Christina / BooksandTea Send Message

Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s time for another Sunday Tea and Books review.

The Tea

Jasmine Special Grade Green was part of Simple Loose Leaf’s August subscription box. I ended up getting a sample of this in the July box, and then unexpectedly got the August box for free. When I told Simple Loose Leaf this, they said that they hadn’t meant to send it out, but that they’ve enjoyed my ST&B reviews so much that I should just consider it to be a thank-you box. Awesome!

When I first opened up the package, the smell of jasmine was unmistakable, but the smell of the green base underneath was unusual. It smelled sort of smoky and leathery, but I really couldn’t put my finger on it.

The resulting tea is similar. The jasmine is very strong, but still somewhat sweet. I was initially worried that I had overleafed it somewhat. I think that because of the strength of the jasmine flavour, this tea would benefit more from a 2-minute steep than a 3-minute steep, because at 3 minutes the resulting liquor was dark and intense.

All throughout, I wished that I could get a better sense of what the base tea was. Neither Simple Loose Leaf nor Maya Tea Company (which I’m assuming is the source supplier for this tea because the photo and the description of this tea is the same on both sites) mention the base cultivar/variety for this tea, which means that I feel I’m lacking some context in order to fully appreciate it.

Despite this, it is still a decent jasmine tea. It edges towards the Wall of Overwhelming Jasmine flavour that I worry I will sometimes experience with jasmine teas, but it stops just short of that unpalatable threshold.

I drank most of this while sitting at the little patio table on the front porch of the house. The weather dallied back and forth between being sunny and cloudy. I just sipped, read a book, and watched my cats wander around the front yard. All in all, it was a nice, contemplative tea session.

The Book

So what fictional character does this tea remind me of? This is a tea with a distinctive flavour, but with origins that are somewhat murky. Despite this lack of context, it has a lot of potential for future enjoyment, as I find there’s always something soothing about drinking jasmine tea.

Hm…a character whose origins are unknown, but who has the power to do great things. A character, in fact, whose destiny hinges on the fact that they don’t know their origins, their history, their parents.

This tea makes me think of Taran from Alexander Lloyd’s Chronicles of Prydain series. Although I haven’t read the books myself, thanks to Wikipedia I am an unrepentant devourer of spoilers, and I know that by the end of the series, Taran, despite being an orphan, becomes the High King of Prydain. In fact, his ascension is ordained by prophecy, as it’s stated that only one with “no station in life” would be able to succeed the current dynasty to rule after their passing.

He seems like the perfect character to match to a tea with similarly unknown provenance that is memorable in spite of that lack of info.

EDIT: I did a second steep for 2 minutes, and the result was still very strongly jasmine flavoured. I have to admit that by the end of the second pot of tea, I felt that I had reached my Jasmine Quota for the day.