Following the general gongfu instructions, I first poured boiling water onto the leaves and simply poured it away. Then I used 80 degree water and let them steep for 15 seconds, all I got from that steep was a general fruitiness, which made me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have done the rinse/wash. With the next steep(20 seconds), the fruitiness got much stronger, and I probably could have figured out some individual fruits if i had walked over to the fruitbowl and taken a sniff for comparison, but that didn’t occur to me until much later. Obviously, I should eat fruit salad much more often. The third/fourth steep(depending on wether or not you count the rinse/wash as a steep) basically gave me more of the same. After the next one I got interrupted and had to take a break.
The fifth/sixth one had a sweetness. On the sixth/seventh steep, there was more sweetness, but also some woody notes. The sweetness retreated on the seventh/eighth steep, while the wooden notes got stronger and were accompanied by a slight smokyness.
In the eigth/ninth steep, the sweetness changed, becoming simultaneously more subtle and more intense, more purely sweet – I think it may be that it originally developed out of the fruitiness, and this is its true peak. The wooden part disappered, completely replaced by smokyness.
Umm, at some point I lost count of the steeps, but eventually it got weak, so I put the leaves away and cleaned the tiny pot and cups.
