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tea-sipper drank Golden Orchid by Whispering Pines Tea Company

4324 tasting notes

Additional notes: THANKS SO MUCH for sending me over a few samples of these Whispering Pines teas, Kawaii433! I truly appreciate you sharing them. Most of them I haven’t been able to try and if I did, it was ages ago, or the samples were of questionable age. (Has Whispering Pines really been around for ages? At least AN age.) So it is great to revisit some of these teas, even if I had the honor of trying them before. I rated this tea 99 five years ago and that is an elite group. Unfortunately, this new harvest isn’t wowing me…at all. It’s not a matter of being tea spoiled because I can generally appreciate a tea about as much as I appreciated a tea before… even if the tea I have around is on the older side. But this isn’t old tea anyway. I wanted to savor these two teaspoons of leaves, so used one teaspoon for this steep session without filling the mug all the way (this should have resulted in a similar leaf to water ratio that is mentioned in the description). Sadly the flavor is not as chocolate or vanilla as I remember. I didn’t see any vanilla beans in this sample, even though I remember quite a few from the harvest of five years ago. The brew simply isn’t deep enough to remotely resemble chocolate. The flavor is very light. Too light for me to even describe… it’s like the faintest flavor of Fujian black tea. But PLEASE don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Maybe with the parameters you use, it will be the same lovely tea once again. I tried this tea years ago and of course harvests can’t be exactly the same. It’s a shame though. If I lowered ratings, this tea would now receive a 72. :/
Steep #1 // 1 teaspoon for not quite full mug // 10 minutes after boiling // 2 minute steep
Steep #2 // 8 minutes after boiling // 3 minute steep
Steep #3 // just boiled // 4 min