__Morgana__ Send Message

Sipdown no. 67 of 2018 (no. 423 total).

It feels good to sip this down because it was a big honking bag, almost dimensions of letter sized printer paper. I’d say it’s about 8×10.

Lesson: hot water and long steeps gets some flavor out of white tea, as does cold brew.

I’m still not sure I grok unflavored white tea, or perhaps it’s that I don’t fully appreciate it because I am not sure I’m tasting it prepared as it was intended. I should probably try some at a tea house somewhere, where a professional makes it, so I know I’m getting the preparation right.

Still, what I’m tasting in both hot and cold brew grew on me enough to get this into the green smiley face column, ever so slightly.

Sipdown no. 66 of 2018 (no. 422 total).

Took this to work over the past two weeks. It remains a good solid jasmine green tea. I’d drink it again, though I’ve found some juicier jasmines since I first gave this one a try.

So Steepster already has an entry for this tea but it is broken — it doesn’t display properly in my browser and it also won’t let me post a note. I sent in a support issue note, but it hasn’t been changed in a week, so I gave up and decided to create a new entry — even though coming across multiple entries for the same tea in Steepster makes me all cringy. I know there’s very limited support for Steepster, and that makes me wish there was a way for us contributors to merge double entries and remove broken pages. I’d be happy to take care of this myself.

Interestingly, when I went to create a new entry, I discovered there is a new feature (which is long overdue) that lets you know that there is already an entry for the tea you are trying to add. Fortunately, that was easy to do here as I could simply use the English translation.

This is a wonderful tea. The dry leaves, aroma of the steeped tea, and flavor all have a really wonderful fruit blend flavor that’s primarily cherry and strawberry. It has less depth than some other Mariage Freres blends, or it would get an even higher rating from me. But the fruits are lovely and I could drink this all day.

I’ve been experimenting with this tea over the past week because I felt sure I was missing something. Like I’ve said before, I don’t “get” white tea and I keep trying to get it.

I decided to try this with hotter water and see what that did. There seems to be a division of opinion between whether to use low water temperature or hot water temperature with white tea. My first shot was low, so I tried boiling at 3 minutes yesterday. The flavor from that endeavor was marginally better than the 0 flavor I got from the original steep.

Today, I tried boiling at 7 minutes. In other words, I treated this as an herbal. This is the most successful steep yet. Today’s steep has a mildly nutty flavor a little like water chestnut or macadamia.

But the most successful of all has been the cold brew. On the strength of the cold brew alone, I’m upping the rating from 20 to mid-range. The cold brew is actually flavorful — definitely nutty but also arboreal, and a sweet aftertaste.

I wish I could figure out how to make the hot tea taste like the cold brew. I’ll continue to experiment. I have a ton of this, so a lot of room to play.

Meanwhile, No. 2’s assessment of the cold brew is “it tastes like leaves, like every other tea you ask me to try.”

Since I wasn’t able to find an untried plain black tea this morning with anything approaching ease, I decided to switch gears and do a plain white tea instead.

I’ve never really understood white tea. I love the concept of it, and I think I’d like the tea itself if I could ever get it to steep in a way that brought out its flavor. But I’ve tried a gazillion different ways, and no matter what I do the best I can get out of it is a sort of dew drop flavor for the silver needle variety and a planty, almost weak black tea flavor out of the white peony variety. Neither of which makes it worth my valuable tea tasting time.

This one falls into the former category. It’s a visually pretty tea with a pungent earthy smell in the newly opened packet. I steeped according to package a directions, and it came out so colorless that the only way I could tell I’d steeped it was the heat.

It smells like nothing so much as hot water, too. After draining the cup, I can smell something very subtley sweet, but wow is it barely there.

My impression of the flavor is pretty much the same. I can’t really taste anything — anything!

I’m concluding that I should drink up all my white tea and then give up on it. I’m sure it will be a mutually beneficial parting as this poor tea is probably everything a person with the gene that can taste white tea could want — but it does absolutely nothing for me. I might as well drink plain hot water.

I’ll probably try it cold brewed and see if that does anything interesting. I might also try it steeping hotter and longer just for laughs. But absent a miracle, I think this is one that’ s lovely fluffy leaves are taking up way too much room in my house for what it provides to me in return.

Sipdown no. 65 of 2018 (no. 421 total).

I tried it cold, too. It was ok, but the cold brew didn’t bring out its best.

Much better as a hot tea, which is how I finished up the last bit today.

Sipdown no. 64 of 2018 (no. 420 total).

As it was the lowest rated black tea in my cupboard, it went into a cold brew mix — there wasn’t enough of it alone to make a full pitcher so I combined it with the last of the Richmond Park Blend from Upton and Snickerdoodle from Leland.

The cold brew is quite weird, and not the parting note this tea deserved.

Sipdown no. 63 of 2018 (no. 419 total). Sample tin.

A very tiny bit left in the tin (1.5 spoons full) so I dumped it into a mix for cold steeping along with the Tea Table Keemun Hoa Ya A and some Leland Tea Snickerdoodle to see what that would do.

It’s a truly odd black iced tea, neither fish nor fowl and not as strong as I would have expected.

But I have nothing of interest to add to my original note on this one.

I had forgotten, when I cracked this open and steeped it for my first morning tea today, that this wasn’t a straight black blend. Surprise!

The first hint should have been the smell of the dry leaf in the bag (I bought a huge one because they were out of the small ones and I haven’t met a Harney tea I couldn’t drink). There’s definitely a strong citrus zest smell from the bag, along with a bit of a stone fruit aroma. Bergamot and stone fruit right there in my nose first thing was the first hint.

After steeping, some more interesting aromas came to the fore. The very dark berry aroma, the cocoa aroma, the bready aroma (which combined with the cocoa made me think of croissants) and some bergamot and honey. The tea is a medium coperry-red with a slight haze to the liquor.

It tastes about like its smell. Perhaps a bit more on the berry side than anything else, which is fortunate as if it had been more to the bergamot side most of the other flavor might have been lost.

A very tasty tea to accompany the news coverage of the Royal Wedding.

Sipdown no. 62 of 2018 (no. 418 total).

This was the lowest rated black tea in my cupboard with enough to cold brew, so I left it in the fridge for just short of 24 hours.

It makes a tasty if not entirely remarkable black tea. It has a weird saltiness to it that makes it interesting — a little like the saltiness of salted caramel but with a different flavor profile.