Ahh. Wednesday. A work from home day.
Which means my overflowing shipping boxes full of recent tea deliveries are surrounding and beckoning to me. Yes, that’s where I’m now reduced to collecting (I won’t say storing because that might mean it would become a permanent solution) my tea deliveries, one for each type from black to white. On second thought, beckoning is the wrong word. It sounds gentle and polite, or at least resistible.
But first, I must not ignore my crusade to drink up the bagged tea to make room for all the new stuff, lest the boxes indeed become permanent. The good news is that though there are still way too many, I’m finding that I’m running out of ones I haven’t written notes on.
This is one. The bag has a deep “black bagged tea” smell, a bit like the Numi pu erh bags but minus the leathery/earthy notes. It steeped to a dark brown. I used 2 bags in 14-16 or so oz of water which likely resulted in a darker liquor than would be typical.
The tea smells much nicer than the bag; it has something similar to that sweet, brown sugary/malty smell I detect in a lot of the black Samovar teas and that I just love.
The sweetness isn’t as apparent in the taste, unfortunately. There’s a tiny bit of sugar in the finish, and a full, malty flavor with some astringency. It seems better than many of the bagged blacks I’ve had. But it lacks the depth and smoothness of the loose blacks that are my frontrunners at the moment. I’d be afraid that steeping any longer than 3 minutes would turn the corner into bitterness.
I’ll finish this up and would choose it over other bagged blacks in a pinch, but there are better teas. I’m spoiled by Samovar and Mariage Freres and look forward to more spoilage as I work through the contents of my shipping boxes.
