I got a new round of tea samples from the wonderful Angel at Teavivre. This is the first one from the new set and I decided to actually write down the steeps in my journal before logging them into Steepster. It was fun actually writing down a tea tasting in my neon pink ink.
Steep 1: Brewed for two minutes. The tea smells dark and the liquor is a deep warm brown. The first taste is more earth and then a slightly sweet taste creeps in along the sides of your tongue. I looked at the tea packet and saw that it suggested a lower water temperature than I used so I am going to try a lower water temperature with the next steep and see if that changes things.
Steep 2: Brewed for 2.5 minutes. The liquor is slightly paler, but not by that much. It looks more like a dark topaz. It smells slightly like a sweet potato that has been taken out of the dirt and then quickly sprayed off so that it is clean but bits of earth are still clinging to the skin.
The taste is amazing. A very faint cocoa note that mixes with the previous taste to make an amazing slightly sweet rye bread. The kind that is just out of the oven. The crust is crisp and the crumb (the soft part of the bread) is so soft that it deflates in your mouth and releases a burst of flavor. So delicious.
Steep 3: Brewed for 3.5 minutes. The liquor is a light bronze. The flavor of rye bread is still there but it has a slight sweet potato taste to it now. This steep is a little watery, but I think if I had brewed it for another minute it would have been better. This is the last steep for the night.
Overall, this tastes very different from the full leaf version, but I love that it is so different. It just tastes good and makes me think of a warm kitchen when I was little. My mom doesn’t like rye bread so she never made it, but she did make bread. I can let my imagination fill in that it tasted like this tea and I would be content wherever I was at the moment. Delicious.
