Honestly, I’m not feeling all that great today so it’s not the best time for me to try a new tea, but my order from CTG just came in and it had this interesting little beastie in it and I just couldn’t resist.
There are two different ways to prepare this, plus I’ve got my own sort of default prep method, giving me three different ways I want to try this tea at to see what it gives me. For this first attempt, I decided to go with the ‘high flavor brew’. 4g/4oz, 175° for 45s. The tea smells very vegetal with a hint of buttery. The first part of the taste is refreshingly astringent with a very vegetal/green and a little sweet and buttery flavor. The aftertaste is astringent but sweet. And now my cup is empty.
4oz almost isn’t enough to figure out what I think of this tea. I could probably do without the astringent aftertaste, but I kind of like how it shows up at the front of the sip. The other flavors in the tea are also very promising but I’ll have to have more of it to figure out how much I like it. And that will give me a chance to play with parameters, too. So right now the rating is tentative, subject to change with more parameter playing and when I’m feeling more chipper.
ETA: I messed up the second steep (too much water) but it ended up nice anyway – the vegetal taste of a Chinese green, the sweetness of a Japanese green. I did a 5s steep, treating it like I would a Japanese green and I probably could have given it a touch more time since it tasted a little thin, but at the same time the shorter steep time probably kept any astringency down.
