A chinese tea wanting to be a japanese one? When i saw this in the shop i knew i want to taste it. Chinese teas are usually pan fried and japanese teas are usually steamed. So this was quite a surprise. The leafs look like high quality sencha – quite long and nice in color. The smell was ok, fresh and green. Also almost like a sencha. So where is the difference? In the taste of course.
The first steeping can be quite long – like 1 minute. I used quite a lot leafs (1:5 water). There was a slight bitterness, but also a nice sencha-like taste. Very good.
The second time a steeped only for 30 sec. Even after this short time the brew was quite bitter and the taste started to resemble a bit more the tradicional chinese teas. The green fresh taste and the bitter taste were quite is sync. Both very powerfull. The 3rd and 4th steeping were less bitter, but you could still feel it.
This tea is not for everyone. If you don’t like the bitter taste, you won’t like it. It’s not possible to get enough flavour from the leafs without having it bitter. On the other hand, if you don’t mind the bitterness (it’s not this bad bitter taste like if you leave the tea steeping for too long), it’s a very interresting tea. You can play with it quite a lot. After finishing you can see the really nice leafs – quite good quality. This one behaves like a real mutant :)
..but for a good price: around 7Euros for 100g (and only 1/3 as bitter as Ku Ding >_<).
165 °F / 73 °C
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