Queued post, written September 19th 2014
This tea was the one that made me place an order with Yunnan Sourcing in the first place. I’ve never ordered from them before, but then someone in the chat room (which you should all visit now and then, you know!) asked if we had ever had it and it was also mentioned that YS were having a good offer up at the time. So, having already fulfilled my requirement for being allowed to order tea (emptying the yet to try box) I decided to just be spontaneous and try it.
The thing about this one is that during preparation it has been roasted with a kind of sugar similar to muscovado. This made me think it must have been sort of caramelised and it’s not really a secret that I am generally attracted to caramel-flavoured things and I love food that has been cooked with sugar and butter. In Denmark we do this with small cooked potatoes as part of the traditional Christmas spread. On the other hand, I don’t like having sugar in my tea. I find it unnecessary and in some cases actually unpleasant, so that was a bit of a gamble.
Quite sweet. A bti too sweet really. underlaying notes of hay, wood (oaky) and a bit of earth. It’s having pu-erh-y thoughts, this tea. Perhaps that’s what it actually wanted to be when it grew up. As it cools it just tastes more and more like a cup of ordinary Yunnan black which has had a spoonful of sugar added to it, and we’ve already established previously that I don’t like sweetenener in my tea.
Re-steep is a bit thin, in spite of having steeped for rather a long time, due to receiving a telephone call from a friend whom I haven’t spoken to in a couple of years. He’s just become a father for the first time. The re-steep is very much a pale imitation of the first steep. It’s the same as the first, only… less. Much less.
I feel a little disappointed by this. It wasn’t what I imagined it would be, although now in the harsh clarity of hindsight I don’t know how I could make this mistake. Sugar is sugar and caramel is not made of only sugar. I love caramel flavour in my tea, be it naturally occuring, manipulated out in processing or added flavour. I hoped this would be more caramel-y.
I’ll give it some points for being interesting though, and drinking an interesting tea is always a good experience regardless of how it tastes, because I’ve never heard of tea being roasted in sugar before.
