Gosh, Steepsterites! It feels like it’s been ages, eons and decades since I last inflicted my presence upon your unfortunate and super-humanly patient souls! There’s just been so much recently, you know? We were away over the weekend so I’m really in need of a bit of a breather. A 9yo birthday. Four children and fourteen adults in one lounge for a whole afternoon. Gosh! O.o (Nothing wrong with my family at all, mind. It’s just such a lot of people)
So I thought it was definitely time to sit down and get a proper post together and relax a bit before making my shopping list and getting some groceries in. This is one I got from Ssajami, and I was quite excited about it from the moment I took it out of the box. The description of it on the pouch sounds right up my alley!
The aroma has a quite strong note to it, which I think is a mixture of the honey and the flowers, although depending on what sort of flowers honey is made of it can have very different smells as well. I can’t really find the fruit very well in the aroma. Perhaps a tang of rhubarb, but primarily it’s honey. Thick and rich and viscous.
The flowers give it a rather strong floral flavour as well, which disappointed me a bit. I was looking for something rather more fruity and this is borderline verging on slight bitterness instead. I’m not sure what sort of black tea is at the base here, but I suspect that like most other flavoured teas where this is isn’t specified, it’s probably a Ceylon. I should have liked to have had it on a Chinese base instead, to put that astringency-going-on-bitterness out of the picture. Oh well.
That particular disappointment aside, it’s a quite nice tea. Once I know what to expect from it, I find the floralness less of a problem, and I have no problem locating fruity flavours underneath. Mainly straw- and blueberry, not so much rhubarb. I suspect the rhubarb here, being in itself rather astringent, is hiding in that nearly-bitter astringency of the black tea.
I did however make it with boiling water although Le Palais des Thes recommend slightly below boiling because I only discovered that when it was too late, and it did possibly get a bit of an extra long steep because I was too lazy to change the timer. I still have enough leaf to try again and we’ll see then if that makes a huge difference. I expect it will definitely eliminate some of that astringency there.
As it is, however, I’m quite pleased with what I got out of it this time too.
