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My husband won the Oolong sampler from Teavivre in their recent giveaway and it finally arrived on Friday. Therefore, new tea! Whee! He was obsessed with trying this one first because he loves the idea of monkeys picking tea. He was very disappointed to learn that it is highly unlikely that a monkey touched these tea leaves, but he got over it.

I am not much of a Tie Guan Yin fan but hubby is, so between us we should have a balanced review. I still don’t care for greens or green oolongs but I sometimes see the appeal. This is actually being paired with a fairly brisk breakfast of scrambled eggs with vegetables so hopefully it doesn’t get too lost.

I followed the Western style instructions from Teavivre’s website and steeped the 7 gram packet at 100C for one minute. This yielded a light smelling liquor that has what I think of as a fairly typical TGY taste. It verges on being astringent but it doesn’t really develop. I was worried about the boiling water, but it does work. I am not getting any of the peaches and cream I usually get from this sort of tea but I don’t know if these leaves aren’t like that or if the water muted the flavours. This is a perfectly enjoyable cup though. Lightly sweet, nothing grassy or “green.”

The second steep at 2 minutes tastes much the same. The hubby says it is like a light green, and doesn’t find much of a difference between the two. He seems a little disappointed but I reminded him that gongfu would have given him a bigger variety of flavours but we were lazy. Ah well. :)

Will report on further steeps later. For now, it is groceries and then a return to GTA V and reading and crosswords and Supernatural and tea and lovely Sunday afternoons at home.