Purchased these ones from Cuppa’T because I was looking for one, more interesting thing to take home and these “bricks” were pretty unique and inexpensive, plus I recalled Lala writing a review on them at one point a while back…
I ended up trying them out for the first time Gong Fu, but in a split session because I started it on Christmas Eve in the evening but then we went out to eat supper at a really fancy restaurant for my mom’s birthday before I could finish the session. I ended up finishing it when we got home, though.
The first half of the session was really lovely, and interesting. The rose in the tea is actually way more strong and well defined than I would have imagined it to be – in fact for the first three infusions it was pretty well all I could taste. Honestly, I didn’t mind though because it was fresh and realistic tasting – no gross chemical/artificial quality to indicate it was someone trying to imitate the fragranced sweetness of an actual rose. After the initial wave of rose it gradually mellowed out and I could taste fresh, crisp vegetal notes from the green tea – snow peas in particular.
After that we went to supper – which was wonderful. I got a baked brie dish with the most amazing red pepper jelly and basil pesto toppings. It literally felt like it was dissolving in your mouth as you ate it, and it was just incredibly satisfying. After that, I moved on to a salad that was… interesting. The only ingredients in it were iceburg lettuce, diced tomatoes, and a very nice herb and buttermilk dressing. What made it really unique, though, was that they literally served it as a third of a head of lettuce. So, still intact. Then they dressed that third of the head with the diced tomato and buttermilk dressing. So, I had to cut pieces off my head of lettuce. It was really unique, presentation wise, and actually I kind of liked having control of the bite size thanks to cutting it…
When I got home, I finished the session. It wasn’t nearly as good; possibly because it was later infusions but also maybe because the leaf had been sitting a while. I try to avoid splitting up sessions, when I can. More vegetal than anything else though; less sweet/fragranced and more of a semi bitter grassy character? That is, until it started becoming watered down enough to not taste like much at all.
EDIT: For the record, I also used two bricks for this session because it was a larger gaiwan and also the bricks are relatively small/tiny so two seemed a lot more appropriate than one.
