alongside that made the whole thing reminiscent of cinnamon buns.
However, the dominant taste was of the roastiness, smoke, hay, tobacco, that sort of thing. It got quite astringent as the steeps went on.
The thing I like about gong-fu brewing is that it forces me to sit and contemplate things for a bit – counting out the seconds as the clock ticks during my steep, keeping my hand steady when I pour it out into my cup. That sense of peacefulness that comes from silent still time is good, and I got that when drinking this last night.
Sipdown.
I made this last week in my iced tea pitcher – 2 cups of hot water, then diluted with 2 cups of cold water and stored in the fridge.
I have to admit that while I did smell the raspberry flavouring, I could barely taste it. It just tasted like a mouthful of cold tea, slightly overstrong and astringent. I forget it I added any sugar.
Many thanks to Oolong Owl for her recent stash sale – this tea was one of the ones she sent me, and the first new one I tried! (Of the teas she sent me, it turns out I had one in my cupboard already from Teavivre).
I brewed this up western style this morning – 1.5 tsp for 1.5 cups of water, 3 minutes, 70C. The resulting liquor was a nice yellow-orange green colour, somewhat pale, but still with some character in it.
The tea tasted like a pretty straightforward green tea – not quite buttery or green beany, but still somewhat vegetal. Slightly smoky.
In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of the Hunan Cloud and Mist I have from Capital Teas, or like a very light Yunnan green. I don’t know at what elevation this tea was grown, but I do wonder if that’s just what high-elevation teas taste like (assuming that high elevation is the reason behind the name “cloud and mist” in the first place).
Woo, 700th note!
I bought this from the Toronto Tea Festival about 5 months ago and haven’t added it to the database until now.
A few nights ago I steeped it in a gaiwan at 80C. Didn’t keep track of the steep length, but the tea was fairly neutral tasting, though as I went on it became more astringent and drying. I’d love to try steeping this with hotter water to see if develops the sweet, syrupy nature that made me buy this tea when I sampled it at the festival.
