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I came back home from vacation to find a brand new box of tea samples from the wonderful Teavivre. It took me all day to figure out which tea to try first, but this won the right to be my 300th tea tasting note.

I brewed three pearls in my french press for two minutes with the first steep and three minutes for the second steep. The pearls themselves are about twice the size of the green jasmine pearls and smelled like dry hay. It was interesting to watch the black pearls unfurl with the hot water.

At first the tea didn’t taste like much. It isn’t as earthy as my yunnan black and that is what I was expecting from the tea for some reason. Only after I let the tea cool down for a while I began to notice a dark note. It wasn’t very strong but it was a dark note. Not earthy and not very sweet, but present.

On my second steep the dark note was a little bit stronger and that was when I was able to pinpoint the flavor. It tasted like a small sliver of bittersweet baking chocolate. I think I am going to have to brew this again with another pearl or two to really bring out the chocolate note.

I think the next time I try this I am going to put either my second or third steep in the fridge to try this iced. I think it would make a nice iced tea.

Thank you again Teavivre for this lovely tea sample. I would have never imagined that I would go from having a tea bag every once in a while to writing about loose leaf tea samples.