Another tea removed from my cupboard! I had one single session left; from the days when derk sent it to my way, through it comes from White Antlers Swedish death purge days… so thank you both and missing the second one!
This tea actually aspires to be one of the strangest, weirdest and most unique teas I have ever tried. I prepared the chunk (5 grams I believe) in gongfu method starting with 15 seconds steep with 5 seconds increments. It went great this way!
On the packet, there is short, but absolutely correct description: “Unusual sour lemon taste”. When I saw it, I had no idea what to expect. I smelled the dry chunk and it was indeed sour, but like from fermentation, but also citrusy indeed. That caught my attention and I was looking forward to it.
In preaheated gaiwan I got even more of the sour notes.
But in taste they are indeed tamed. Derk describes it as “pungent, sour, and medicinal with notes of soy sauce and dried fermented lemon peel” and exactly same thoughts were mine. Indeed sour and slightly medicinal, indeed I got some notes of soy sauce… and fermented lemon peel was probalby the thing I was thinking the most about when drinking this. I believe I had fermented lemon peel in some blend from B&B — so that is my only limited experience with it. But it was that.
Certainly tea I need to keep an eye on — there is 2022 harvest available on What-cha website, but it’s UK based shop (sorry Alistair) and that means customs. Customs means VAT. VAT means extra costs and even worse… all the paperwork.
And in conclusion — it is actually pretty refreshing. Hearty meal is perfect pairing, pot steeping would probably work even better than my gongfu. And yet it is so strange, I want another session to be a more descriptive through session and not writing this post-session note.
