Alishan

I’ve been MIA for a couple of months, mostly because I’ve been drinking very little tea shock horror. First I was travelling for nearly a month and so preparing tea was problematic, and after that I got really sick and spent nearly another month in a Spanish hospital. The closest I came to tea in Spain was some Linden flower herbal infusions (“infucion”) that the nurses brought around late in the evening.

I’ve been back in London for a couple of weeks now, staying with my brother while I wait to get the all clear from the doctor to be able to fly home to Australia, and the other day I was finally well enough to go out for a few hours, so OF COURSE I went in search of somewhere with good tea. I ended up at TeaSmith.

It’s been so long since I’ve had a really good Taiwan oolong that I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to evaluate it well, but as soon as I took the first sip I remembered exactly why I love this sort of tea so much. Of course, having the tea prepared properly in the Chinese style by someone who knew exactly what she was doing right in front of me at the fantastic tea bar certainly helped – and especially doing six steepings of it, so that I could really appreciate the evolution of this tea. It really hits its stride around the second or third steeping: beautifully sweet, silky and buttery. The sweetness is mostly gone by the final steeping, but there’s still enough flavour left to make that sixth steeping worthwhile.

This was a really wonderful return to the world of tea. If you happen to be in London sometime, TeaSmith is well worth checking out. The tea bar is a great experience for anyone who loves tea enough that they… write reviews on Steepster. ;-)