For all of my black tea drinking, I’m a relatively newbie to Ceylon teas. But I decided to break out of my Yunnan, Assam, or Darjeeling rut and give this one a try.
Koslanda has been an organic and biodynamic estate since 1992 and is located in Sri Lanka’s Uva’s District, famous for its teas and often used in blends.
The recommended steep time for this tea is relatively short for a black tea, three minutes, not because it’s delicate like a Darjeeling, but because this is a broken-leaf tea and with all that additional leaf-fragment surface area, this baby infuses quickly.
The liquor is rich and dark, but what’s missing is flavor. It’s not an unpleasant flavor, mind you, it’s just completely lacking. It sort of hints at being Assam, with a glimpse of maltiness, with a bright nuance reminiscent of Darjeeling, but they’re all vague hints. And the clean finish that Upton’s description mentions is really a euphemism for when you swallow, any flavor immediately disappears from your mouth — there’s no after-taste whatsoever.
That said, because the liquor is smooth and rich, it holds up to creamer and sweetener fairly well. After trying it neat, I added vanilla rice milk and agave syrup and it tasted, um, sweet and vanilla-y. But the tea was doing very little of the work here. Disappointing.
