Hmm – somehow I wasn’t thinking when I brewed this up. I treated it like an oolong! In my defense, I did brew it a little cool for that, ~188 so just take this with an extra pinch of tea leaves in case I botched it, right?
More tea that I have had freaking forever. And yet it still smells good. The dry leaves had a great deep caramel flavor, with brown sugar elements. The leaves were rolled up tight in little balls – there was a slight amount of dust and broken leaves.
When I brewed it up, they unfolded into these incredibly long spindly skinny leaves – really interesting looking, like something out of an Edward Gorey drawing or a Lovecraftian opium vision (what, too fanciful? Come on, it’s almost Halloween! … and they really look that strange).
The liquor smells great – almost a caramel or tobacco flavor. I still get some of the notes of oolong butteriness, but it is more like a smokey sweet kind of scent. It smells like it would taste like butter spice cookies. (This is really not sounding like a green tea, is it? …)
This tastes suspiciously like chestnuts. I definitely brewed this too hot – I taste bitterness but that might be an illusion exacerbated by the astringency of this tea. It is very nutty in a great walnut/chestnut kind of way.
I definitely have to try this tea again and make sure not to mess it up because I can see the potential here.
