368 Tasting Notes
The thing about this tea, given that it is a black tea, is that it is very un-British. At least very un-British-during-Imperial-expansion-discovering-tea-and-wanting-it-black-as-coffee kind of thing. This tea is soft spoken and open. It is not a tightly clenched fist of islander paranoia and aggression that needs honey and lemon to be remotely civil.
This is a post-colonial, rural, quiet, taking a break from a day’s labor kind of tea for those who maybe are a bit over the usual rustic green teas.
Preparation
Apparently I’m drinking this. Liz got a sample from Kristin and shared a cup with me.
I can’t taste the slightest hint of orange, here. But for me, that’s a good thing.
This is a pretty good oolong to be getting used in a flavored tea.
You know, I thought it was better oolong than it should be too. Tasty. Just, y’know, not what was advertised…. so odd.
Yeah, so it took me a while to get the pun. I have no excuse. Except the whole morning thing. I kept thinking that they were just using orange as a verb, as in “we will make you slim with the power of ORANGE”
Is that… a verb in that sentence?
I was rephrasing for clarity!
Thanks for the feedback. I will try to think of a new name to not give the wrong impression. I was wanting an Oolong with a slight orange (not too much hence the name) I also shoot for not using the name flavored as an apology for selling a low quality tea to start with.
Ah. it was presented to me as a flavored tea, so I went tasting it as if it were. It was definitely a very good oolong.
grumble dog up at 3am grumble sore in mouth from b12 deficiency grumble work frustrating grumble guess I’ll drink white tea.
Our multis have plenty of it, I’m just lousy about taking them. Next year I’ll know to be more disciplined about it.
I have a new teapot. If you find your way to my facebook, there’s a picture. We went to the Houston Japanese American Festival in Hermann Park where I met a well preserved octogenarian who makes pottery. Included in her collection of wares was a delightfully quaint half liter tea pot, glazed a white satin finish with a new leaf green wash. It has actual wabi sabi, as opposed to carefully calculated flaws you find in some mass produced work. The handle is high, and fully integrated. Most important of all, it has a wide, open top with a snug lid. No more rummaging about to fish wet tea leaves out of narrow pot tops. No more balancing plates on top of Pyrex™ measuring cups.
This green tea is perfect for today. I got to watch most of a matcha-do ceremony demonstration in the tea house in the Japanese garden in Hermann Park during the festival. It made me crave shaded green. The weather is off again on again sun and rain, but warm when the sun is out. The live oaks have put out all their new growth and are a shockingly bright shade of green, kind of like what’s in my cup. We had brunch in an absurdly upscale bistro garden where I ate some of the best poached eggs over spinach and potatoes I have ever had in my life.
We just wish the rain would blow over so we could go out and test drive Liz’s new bicycle.
Preparation
Sounds like you guys are starting to enjoy Houston? :)
?
I don’t have Facebook or I’d look but I love pottery and your new pot sounds lovely.
This should still work for you to see it:
http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?pid=4404983&id=537550635
Nope – goes straight to a facebook login page! Would you consider posting photos to the flickr steepster group?
Apparently “everybody” as a security setting means “everybody with a facebook account”. That’s weird.
Does this work?
Oh, that’s darling! Oh – yes, it does work, thanks for taking the trouble to post to flickr for people like me who don’t have a facebook account! Though I have to tell you, The Pyrex Method still works for cooling down green tea water!
Oh that is cute. I couldn’t see it either since you aren’t my friend on facebook (?).
@Lauren ~ yes, i still use the pyrex to get the water down to temp before steeping.
@Kristin ~ you should be able to see because all my FB stuff is set to “everyone”. Does the above link not work for you, either?
Nope.
I get a “Content not found” page.
That works.
Apparently mobile uploads don’t respect universal privacy settings but default to something tighter.
It does! It’s lovely. That’s just the kind of pottery I like. With the dripped/dipped glazes with different colors, shades, and shapes for each piece. Thank you for taking the time to put it on Flicker so I/we could see it.
I just need to get one of those plastic spout attachments to prevent dribbling.
How to make the uber pot of oolong:
Set up one of your bigger tea pots.
Choose an oolong where the second or third steep is often better than the first.
Steep a couple cups of water in a generous amount of leaf in a separate vessel in the usual fashion.
Strain into larger teapot.
Repeat for at least three steepings (with a bigger teapot you could do more).
Sip the resulting blend of the three steepings and wonder why you don’t do this every morning.
This works especially well with this oolong from TG because the balance of green notes to roasted notes changes with each steep and this way you get the best of each all in the same cup.
Preparation
Sounds like my next weekend project! Mmm!
It took surprisingly little time, actually.
My friend Steve, who taught me a lot about teas and turned me on to drinking tea a lot more, does this all the time when he steeps tea. This is the first time I’ve read a tealog about it.
Let’s not beat about the bush. I really don’t want to talk about tea this week. I barely even want to drink tea.
I ran out of big tins when my TG order came in, and the Pai Mu Tan is so leafy that it wouldn’t fit into my biggest tin, so there’s extra still in the pouch. I’m trying to use it up before it gets stale, and that’s the only reason I’m drinking this today.
Now get off my lawn.
I bought canning mason jars from the store to offset my loose tea overflow. I make sure the lid is nice and tight and store it out of the light. Works just fine for those “odd” amounts that won’t fit in my favorite tins I’ve been collecting. :)
The problem is, we have a huge tin collection, they’re just mostly for 100-200g of small teas. Big, leafy whites are kind of a wild card. I have one of the huge, gold 500g-1kg tins from the TG shop in Chicago that Sam gave me because I was buying this one white tea they had that was already so leafy, even dry, that 100g of it barely fit in it, let alone in a retail bag. But that has the dregs of my pu-erh in it (because I tend to buy that 500g at a time). I could split the white up into lots of small tins, but I only have the one label.
Mostly I’m lazy.
I’ve almost given up on tins. Just trying to drink everything quickly. :) Since I buy a lot of flavored stuff, my tins are all contaminated with stink. I cannot get the smell of Teavana out of them.
Glass is a great alternative because (as far as I know) it doesn’t retain the smell of the tea after you wash it and dry it. One of my favorite local tea houses stores all of her bulk teas in glass for this reason.
Thanks Amy. My teas are in a drawer out of the light, so that might work (plus I can get those locally and not pay for shipping). I just read the thread on this topic and will try some vinegar in them… I already tried baking soda.
The Super Serious Tea Blog™ I have been reading insists that only glazed porcelain is appropriate for storing tea, claiming the metal impacts the flavor. Glass is molecularly similar to glaze, so that’s probably fine, aside from letting in light.
So, I do need to, with time, phase out the tins, but this will take a while. I’m still investing in LED light bulbs for the whole house which, while using 1/10th the electricity and lasting tens of thousands of hours, are still about $40 a piece plus shipping.
I just need to remember not to buy leafy whites unless the big, gold tin is empty.
I feel so glazed and molecular now. ;)
But don’t the glass jars have metal lids?
The lid isn’t likely to be in contact with the leaves the way you find in a metal tin. I assume.
My stuff sits sideways in a drawer, so it probably would, sigh.
A layer of cheesecloth or linen under the lid?
If you get some with a pressure seal the lid can be glass too; I’m not sure of the word for that type of closure, but you can see it here http://www.containerstore.com/shop/kitchen/foodStorage/jarsTerrines?productId=10011037
“bail & seal” ~ it was in the description field.
A neatly stacked cupboard (very) full of those jars would look quite lovely and be very tantalizing. Or, at least, the picture in my mind of it is.
One of the creepiest apartments I ever had when I was young and poor (relatively) inexplicably had, on the top shelf of one of the cabinets, about 100 small, empty, cleaned jelly jars, all stacked very neatly. For some reason it was really freaky. When we had parties, if people tried to use one to drink out of I’d get upset. I had this deep fear they were like some kind of puzzle box and we shouldn’t ever move them.
SECOND STEEPING:
This cup is more bold/less soft than the first steeping, but surprisingly the notes are nearly the same. I expected a second steeping of a shaded green to be a complete disaster, but this is a very good cup of tea. A teensy bit bitter, but nothing unpleasant. The green veggie notes are more pronounced and the non-green notes have faded, but this tea started off with such a good balance that this is not a problem.
Preparation
The dry leaves of this tea have some very unexpected high brightness to them.
The wet leaves are powerfully dark green, but not muddy.
The cup is a vibrant yellow green color and smells more like the dry leaf than the wet.
The low temperature and extremely short steeping time means this is a tea about which one ought be paranoid about over-steeping by even 15 seconds, let alone more. This stuff will get into kale and kombu territory quickly, I think.
I seem to have timed it right, because the cup is surprisingly soft, but not weak.
This is one of those teas that makes you want to act like you’re in a Japanese movie for the whole day. Something meta-physical with deep symbolism in the cinematography. Traditional tea ceremonies juxtaposed with neon loglo and racer motorcycles. Seedy night clubs and Shinto shrines. You do everything in swaggering slow motion in a slight drizzle, but are kept centered and focused on your task by the carefully wrapped flask of this tea you always have with you. Some things in the land of the rising sun will never change. A flock of birds startles across the sky.
Baby spinach in a lemon vinegar, fresh hay, and something almost like candied ginger without the bite.
Preparation
The dry leaf smells like warm fruit in a humidor.
The wet leaf, I kid you not, smells like beef, brown gravy and egg noodles.
The cup smells like brown beer. It is not as dark as yesterday’s golden pekoe, but is certainly closer to amber than to goldenrod. Let’s call it chestnut?
This is one of those teas that is too open, in dried form, to measure by volume, and so there’s a chance I didn’t use enough, but I actually felt like I might have put in more than I needed, really. The opened wet leaves take up about 1/3 of the pot, which with big, full leaves, is about normal for me. This may be a tea that is just all in the nose not on the tongue.
The cup tastes very gentle, hence my concern about enough leaf. A mild roast and dried fruit in the sun. Like trail mix on a hike, sitting on a big, dark rock on the summit. Old, weather worn, but solid, and full of dormant energy. This tea fits today very well. A bit overcast with storms on the way, and a long afternoon of quiet, somber reflection.
Now, I will confess that a week’s worth of singing for hours every night in a church full of incense has made me rather congested. So I could be completely wrong about all of this. ;-)
Also, I discovered that people are willing to take even tea too seriously, after thinking just yesterday how nice it was to have a social networking site where people didn’t go out of their way to pick fights with you. So much for that. If you find me reticent to interact, don’t take it personally. I’m really, really burnt out on this kind of thing and had hoped to just have some fun over here.
Preparation
What an intriguing tea! Your writing style is really evocative of the teas you drink. Your description of this odd tea makes me want to order it right away.
I’m lousy at “wine talk”. I tried to pick it up from Sam at TeaG during the tasting sessions on State Street, but I just don’t eat the right kind of foods to pull that off. I don’t eat very much fruit at all, so my fruit vocabulary is horrible. Not that I drink a lot of fruity tea, either, but the words help.
Also, I’ve read enough to know that most wine talk is a complete lie. Studies have shown that you can’t identify more than six flavors at a time ~ even trained professionals.
Also, I think most people misunderstand the metaphor or wine talk, anyway, and it too literally.
So rather than provide some laundry list of “notes”, I try to get into what the tea evokes for me, over all. This is definitely “curl up with a good fantasy novel on a rainy day” tea ~ which isn’t today at all, but that’s ok, the tea still fits.
and use it too literally.
I really like your evocative notes. I think that “wine” talk can get absurdly pretentious. Tea, for me, evokes places, time periods, feelings, and moods and I try to convey that. While I like wine, I don’t get the same sorts of visceral reactions nor the range of reactions.
