Sipdown (122)!
After getting home yesterday afternoon from my file maintenance shift I made myself lunch and then fell asleep, finally. I had gotten maybe two hours of sleep the night before because I just couldn’t make my body fall asleep so early in the day – and then I had to get up at 3AM to get to work on time for 5AM. Yuck.
Consequently, I ended up sleeping last night for a SOLID 13 hours. So; definitely rested now, that’s for sure. Sadly sleeping so much yesterday means I never got to tell you guys the word of the day! So I can do that now, I suppose. Yesterday’s word was Symbiosis; the living together in close association of two different organisms especially when mutually beneficial. I suppose you could say Tre and I have a symbiotic relationship of sorts.
Today’s word is another new one for me (though yesterday’s wasn’t new): Dross; the waste slag or scum that forms on the surface of molten metal ; waste or foreign matter : impurity ; something that is base, trivial or inferior. This one might be harder to use in a sentence; but the challenge to do so still stands!
But lets get back to the tea itself…
This is my last Octavia Tea blend to try (but not my last to sipdown); and I think I really only saved this one for last because it was so adorable and I liked looking at it when I opened up my sample drawer. Seriously, the little teeny tiny formed mini cakes are flippin’ precious!
I used one of the cakes for my mug of this; if I’m remembering correctly the recommended amount was one cake for 8 oz. but I used one for 12 oz. and after having doing so I can say that two would definitely have been too much tea for the water amount. And sadly, once my cutie pie little tea cake hit the water, it quickly started to come apart. Boo. I mean, I expected it to but it still would have been hella adorable if it hadn’t.
Taste wise this was surprisingly smooth with some very nice, well rounded sweet earth or, rather, loam notes to it. I drank it early in the morning on my way to work, and it just felt very appropriate to be having it as a “breakfast blend” of sorts; the way it was very bold and robust flavour wise to kind of slap me awake, but with a softness to it that kind of apologized for doing so. As for the rose, it wasn’t as present as I expected it to be but it was faintly there contributing a caress of floral flavour that likely added to the overall softness of the blend.
Surprisingly to me, I think this is a blend I would buy for myself. Partly for the taste, which was definitely better than I had anticipated and partly for how aesthetically pleasing it is to look at tiny little heart shaped Pu’Erh cakes – but a lot because of the convenience that the formed cakes provides. I can definitely imagine travelling with one or two of these cakes with me – the convenience of taking loose leaf tea on a trip, but without sacrificing the flavor or quality.
