Last night was my 3rd night in a row of not sleeping well, which is highly unusual for me (I generally sleep like a vampire at dawn), and when I did sleep, my dreams were crazy, scary, & disturbing. It’s not the caffeine, as I’m pretty used to the level I’ve been drinking. In part there is the late night blogging to blame, but I’m also having awful allergies, which always makes me feel irritated from head to toe.
So today I thought I’d be gentle with myself & try a fun little experiment, which I’ll call “Peach Oolong – 3 ways”. I had students today from 10am until 4pm, with a few short breaks, so I felt like the day would lend itself to this sort of thing.
Peach is one of my favorite flavors. The Tea of this experiment is a dark green nugget style Oolong (summer?), mixed with pale chunks of peach, cut at roughly the same size as the tea. Dry, it has the scent of under ripe peaches. I’ll confess right now that it isn’t my favorite Peach Oolong, I prefer a more fall-like blend, so I’m not going to attempt to give a rating.
Brew #1: In a cup, 3 minutes, basically the standard brewing I’ve been doing for years. It’s a very light taste of less than ripe Peach with a brightness to it, & a slightly bitter green backdrop. I just remembered that I usually use a Tablespoon, because there’s more peaches than tea, & I only used a tsp. I re-brewed the leaves & the 2nd cup was less peachy, more green, slightly astrigent. When I use a T it is better.
Brew #2: Same as #1, only I added a few drops of Stevia, which really brought the Peach to the for-front, & my mind’s eye saw the color yellow. This was my preferred brew of the three.
Brew #3: I’ve been reading some tea blogs, so I decided to try something different. First, I gave the tea a quick hot rinse, then I went with 6 brewings:
20 seconds – lightly sweet, pale green
15 seconds – I felt clarity, a mild orchid scent, pale apricot essence
15 sec – Alkaline
15 sec – more Tannic, my mouth was really dry…
20 sec – OK….admittedly, at this point I started losing interest…
25 sec – This last one was like really smooth water…
I have to confess, I didn’t drink all the tea in this series. I drank the 20 sec & the first 15 sec cups, but after that I just sampled them. I tried this technique because…well…just to try it. I suspect it is more worth doing with plain, really awesome Oolongs, & I plan on doing so when the teas I’ve ordered arrive. So really, this was just a trial run, I suppose. But worth trying.
