Fresco Coffee

As I have mentioned before, I don’t generally do flavoured teas, but this tea works for me. It will make a good everyday tea for when I fancy something citrussy.

After the disappointment of their Darjeeling, this tea came as a nice surprise. The puerh is an earthy shu that carries a decent bit of body. What I tasted of it was not exceptional but definitely workmanlike enough to satisfy me when combined with the citrus. This was a bit surprising given my general lack of interest in flavoured teas.

The aroma of the dry leaf is largely grapefruit. When steeped the liquor has a peculiar dual layer to it, as if smelling two separate teas. At the top is citrus then the earthiness of the shu comes into play as you dip your nose further into the cup. The extent to which the two aromas existed separately surprised me a lot. This situation persisted in the tasting of the hot tea. The citrus dominates at first and then the earthiness of the shu came through to take over. Then, when the earthiness has faded from the aftertaste, the citrus remains strongly on the tongue for some time afterwards leaving you with a very clean-feeling mouth as if I had just brushed my teeth with grapefruit toothpaste. I cannot imagine drinking this every day, but it will remain in the cupboard for those days when I want something fruity and simple, and I shall not be averse to getting more when it is gone.

I’m drinking this as default tea when I do not feel like spending time enjoying better teas. I have come to terms with its lack of Darjeelingness and have worked out some basic parameters for brewing it so that something of the Darjeeling flavour comes through, It is not bad and is better than PG or Typhoo but it is just not good enough for me to want to buy it again. Once the packet is gone, I shall look around for a different Darjeeling that I can drink as an everyday tea.

A coffee and tea shop opened up in Beverley, near us, recently. Naturally I got all excited and had to charge in at the first opportunity. So, I checked it out. It seems to stock mostly flavoured teas and coffees with few ‘proper’ teas. Shame that. The place seems like a step up from Whittards, but not so much to my taste. Unfortunately, this tea I bought from there is the same. I have tried it with different amounts of leaf, at different temperatures and varied the steeping time. It tastes like a Darjeeling, but only just and the variable elements don’t seem to change it much. It is certainly not a patch on the other Darjeelings that I drink more regularly, but then it is cheaper too and that shows in the taste. Shame about that. I had hoped for a regular source of everyday tea but this one is not it. Perhaps the shop has others that are better …