Spring 2016 Crassicolumna Sheng

Day 12 of the homemade advent calendar: today’s theme is Chinese herbals

At first I find this herbal kind of plain with notes of vegetables broth, but once you steep it a bit longer it really tastes long a puerh tea. Vegetal broth notes, toasty flavours, hints of potato, but mostly it reminds me of a fermented tea flavour. It is related to tea, so I’m not surprised it tastes so similar.

This is an interesting tea. It’s not tea but it tastes a lot like tea. It’s made from a close relative of the tea plant. This tea was actually pretty good. It was sweet with little real bitterness. I really didn’t notice any bitterness to this tea. It did have a mediciney like note to it early on that seems to have disappeared by around steep five. This is not as good as sheng. But as I can’t drink sheng quite this late with my insomnia it is a good choice. I steeped this ten times and it would have gone a few more but to be honest I had had enough tea. For anyone thinking of trying this I think this is worth getting a 25g sample of. It’s quite expensive. I would not have bought it except it’s caffeine free.

I steeped this ten times in a 150ml gaiwan with 5.1g leaf and 200 degree water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, and 1 min.