Blissful Harmony

I decided to be a rebel and brew this as a traditional English cuppa. 5g leaf, hot but not boiling water, 6-7 minutes steep in 500 ml water. I added a dash of vanilla soy milk.

There are a lot of tannins despite the liquid being lighter amber. The milk smoothed it out nicely. I can taste a lot of honey notes. Not just the sweetness but distinctly honey. A little malt but more focused on the honey. Although I don’t drink a lot of plain teas or caffeinated teas, it made a nice morning cup. It has a strong orange pekoe flavour but the aftertaste of honey was a nice surprise.

Sipdown (211)

B is for…Blissful Harmony

This is one of my oldest teas so it is nice to get this sipdown in. I am grateful to teakruthi for sending this my way but this remained in my stash the longest of my teakruthi teas because of the combo of black and white bases. I don’t love mixing bases and this is no exception.

That said, it’s not a bad tea but it’s not for me. It’s a touch coppery on the tailend of the sip. Before that though, I get stonefruit flavors and the slightest bit of honey today. It’s also fairly nutty with a touch of hay from the white tea. Now I am cutting the note short because my nephew has both grabbed my tea and my laptop.

I’m exhausted so if partway through reading this and it doesn’t make any sense, you know why. This is a really unique blend. You see black tea blended with tons of different things but silver needle doesn’t tend to see as many mixes, much less both being mixed together. The first steep is the best with slight malt, honey, and savory earthy notes. In a gaiwan it is best steeped 10 – 30 seconds. Extra time allows for too many tannins and a strange astringency.

I’ve been super busy lately and haven’t had as much time as I’d like to do gongfu tea reviews, though I’ve had plenty of lazy gongfu sessions to sip down old teas. Western steeping seems to be a good compromise. Thanks to Teakruthi for the sample, and sorry for taking so long to get this review posted! I steeped around 4.5 g of leaf in a 355 ml mug at 190F for 4.5, 6, and 10 minutes.

Wow! These white tea leaves are huge! I’m a bit concerned that I didn’t get a proper balance between the white and black teas in the blend because the black tea collects at the bottom of the bag, but we’ll see. The first steep is a smooth combination of malt, honey, flowers, grass, and autumn leaf pile. There’s a lot of sweetness from the white tea and not much astringency from the black. The second steep is grassier, but still smooth and sweet; the flavour falls off in the third.

This tea lives up to its name and harmonizes the white and black teas nicely. I found it to be a pleasant evening cup and agree with Roswell Strange on the rating.

Last of the samples provided by teakruthi that I tried this week.

So, when I saw this in my provided samples I sort of had this inner “groan” type of reaction, because mixed tea base blends are sort of fun conceptually and have this neat novelty factor to them but rarely taste all that good. You’re usually having a slightly lesser version of whatever the tea bases would have tasted like on their own…

However, I was absolutely delighted to be proven wrong when I tried this one out! I noticed that the leaf is still majority black tea (though the white tea in this blend is DAMN pretty) so I steeped it Western style exactly like how I would any other black tea. Boil or bust mentality in a way, I suppose. As soon as the water hit the leaves I was hit with a hint of sweetness that I wasn’t expecting, and it just got better from there.

This was an easy tea to just slurp back because of how smooth it was. I personally enjoy sweet teas a lot, and this tea had a really nice and overall sweet profile. I felt like I was getting this mix of creamed honey notes from the black tea and fresher honeysuckle from the white tea, along with a more sweet and nutty body flavour that still had a rich undertone of creaminess to it. I see now, reading the company description more thoroughly, that they compare it to cashews? I’d say that feels sort of correct; though in the moment I was almost more thinking macadamia nuts and this sort of macadamia nut sugar cookie type thing dipped in milk and honey.

I am so delighted that this tea shocked me so much – and it’s a great example of why I love when other people pick samples out for me. Were I ordering for myself, I would have skipped over this tea and I think I’d have been missing out. We’ll see how I feel about it when I finish off the sample, but right now this tea and Lemon Kandy are both two that I would want to order again.