Rooted Dian Hong

154/365

This is an interesting one – a CTC, from LP! I think it came as a sample with one of my orders from him, but I don’t really remember given that it was so long ago. I’m not the greatest fan of CTC, except when I’m super tired and want an instant perk-up, or purely for the sake of convenience. Today falls into the former category, because getting up to go to work never fails to make me feel exhausted. Let’s be honest, it’s mostly because I hate my job. Might need to do something about that.

Anyway, for now I have tea, and that makes the world a better place. This one brews up quickly (of course) to a rich, dark chocolate kinda colour. To taste, it’s a lot smoother than I expected – perhaps because it’s a Dian Hong. It’s quite dry, in the way of cocoa, and a little tannic, but still pleasantly rich and malty.

It comes off fairly ordinary at first, but I keep getting little fleeting flashes of something at the back of my throat. It’s a little bit like smoke (wood smoke, not sweet like tobacco smoke…), and a little bit like root beer (chicory?) It certainly makes this experience a whole lot more interesting!

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to try this one. It’s loads better than I expected.

You know the scene in Stranger Things where the guy says “mornings are for coffee and contemplation”?

Well, snow days are for tea and library books. In those terms, the day was a success.

This tea has the tiny little balls like Irish/English Breakfast, so it diffuses quickly and makes a really rich, dark cup.

My first thought upon drinking was “BUTCH.” There’s a heaviness here, a smoky, leathery, manly richness.

It’s not the sort of thing I typically go for, but I enjoyed it fairly well.

I’ve also been enjoying watching Inception again. We own this movie, but we’re watching it on TV with commercials. This movie holds up, guys. I know that’s unrelated to the tea, but I thought I’d mention it.

Western-styled. 3 minutes @ 195 F. Smooth black tea with zero astringency. Not the best, but not too bad either.

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.

This is a mild tea. It’s not special, but it’s certainly not bad. What I really like about it is the teeny tiny rolled up tea balls.

I also can see the root beer taste like Daylon said in his review with stronger steeps.

This tea was okay. It mostly tasted like a root beer flavored black tea. I expected something heavier, but I got a light cup. The tea did have a smoother quality that I usually associate with Dian Hongs, but the cup had a decent amount of dry tannin. I personally did not get a lot of flavor, but I did not think that was horrible. I just don’t think it compares to LP’s other teas.

As much as I hate ctc teas… I had to figure out a way to play with one to get it to be acceptable. Eventually I learned that there was semi golden dianhong that was made into ctc which drew me in. I decided that since it was already a dry like tea, why not add some more to that aspect. Well… this happened: https://liquidproust.wordpress.com/2016/06/16/unusual-approaches/

and in 10 days the leaf had taken on the smallest amount of smoke which comes off like a semi smoked chocolate you would taste from a bar that has smoked taste to it; but this is quite dry so it’s more of a cocoa.

It took awhile to figure out how to get this to brew correctly to taste the way I want others to taste it as. Turns out that this is quite strong so 3 grams is plenty and 45 seconds to 60 seconds is the time to keep it at; used a teapot for this brewing. Came out quite smooth, but dry like I described. Being that I’m not a fan of ctc, Assam, or Ceylon, this tea is getting a harsh review from me but it passes. I’m going suspect that someone else will find it much better than I do.

I’m hoping this slight smoke doesn’t completely fade within 3 months; that will be something I test out.