Walk in the Woods

thank you Scheherazade for this swap! I’m sad to say that we, for whatever reason, decided that rearranging our entire house again was something we wanted to do late into this evening. I blame the purchase of 5 new board games on that.
In any case, as a result i wasn’t able to focus on this tea as much as i wanted to. Overall, it came across as a pretty great cup of tea. Fruity with hints of smokiness from the assam. Luckily i have enough for at least another cup, maybe two, so that i can spend a bit more time focusing on the tea.

Tried this for the first time today. I generally like black teas flavoured with red fruit, but finding one with a good flavour balance can be difficult. In the bag, this one smells just as I want it to. Blackberry and raspberry predominate, and I can actually see one or two whole fruits among the leaves. The base of this one is actually identified on my bag as a keemun, but it seems to have been cut fairly liberally with raspberry leaves. The effect is pretty, but I guess I’m kind of wondering why they’re so predominant. Surely they’re not going to add much in the way of flavour?

Anyway, on to the tasting. I brewed this for about 3.5 minutes in boiling water. Yumchaa don’t really give much in the way of brewing parameters, so I know it’s going to be trial and error until I find what works best. At first, this has no discernable smell, but after about three minutes it develops quite a strong smoky scent.

The smokiness doesn’t translate to the flavour too much, although I can taste it. On the other hand, I can’t taste much in the way of berries. Maybe very slightly in the aftertaste, but that’s all. Obviously I’m going to have to work on how I brew this a little, because what I’ve got at the moment can’t be this tea at its best. The smokiness confused me at first, although after a quick google, I established that keemun teas can taste smoky and bitter, depending how they are processed. I know the taste isn’t contamination, as I haven’t had any smoky tea in my cupboard since I bought this. Smoky tea really isn’t my thing. Where is the fruit, though? It’s so odd, because it smells just fine dry, and I want it to taste like that too!

Not sure about this one at the moment. I might try it black, and adjust my leaf and time/temp parameters to see if any of that helps. The name is pretty accurate, though. It tastes like a walk in the woods in early autumn, when there’s the scent of woodsmoke on the breeze…

I find red fruits black tea hard to find. Or if not hard to find exactly, hard to find one which is just right. They are either too strongly scented or not enough, too artificial or too diffident, the tea itself too strong or too weak. But this is as close as I have found yet to a good red fruit black tea, it´s perfectly balanced to my taste and not too strong, not too weak.