Garden Teas Palas Supreme

Boh is the Lipton/Twinings of Malaysian highlands. Most of its tea being sold bagged in supermarket, with even 2 in 1 (tea+sugar) or 3 in 2 (tea+sugar+cream) mix available, that makes me cringe each time I see them.
While visiting the plantation, I decided to give a chance to the highest quality teas offered and chose 2 out of the 3, based on the look at the leaves and quick smell.
The leaves are quite long and actually look like dried and partly rolled leaves from a tree. At each opening of the box, I smell it and come back with this only feeling : nice black tea, but…
After the steeping, the tea color is golden honey like, clear.
The taste is quite nice and reminds me of a forest, starting with a green taste like grass or green leaves and switching to a more earthy aftertaste. To my opinion, it seems like the taste of a perfect black tea, completely pure and excluding any kind of flavour.

Now come the ridiculous part, which shows how far I still am from knowing much about tea. On the box I had read flowery pekoe; I remembered having drunk orange pekoe long ago. I wrongly assumed this tea would be flavoured with the flowers of a citrus tree;) Therefore I was surprised not to notice any tangy smell on the leaves, neither on the tea while/after steeping, nor any taste while drinking it.
I then decided to research a bit and understood that flowery pekoe just relates to the quality of the leaves selected for making the tea; flowery pekoe being either the highest or second highest quality range, according to this British classification used throughout India and former British colonies (such as Malaysia).

So this is probably the explanation to my good but not excellent rating to this tea. Despite my conviction this tea is probably a very fine unflavored black tea, but I’ll probably never know for sure as I’m not so keen on black teas, especially when unflavored. At least, this tea helped me understanding that.

The wife of one of my cousins has me in something of a tea war where we send each other interesting tea every month or so and she sent me a canister of this. It’s interesting, but I agree with the poster who called it the Liptons of Malaysia. It is a nice very bland basic black tea with nothing really special about it. It’s tasty but it’s not interesting. Nothing stands out about it.

Sipdown (1375)!

I think this was a VariaTEA share, so thank you for it! I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this tea – it was quite smooth and rich while having an impressive amount of body and thickness to the liquor. The top note was red currant leaning dense jammy compote which kind of bled into more of a malty and grain rich body profile. The undertone was amber honey, slowly building into the finish with this wispy sweetness lingering on the palate.

I believe it’s of the Assam variety, which is not really a favorite of mine. Quite a strong black tea, but smoother than some other Assams I’ve tried. I should try it with milk some time, as it seems well suited as a breakfast tea “English style”. You can add some points if you’re into Assam.