Hi! I’m alive, but I’ve not been doing a lot of tea drinking. Life has been too busy to savor a cup properly, and I really hate rushing the process. Of course, on vacation, things are less busy, and we were in Canada for about 10 days a couple of weeks ago. We stayed in Lake Louise and generally had a great time hiking, canoeing, rafting, horseback riding and many other fun things.
If you’ve been to Lake Louise, you probably know that there are a couple of hikes you can do that take you up fairly high elevation increases to tea houses waiting at the top of the trails. We did the one to Lake Agnes. The day was exceptionally hot, the elevation was not what I’m used to, and I’m generally out of shape, so it was tougher than I thought it would be and I was really happy to get to the lovely tea house where we had sandwiches and sat for a while before doing the (really easy) downhill. The first tea I tried there was a Formosa Oolong (nothing else in the description) which was nice. The second was a jasmine green that had an interesting name, but alas, I didn’t have the foresight to note what it was, which is unfortunate because it was heavenly.
All of this is a rather long way of saying that tonight when I found myself without any Diet Coke to quell my oral fixation and the choice was water or tea, I started going through tins at random and the third one I picked up was this. It sounded appealing because of my memories of Canada. The jasmine fragrance was strong in the tin, and the little pearls were a medium green-to-dark-green with a tad of yellow. My 8 year old said when he saw them, “I thought tea came from leaves, not beans.” Heh.
I steeped according to the directions on the tin in the Breville, and got a medium, buttery yellow tea which brought the jasmine scent from the tin with it in exactly the same solid strength.
The flavor is pleasant, and not surprisingly very floral. My only real complaint is on the finish and aftertaste which seems a bit flat and almost a little bitter to me. I’ve had oolongs that have knocked my socks off and ones that didn’t work at all, and this is neither. Since I have more tea than any sane person should and don’t get around to drinking it often enough to make a dent, this would not go on any refill list if I had one. Which I don’t because I still have more tea than any sane person should.
By the way, I also stepped into a David’s Tea while in Banff and it was a gorgeous little shop. I sampled a jasmine oolong there, too.
