Simply Tea (Århus)

It is nice green tea from Zhejiang province. It has pure taste and aroma reminds a little bit of apricots. Tea is itself quite delicate and flowery.It has umami taste.

Queued post, written June 25th 2014

This sample was positively ancient!

Simply Tea is/was a tea room in Århus. I say was, because I’m not certain about their current status. The actual physical shop/tea room closed a few months ago because they were moving it to anotherr location. It was in their news letter. It didn’t say anything at all about there whereabouts of the new location though, so I’m a little confused by it all at the moment. Sounds a bit like what really happened was that their location became too expensive for them, but they don’t want to actually say that. They still have their webshop open though and still send out newsletters. I suppose it’s possible that they decided to focus more on the webshop side of the business. The webshop has a great deal of really interesting things in it. Some of them are things that aren’t too difficult to find online, but virtually otherwise non-existant in Denmark. But they all have the same unfortunate thing in common. It’s ridiculously expensive. I am sorry, but I don’t care how awesomely good their Keemun might be. It cannot be worth nearly 300 kr per 25g (about £32 or $55). And Keemun is not even an uncommon type at all. I would love to support Alexis (the owner) by shopping there, but I’m not made of money.

Anyway, a long long time ago Husband and I went there for a cream tea. We had scones and jam and clotted cream and I can’t remember which kind of tea. It was a yellow one, I can remember this, because I thought at the time that it was an odd choice of tea to have with scones. I don’t recall it wowing me in any way either. I’d much rather have had a nommy Bohea or something like that. But anyway. It was a gift token kind of deal, so the yellow tea was part of it. As it was a gift token thing, we also got a free sample of this silver needle. And when I say ‘we’ here, I really mean ‘I’. :p Again, I would much rather have had a sample of something else, but it wasn’t something I got to choose.

I’m not really keen on white tea these days. I used to quite enjoy Bai Mu Tan, but now I just think it tastes like courgette juice, and while I like courgettes, I don’t really want to drink them. This sort of prejudice was just arbitrarily applied to all kinds of white tea in my mind, so the sample sat untouched for ages. Years in fact.

There’s no way around it now though. The yet to try box is going to be emptied, dammit, if it’s the last thing I do. And today somehow just seemed to be the day. So here we are.

I remember having the White Rhino from Butiki and being shocked that it was actually drinkable when made up with boiling water. Not only that, but boiling water was the recommendation. I seem to recall Stacy having mentioned on someone’s post about it that she tends to prefer white tea made with boiling water in general. The Lupicia people seem to prefer it that way as well, I’ve noticed. So I considered making this with boiling water rather than following Alexis’ recommendations. (Next time I find myself with a sample of Bai Mu Tan that I don’t know what to do with, remind me to try it in boiling water) In the end, I decided to be a whimp, and followed Alexis’ rather more traditional suggestion of 80°C.

It does smell vaguely courgette-y. Quite sweet, very vegetal and sort of floral as well and with a note that right at first brings gherkins to mind. With the courgette-y note being what turns me off of BMT these days, I wouldn’t say we’re off to a very good start here.

Amazingly, it still has flavour. It was in a little clear foil pouch. Air tight closing at least, but even so. Clear foil bag. And it must be about three years old.

A fair bit of a courgette note, though, and a sort of sharp, peppery note on the swallow. It’s very vegetal and not really as sweet as promised. There is a vaguely nutty overtone to it, though, and nuts are generally fairly sweet for me when used in tea, so it’s not a complete loss.

I can’t say I’ve really been very impressed by this so far. It is very old though, so I would be surprised if it hadn’t lost a great deal of finesse over time and it probably isn’t a very good representative of its type any longer.