Yunnan Gold

Well, yesterday was an insane tea day – 7 different teas for me and multiple steeps of most of them. So that’s BIG for me. And I liked it. So I decided to carry over the tea bounty on to today. I’m not going to hit 7 – maybe 4 if I’m lucky – but still. Yay tea!

Brewed this up in my handy dandy ingenuitTEA using filtered water from home. I’m pretty sure that makes me a big ole dork, bringing tea water to work, but the water here is nasty and using bottled water makes my tea flat.

For some reason, the leaves smell of fruit. Some sort of berry. I think when I first got this tea, it was sitting up against a plastic bag of black currant tea so I’m guessing the smell soaked into it a bit. Which is weird. But at least it doesn’t carry over to the brewed tea. It smells comforting – kind of like dry grass plus a little spicy and bit of baking chocolate. Plus, I get to drink it out of Totoro so how can I go wrong?

I wanted another cup of tea but didn’t really want to resteep the Ceylon King so I pulled this one out. I’ll probably have a steep or two of this and switch to something non-black for the rest of the day. I actually had to go rinse my mouth out after the first steep because I was getting some taste of bitterness from the Ceylon still. But once I’m all rinsed out, this tea is back to the yummy sweet and lightly earthy taste I know and enjoy. Not getting much peppery out of it except at the very end of a sip, there’s a slight prickly warmth left on my tongue. A nice fallback plan of a black tea.

ETA: The husband is having some too and I’m not sure if he has before so I asked him what he thought. His response: “At first I think fish and then melon.” Weird!

Nearly out of tea. Gearing up for a big order of known unknowns.

I have discovered that the key for the yunnan gold is to blend it with other leaves. This manages the sweetness well. Good options are TG’s malty black tea and, not surprisingly, a fermented pu-erh (which is also made in yunnan, and so, probably very similar leaves to the gold).