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Y’all. LOL.

I peeled myself off the floor after this session.

Dry leaves smell like dry oak barrel. Steaming leaves open up to fermenting red fruit, grapes, wet wood, musk, mint, and camphor. Whew.

First pour is largely transparent gold — honey, minerals, hay, and funk on the nose. Spiky in the mouth — tastes like a barrel, like alcohol, like tea tree, like grape skins, like sucking on green hardwood. Sandpaper astringency on the back of the throat.

Wet leaves now smell like opening an old cherry chest of drawers, like getting lost in the basement of an antique store, like fruit must and weird dessert liqueurs only your grandparents drink. Medicinal fennel, Jazz Age toothpaste, peppermint schnapps, dark oily incense, a dusty crystal and tarot shop. My upper lip is tingling from being pressed against the pot to inhale.

Second pour is slightly more opaque, thickly golden, with a nose of tingling and ethereal hay vapor. The barrel taste is morphing from wine barrel to bourbon barrel. Dandelion smear, pilsner, Spanish wine cave, tropical fruit, brut champagne, varnished pine. GOOD LORD.

Back to the wet leaves is back in the basement of a Midwest antique shop, a cherry chest of drawers inside a cedar closet, creamy menthol. Third pour smells of yellow cake, dry summer. Sipping produces astringency reminiscent of carbonation and booze, a mouthfeel I’ve only ever gotten from alcoholic drinks. Hops and iodine and green wood. Where this started off tasting dark-and-brooding boozy, it’s now light-and-crisp boozy.

Back to the pot. Resin and wood oil. What the 1950s and 60s smelled like in my imagination, when everything was made of wood and hard work. Liquor off this pour smells like melon, a wet clarinet reed, yeast. Tastes of white grapes, crisp astringency, green wood essence, menthol, beer.

Feels like I’m getting indulgent at this point, but I can’t get enough of these shifting specters. Wet leaf has become the most fantastical basement you’ve ever smelled, the wardrobe to Narnia. I feel heavy and not even here. Pour smells of white grape, fermented gardenia petals, champagne. Mouthfeel is still drying but not sharp, flavors have started persisting rather than transposing. Here is cup-captured nostalgia, curiosity, history, wisdom. I am absolutely floored, brain and body both.

Mushy cantaloupe rinds and German lager. The end.