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“Gongfu! Hot Brandy will always have a bit of a soft spot in my heart because it was the first compressed blend of two different tea types that I ever came across – I still so clearly remember...” Read full tasting note
The soup is thick, smooth, and fragrant. It fares well with both gongfu style and western style brewing. The tea has excellent endurance and can steep for a very long time and can even withstand being simmered or boiled without becoming acrid.
Both the white tea and black tea have been sun dried and should age well together. However, we are only two three years deep on this experiment; though the results are promising, how it will age in the long term is anybody’s guess.
Hot Brandy is a mix of both white tea and black tea. 200g cake pressed in 2021. Each bamboo tong contains 5 cakes.
Gongfu!
Hot Brandy will always have a bit of a soft spot in my heart because it was the first compressed blend of two different tea types that I ever came across – I still so clearly remember people losing their minds at the concept back with the first release in, I wanna say, 2017. Though I find the rich amber colour of the liquor represents the black tea in this unique blend quite well, this session was all about that lightly aged white tea.Smooth but with a surprising amount of body, the dominant note I got here was dried/preserved stone fruit. Peach and apricot, in particular. This comes alongside a bit of a maltiness and a bit of a slightly greener dandelion note – a mix between the flower, the greens themselves, and roasted dandelion root – like what’s used in a lot of herbal coffee replacements. The whole session has a woodier, bark-like undertone and a lovely brown sugar finish to each sip that rounded everything out with just enough sweetness.
It’s not quite as magical as the 2020 pressing of the dragonballs – those are truly something spectacular and a tough tea for any other year’s production of Hot Brandy to live up to. It was a really solid session though, with a lot of nuance over the coarse of it! Great wrap up to the week!
Tea Photos: https://www.instagram.com/p/Czepc-HuVgc/?img_index=1
Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjBqlKiHEdU
