Just received my LP tea order. I went for a darker mix (FT Dianhong, Dark Kitchen Sink, Jin Xuan and Coffee, Rummy Pu, Laoshan Chocolate Genmaicha, Swanns Way) because.. well.. I love dark tea. I sense that Andrew picked up on that and so he added this tea into my order. While I absolutely love the process (I love anything and everything birch), the CTC tea kind of makes me nervous.
So, I picked this one first. I followed directions and used 4g (1g over but just barely) and brewed it for 45 seconds. I set the temp for 200F just because I wasn’t sure and again, I didn’t want to get the tannic astringency and bitterness I normally associate with CTC black tea.
I have to say that this is WAY smoother than I thought. It has a fairly classic black tea flavor but I detect no tannic bitterness. As an added bonus, there is a faint birch flavor at the end of the swallow on the back of the tongue. Having had birch beer/pop and birch flavored candy, I am pretty familiar with the flavor. I’ll be interested to see if I push the steep time and temperature if I can coax out more birch flavor or if that just makes the tea go into bitter territory.
Second steep of 1.5 minutes yields less birch but still a good smooth black tea. Color me surprised. My rating for this is absolutely taking into consideration the fact that it is a CTC tea. I suspect if I had this experience with a whole leaf tea I might be a little more underwhelmed but this certainly outdid my expectations.
