NofarS Send Message

The dry leaves of this tea are very small and delicate, and black, and remind me of the leaves of a good Ceylon BOP, only darker. This lead me to expect a dark and powerful brew, but this tea is closer to a Ceylon, a light black tea, than to an Assam or Kenya. It’s sweet, with a more ethereal and subtle taste than any Ceylon that I had – and no astringency! It’s very light bodied, almost a cross between Ceylon and Darjeeling, and it’s not at all suitable for milk. If you sweeten your tea, use less sugar than you would normally use – a very small amount of sugar will enhance the tea’s taste, but too much will overpower it. I don’t think that it needs sugar, but it can take sugar.
I brewed it 5 times Western style, and only on the sixth brewing did it lose flavour.
This is going into to be one of my favourite black teas – drinking it was like meeting an old friend that you haven’t met in years, but suddenly run into, and then discover that you miss each other, and have more in common than you ever had, and you ought not to lose sight of each other every again. It’s the tea that you never knew was missing from your cupboard, but that you don’t ever intend to run out of once you’ve found it.
I’ve decided to borrow something from my fountain pen ink reviews into my Steepster reviews: how easy is it to clean up after a tea, once the leaves are spent.
This tea gets a 3/10 in that category – its small leaves are EVERYWHERE! You also have to be careful not to clog up the sink with them, and make sure that you use a strainer – the leaves are so small that some will get through the pot’s strainer and try to be nuisance in your cup.