290 Tasting Notes
Drinking this with my wife while watching polar bears eat whales. A splendid combination for the start of the new year. It’s the end of this packet of tea though.
Happy New Year to you all. I hope this year brings you all you need. :)
Well let’s see…the equivalent here would be watching the new legal pot smokers eat ALL the snack food in Colorado today. Should be epic! First State to legalize pot for recreational use.
Happy New Year!
It was a brilliant tea to start the year with, although it makes me sad that I have no more. Perhaps it is time to try sneaking another tea order through the door. I could do with a few more high quality Darjeelings in the cupboard.
I found a small packet of this lurking at the back of the cupboard after the recent cataloguing exercise. It makes me wonder what other teas I missed. My previous tasting note still stands. This is an excellent tea, clean and smooth and absolutely what I want from a white Darjeeling.
After the disappointment of their Darjeeling, this tea came as a nice surprise. The puerh is an earthy shu that carries a decent bit of body. What I tasted of it was not exceptional but definitely workmanlike enough to satisfy me when combined with the citrus. This was a bit surprising given my general lack of interest in flavoured teas.
The aroma of the dry leaf is largely grapefruit. When steeped the liquor has a peculiar dual layer to it, as if smelling two separate teas. At the top is citrus then the earthiness of the shu comes into play as you dip your nose further into the cup. The extent to which the two aromas existed separately surprised me a lot. This situation persisted in the tasting of the hot tea. The citrus dominates at first and then the earthiness of the shu came through to take over. Then, when the earthiness has faded from the aftertaste, the citrus remains strongly on the tongue for some time afterwards leaving you with a very clean-feeling mouth as if I had just brushed my teeth with grapefruit toothpaste. I cannot imagine drinking this every day, but it will remain in the cupboard for those days when I want something fruity and simple, and I shall not be averse to getting more when it is gone.
A coffee and tea shop opened up in Beverley, near us, recently. Naturally I got all excited and had to charge in at the first opportunity. So, I checked it out. It seems to stock mostly flavoured teas and coffees with few ‘proper’ teas. Shame that. The place seems like a step up from Whittards, but not so much to my taste. Unfortunately, this tea I bought from there is the same. I have tried it with different amounts of leaf, at different temperatures and varied the steeping time. It tastes like a Darjeeling, but only just and the variable elements don’t seem to change it much. It is certainly not a patch on the other Darjeelings that I drink more regularly, but then it is cheaper too and that shows in the taste. Shame about that. I had hoped for a regular source of everyday tea but this one is not it. Perhaps the shop has others that are better …
How disappointing… Tea shops just don’t open around where I live, but if they ever did, I’d be so mad if they didn’t offer a certain standard of quality!
I’m hoping that they develop and improve, but I also wonder how well they will survive in town. I may have to ask some leading questions next time I go in! :) I did buy a grapefruit-flavoured puerh as well. I still have that to try, and it is a definite point in their favour that they even had a puerh of any type in stock, so there is still hope.