Supreme Silver Needle

The first tea in my teapro subscription box. Yep, I’ve decided to do a tea subscription to see what it’s like. When it comes to “real” tea with beautiful complex flavours and many many steeps revealing new layers… I’m kind of lacking in knowledge. I read the awesome detailed reviews here on Steepster (particularly those from Derk and eastkyteaguy) and I feel inspired to kick the supermarket/grocery store tea habit and explore more. But I’m on a budget and I need a little help with detecting flavours sometimes.

So, this “exploring tea” subscription seemed perfect. A chance to get the basics down at least. With a fairly empty cupboard (apart from the box of tea bags) it’s not like I’m going to run out of space.

Anyway, the actual tea. It’s excellent although I don’t have anything to compare it to at this point. The buds are so fluffy! They smell pretty good too, very fresh and fragrant.

I steeped 1 generous teaspoon for 3 minutes, managing to get 3 steeps out of it in total. The aroma is very fresh melon – but not quite ripe melon. It’s not sweet enough to be ripe but it’s very strong in aroma.

Flavour-wise, melon again. But it’s gentle and a little bit creamy. Slightly floral too – honeysuckle perhaps. In my last steep which lasted 9+ minutes, I had this hit of white chocolate. The description card that came with this tea (very helpful with determining flavours) has it down as “floral, melon, honey, cucumber” so I got 3 out of the 4.

I had the first cup at about 7pm and the last around 10pm. I slept very very well, this tea made me feel very peaceful.

I’m going to try the other 3 teas and then write up a combined blog review for the subscription box. In the meantime, I’m definitely looking out for more silver needle teas to try.