Still suffering from some cough thing that is now, fortunately, fairly intermittent rather than pretty much all the time. My body feels like it’s been through a war. I need to exercise, but haven’t gotten back in the saddle yet.
So, the second to last of the samples in the Harney & Sons green tea sampler. Really the last, I guess, as the fourth is a yellow tea. Kind of excited about that one as I haven’t had a yellow tea before.
But first, this one. OMG. What an amazing smell in the sample tin. I’ve smelled butter in green tea before, but this is beyond butter. It’s like that melted butter they bring for you to dip crab or lobster in. And a vegetal smell, too, which is what the butter is drenching. There’s a really interesting additional note that smells a little like a baking spice to me. A weird sort of very vague ginger or allspice sort of smell. Hmm.
The leaves are incredibly fine. They remind me of those iron shavings that they used to put behind plastic on a card when I was a kid, and you were supposed to take a magnet and draw on the plastic, which would distribute them over a picture on the card and enable you to make a beard on a face or something of that nature. It occurred to me that it could feel really nice to jump naked into a swimming pool filled with these leaves (and no water). No idea where that thought came from.
The aroma is still a bit buttery, though much more dilute, and there’s a plantiness to the aroma that is a bit like water chestnuts. The liquor is pale green.
It has a sweet, green taste that’s a little surprising in its lack of overly vegetal flavor given the smell of the dry leaves. Mild, smooth, no bitterness. Some butter, a little nuttiness.
It’s been a few days since I had the Kagoshima Sencha which I quite liked, and I like this one at least as well, though I thought it had… hmmm… dare I say more flavor? Or at least stronger flavor. It may also be that given the fine-ness of the leaves I should use a bit more tea than I did? Because I’m getting a really peaceful, sleepy tea here. Which is fine, though given the price differential I’m not sure I’d choose this over the Kagoshima.
It could also be that my palate hasn’t yet fully awakened to the nuances of green teas, and that months from now I’ll look back on this and wonder how I could have come to this conclusion.
