Bouwa Kaisha

Bought this in Chinatown – Yokohama has the largest Chinatown in Japan and one of the largest in the world – from a shop that I happened to duck into because it was raining. The nice old lady there followed me around and explained what everything was and even gave me some jasmine tea to try. I bought this because I thought it sounded neat: pu erh, oolong, and rose! I learned from a friend that these types of blends are actually quite popular in China for dealing with drinking and eating too much. Well yesterday I definitely did the former if not the latter (all you can drink karaoke, baybeeeeeeeeee).

This is quite nice! I like the dynamic of the oolong and the pu erh, both teas are quite present but somehow their interaction smooths out the taste, so that the normal dirt taste of the pu erh isn’t quite so noticeable and the sort of resiny aftertaste of oolong was also unnoticeable. I had thought that since it appeared that the tea just had rosebuds put into it, they wouldn’t do much to change the taste since I’ve read in other parts of this site that flowers added like that are mostly cosmetic. These must be some sort of magical flowers because the taste of rose was VERY noticeable. (I’ve also since had just the tea without a flower in it and it doesn’t taste of rose at all, so it’s really the rosebuds doing it) Magic or not, the rose taste also fits this tea really well, I am quite pleased!

It was also quite helpful for my nausea although it failed to do anything about the icepick lodged in my brain. Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything.