The Jabberwocky

Sipdown 136-2021
Another pot of tea to sip through things more quickly. This isn’t my favorite. I find it a bit muddy and thick. Really vegetal, with some cacao notes at the end of the sip.

I ordered this tea from WP because, honestly, I liked the name. I have no vested interest in the tea or know about the hype surrounding it until I started looking at the reviews.

I brewed this following WP’s guidelines: 1 TBSP / 8 oz @212F for 3 minutes, then 5 minutes
(I will also try this GF style, then update this review)

Tea: 1.5 grams, which about fit in my TBSP at home.
Water: 8oz/237 ml

For this brew style, this is a very innocuous tea without much wow factor in the flavors. It’s not bad and I suspect that it’s a good beginner type tea for someone who is used to bagged tea from Tazo.

For what it’s worth, finally found the eucalyptus. Maybe it only comes out while eating risotto with your tea…

Otherwise, a solid and frequently returned to black tea for me.

I finished off my bag of the Spring 2018 harvest several days ago and it took a while to background process my opinion.

While this tea is complex and layered flavor-wise because of the mix of Chinese red teas, I feel like the Jabberwocky’s bark is bigger than its bite. It’s an easy tea to slay, one I could drink all day but I was always left longing for something a little deeper, a tea I could sink my teeth into, a beast that would put up more of a fight. I may have preferred this tea gongfu actually, because each type of leaf in the blend waxed and waned. There was however, always a bit of flatness to the body regardless of brewing method. The description is mostly apt, but I was missing out on that camphor and eucalyptus.

I think this tea would be very appealing to those who like slightly sweet and softly poetic Chinese reds.

Opened the pouch yesterday. I was looking forward to trying this one.

The Jabberywocky tea’s dry leaf is thin dark twists. The dry tea leaves and tea are aromatic. It has a good chocolatey, woody forest, honey aroma. The wet leaves have the equivalent but more intense aroma of cocoa, dark cocoa to be specific and honey. I could smell some malt, baked bread, and wheat toast. I love those three aroma/taste in tea, by the way. The liquor was a dark amber color and the early infusions had some dried fruits, lots of cocoa. It was woodsy and malty. The baked bread, wheat toast/bread, sweet potatoes, and some spices notes, a dash of salt were present throughout the infusions along with the fresh aroma of fruits, sweetness. Later infusions produced minerals, raisins, and a stronger fruit taste, particularly white peaches, more malt, while the dark cocoa, wood, sweet potatoes, and bread-y notes remained. Lots of honey sweetness, along with brown sugar, burnt sugar, caramel, toasted bread. It has a thick texture although not as thick of a texture as their Alilaoshan Black that I sampled a couple of weeks ago. This is smoother though, in fact, when I drank the infusions, it felt as though I used a different type of water, I didn’t. Really soft mouthfeel. It is also extremely complex with clean notes. Great aftertaste and a long finish of sweetness, and coolness. No bitterness or astringency.

6g, 212°F, 110ml, rinse, 14 steeps: 5s, 10s, 15s, 20s, 25s, 35s, 45s, 55s, 1m5s, 1m15s, 1m30s, 2m, 3m, 5m

This is one of the teas with a flavor profile that I used to refer to as “mushroom,” although it doesn’t exactly taste like a mushroom. I associate the smooth, slippery, heavy mouthfeel of it with mushrooms. Now that I have more experience with flavor profiles, I’ve come to learn that honey is at least one common denominator among all these “mushroom” teas.

It’s a flavor profile I really disliked in the beginning, but have slowly acquired a tase for. I especially appreciate it after long breaks from high-end teas. I usually prefer bold, astringent, and malty black teas. But every once in a while, its nice to change things up so that I can appreciate a sense of newness in the flavors I get too accustomed to.

Despite having been on Steepster for so many years, I have not developed the tea-conossier tasting sensitivity so many of you others have, so my reviews tend to be pretty basic (sorry!). What I can say for this tea is that it stands out from the crowd with its subtle minty finish.

Smooth, complex, easy to drink.

A beautiful blended tea

i want it…

Forgot to save my previous note on this, so this will be just a short and quick review.

I prepare this tea mainly gongfu style, but I have also done it western

With gongfu, early steeps contain a very fruity apricot taste (specifically dried apricot). But subsequent infusions adopts a heavier wood-like taste with malt and dried apricot background. I haven’t seen how it tasted following the end-stage infusions, so can’t give much of a comment on that.

I did prepare this western style once quite a while ago, and I do have to say that western style is the recommended way to approach this tea. It had a very complex yet harmonic taste, consisting of fruits (with apricot as main), honey, general sweetness, light wood, chocolate, and a maltyness around it. I believe gongfu style doesn’t allow the blend of leaves to steep sufficiently enough to have the combined flavour from all of them, but instead prefers the faster steeping leaves over the others.

Not a bad tea, but not recommended if you prefer tea gongfu style.