First of all, thank you so much Angel from Teavivre for the samples!
I have slowly begun to get into black tea but I am still new, so please be patient with me! This will be the first black I review.
The dry leaves were tightly wound large balls with a strong scent. I decided to do a rinse of these to loosen them up a little bit so I rinsed them for about 15 seconds.
I then gave them a 1 minute steep at about 212 degrees which unfurled a layer of the leaves partially. After the steep, the wet leaves produced a slight sweet molasses like sent. I have had a black tea that was described with a molasses taste and I did not like it, however, this was a way better smell to me. The tea was a medium gold, lighter than I was expecting and I could tell this was going to be different than I was thinking it would be like. The taste was an interesting warm flavor that carried a subtle dark chocolaty sweetness. This was a pleasant surprise! I had never taste a black quite like this one.
I decided to try to pull out more of the flavor and steeped this one for 2 minutes. This caused the last layer of leaves to unfurl completely, producing a dark gold liquid. This time the tea had more of the dry chocolate flavor with a slightly bitter after taste.
I wanted to play with the taste some more so I decided to steep it at 1:45 this time. This gave me the dark gold liquid again but more of the first steeps taste. This is definitely a tea that you can change the taste to your liking by managing the time and leaves well. I continued on to a 4th steep and could tell that it would resteep well at least one more time.
