Be warned: there is nothing black about this tea. The leaves are green. The dry leaf smells green. The wet leaf smells VERY green, and the cup, is green fading to hay.
So don’t think of this as a black tea, even though it is categorizheed as such. Think of it as Indian green tea — which is weird.
But the good news is that this is doing a really brilliant balancing act between the toasted flavors of Chinese green and the resounding bitterness of Japanese greens. This tea is a bright green. Vegetal like broccoli, not kale. Not sauted broccoli with butter and garlic and salt and all that caramelized sweetness, and not raw broccoli with that woody fibrous tooth, but steamed broccoli that is bright green and soft, but still not at all sweet.
Beware also the incredibly short steep time and adhere to it! I went a hair over 2 minutes running to the cupboard to confirm the time and then back to the timer and that extra 7 seconds or so made it clear that another 7 seconds would be 14 seconds too long. But, this is after all a black tea, and so you use boiling water. Go figure.
