Gongfu!
Here’s the thing that I wrote on instagram since this was my last Gongfu session of 2019:
Possibly my last tea & tea session not only of the year, but of the decade!! As many of my close friends & coworkers know, I really like to have symbolic or themed teas on holidays and special occasions & I spent a good portion of the afternoon today trying to decide what tea could possibly be “worthy” of being the last tea of the decade. Would it be an aged tea from 2010? There was something poetic in the idea of a tea from the start of the decade closing it out. Maybe some champagne flavoured, as a celebration!? I don’t think anything would have REALLY felt ‘right’ though, and I realized that heading into next year I want to shake the idea that I “need” to find the perfect teas for the right occasions; the time spent thinking about what might be the “best fit” is time often wasted where I could have just been having a nice experience regardless. Just having a nice session or mug of tea should be enough. So I picked something arbitrarily, and I’m doing my best to be ok with the fact it doesn’t have any significance…
Ultimately, I didn’t end up liking this tea all that much. Maybe a full coin was too big for the 100ml glass pot I was brewing in? Maybe my water was too hot or my steeps too long? Or, possibly, it’s just not my thing…
I gave it five steeps before I decided I was done with trying to make it work; I just found the infusions incredibly tannic and bitter along with a strange mix of tobacco/cannabis and toasty grain notes that were NOT sitting well with me. It was like drinking skunky marijuana and burnt toast, with some rocks tossed in for good measure.
I’ll try it again with an open mind – but it just might not be my thing. That’s fine too; you can’t really love everything and it’s crazy to expect to…
Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B6wP1TagZSr/
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_OwQQF_3qU
If it is big as their flapjacks, I really think one coin is too big. I would go for half :)