DrowningMySorrows Send Message

I’m not sure if it’s because 2022 was a bit of a rough year weather-wise for tea crops or if maybe my expectations were unrealistically high, but the 2022 Tiltshift doesn’t seem as amazing as the previous couple years. It’s not BAD. But I’m not getting the same sort of tropical fruity flavors or that weird soft powdery mouthfeel. It’s not like drinking a delicious smoothie but hot. It’s just…okay. I could drink it regularly, maybe even daily. It just lacks the pizzazz of past versions. It’s like when I tried a sort of western/grandpa-style mashup steeping of one of the previous years in a tea press and it lost all the wild and crazy fruity flavors and was just…tea. It’s drinkable but not life-changing. I don’t usually like to eat while I drink nicer teas, especially if I’m brewing gongfu, because I feel like a lot of the more subtle flavors and the changes between steeps get lost. I’ll have a snack before/after my tea or take a little snack break and then go back to the tea if I need to. I really missed the strong fruit flavors in this version of the tea, though, so after a couple of steeps I started nibbling on freeze-dried pineapple while I sipped. The tea and pineapple went together nicely and it got me a little closer to the flavors I remember being in past Tiltshifts.
I could see myself grabbing a few more to see if they improve with age, but I’m not really upset that there are only minis and no cakes for the 2022. When I asked Paul of White2Tea if there would be cakes or only minis he mentioned there would be a bamboo Tiltshift coming…I like the idea of that but with the way I feel about the 2022 Tiltshift, I’m not sure I’d make an order just for the bamboo version of it.