Oddly enough when I searched from “Dragon Balls”, this tea did not come up. Boo. Anyway…
As the song Cup of Brown Joy says, “If you’re tired of tea then you’re tired of life.” Well, I’m not so much tired of life, but it has been feeling somewhat blah lately. And so I’ve been somewhat blah about tea as well. So yeah, I’m still drinking it but I’m just not that excited. Which is stupid because I have some teas to try that I’ve wanted to try for a while and now I have the chance! But I feel that they deserve more than blah me so I’m holding on for enthusiastic me to come back. (If the freakin’ wind would stop trying to blow my house down and the sun would stay out, enthusiastic me would probably show up quicker.)
With my lackadaisical attitude about, well, everything lately, I took a different approach to this tea today. I tossed a couple of balls :snicker: in my cup, boiled some water, brought the kettle to my desk, filled up my cup and just kept topping my cup off as I sipped. So there’s no real steeping time, no real water temp. I really wish I had some oolong at work to try this with but maybe tomorrow.
So how did the experiment work? Okay, so I ended up with a slightly strong first cup since I needed to let the water cool so I could drink it and it kept get stronger as I got about half way down into the cup. But it didn’t get bitter, just strong and I learned to top off my cup frequently-ish and that took care of the too-strong issue. And I might have had to put a leaf bit or two back in the cup at the beginning. But a bit of leaf floating into my mouth isn’t near as bad as a gnat or something and once things got going the leaves stayed firmly in the bottom of the cup (which was kind of neat). The tea tasted good even though there was fair amount of variety depending on how much water was in the cup and how long it had been since I last added more. In fact, towards the end it ended up being pretty sweet which is something I don’t think I’ve hit on with this tea before.
All in all it worked out pretty great and the brewing style fit in well with my current meh-ness. It seemed like I got a lot more tea out of the leaf than I would have otherwise (close to about 26oz I’d guess) and it was pretty tasty once I got the hang of when to top off and by how much. So I’m gonna count this as a win and make note to do it again. Even if the leaves in my cup did make it look like I was drinking a cup of swamp water.
