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April 28th, 2021 harvest, grown without pesticides

Second time this has happened in the middle of typing a glowing review of this tea — backspaced myself out of the pop-up window and lost it all.

In my frustration, I feel like I need some closure so I’m posting a little bit for now:

What a gorgeous Japanese black tea! It blows away all past encounters with Japanese blacks, all of which deeply offended my stomach. This leaf is so clean and pure.

I’ll come back with a full review later after typing it up in another platform :P

After taking the first sip, I realize this tea will wreck even the most fortified of stomachs. So, milk.

Sweet butterscotch aroma that barely creeps into the taste which is so often the case for flavored teas. The taste is like drinking a fresh, peppery cigar with a strong black tea note. And then there’s the leather, the taste of which feels like a lead blanket draped over the body. It’s more than just wearing a leather jacket. Piled in steer hides. Lightly smoky whisky and burnt sugar remain on the palate. This tea is heavy and earthy, sultry and rich. Wet backwoods, tobacco plantations, rolling hills, tack rooms.

A vibrant range of tastes imparted by 3 different types of tulsi.

It’s tulsi. What more can I say? Less star anise-clove forward than I recall Trader Joe’s tulsi being, which I think was also a blend of 3 types. This feels lower toned, more grounding, but it doesn’t taste like earth.

Good for a morning where I had to talk myself down from calling out before forcing myself out of bed 20 minutes before work, heh. I said to myself, “derk, you can go home for the day at lunch”, but then now begins the post-Thanksgiving year-end scramble to complete projects. Work was actually a good way to separate mind from body today and I finished out the full day with relative ease. Maybe the tulsi helped.

Tastes like one of those cinnamon and peppermint flavored Starlight candies. Fennel noticeable after the swallow, along with licorice root. Pretty sweet. Cinnamon and peppermint together is a combination I tend to avoid. Not bad. Good peppermint. Don’t taste the chamomile. Why the need for mint and licorice flavors, though?

Awful. The taste brings back haunting memories of the 1980s and chewable children’s acetaminophen.

July 2020 harvest

This tea would be a delight for flavor-focused drinkers, new and seasoned alike. It has all the right malty-but-not-heavy, fruity and baking spice notes, along with a strong florality that melds with those notes so well that it may be imperceptible. While the tea itself doesn’t have a lot of flavor beyond tanginess, the aromatics absolutely coat every surface of the mouth and into nose. That’s where the beauty of this tea lies. I swallow and the vibrant, complex aroma just lingers forever, transforming wildly over the minutes.

I’ve drank this tea both western and gongfu and my experience says western doesn’t do this tea justice. It still has all the notes, however a bit muddled and it must be steeped with more leaf than you’d think based on the aroma of the dry leaf alone. Either method doesn’t seem to amplify the body of the tea, though. It is always medium-bodied. This tea can take boiling water. Wait until it cools for a bit like an Assam black tea to be able to fully taste what it has to offer.

The one thing that keeps me from repurchasing this tea is that I am, without fail, grumpy after drinking it; that or I drink it when I’m unaware that I’m in a foul mood and having a cup of tea brings brings it to light. Either way, I don’t think it complements my constitution. It is a fairly cooling tea, and the feel and flavor profile speak to me as an early fall brew when warm days can still surprise.

I’ve had the Camellia formosensis species processed as an oolong that was not much to my tastes. If this Wild ‘Shan Cha’ is of the same species, I’m inclined to say that black tea processing does the species a great favor.

Another Organic India tulsi blend that just does it for me. It’s a strange mix, honestly. I’d expect another ingredient to tie together the tulsi and hibiscus but it works well as is. The tulsi is much more prominent than the hibiscus, so I could see this working for hibiscus haters. A little tartness and fruit punch taste, nothing crazy.

The bag I had stated Best Before 04 APR 2021, drank nearly 8 months beyond that. No issue with the taste whatsoever. I actually quite like this one. There’s less of the obvious hay-and-apple floral chamomile taste and more of a soothing herbaceous quality.

Has the cool, crisp freeze of Pacific Northwest peppermint but is unfortunately watery. Perhaps 6 oz of water is needed for a bag instead of my usual 8 to 10.

The experience of drinking a tree, thriving as a part of its larger environment. From the clean air to crowns and fruits. From mosses and lichens and orchids to bark. From grasses and nuts strewn about to root crowns gathering nutrients for transport. It is not an isolated process. And neither are we. This tea grounds me to what supports my being. It is life’s teacher.

I had the 2019 harvest. Please read Jade’s note for this tea as well.