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So I’m working through a few half-finished advents and countdown boxes, and the Volition/Yao Cha Tiger Box Year of the Tiger tea collection is one of them. This is Day 11. The dry leaf smells like malt, yams, and molasses. I’m always torn about how to brew teas from Volition – the instructions say to use a mug, but given the quality of the leaf I feel like it benefits from gong fu brewing. I did the first steep precisely per instructions and it came out tasty but just a tiny bit thin, so I switched over to gong fu after that. Even that first steep tasted like the dry leaf smelled, with absolutely no astringency or dryness. Subsequent gong fu steeps maintained that sweet potato and molasses flavor, but also felt just a little less robust than I’d ideally like for this flavor profile. I got a ton of steeps out of it though, and the good news is that this is a black tea that doesn’t hurt my stomach. If I had more I would experiment with using a bit more leaf than recommended.