My previous note on this tea was with a sample gotten back in 2015 or so. I later bought a cake of this tea and sometimes have it in my daily drinker rotation. I think I’ve got less than half of the 400g cake left so I must have drunk it a couple of dozen times. It’s been in Florida for something like a year now. I drank some yesterday.
This tea is a very fancy grade of leaf with very few small broken bits, if you flake the cake apart carefully. It makes a very bright orange, crystal-clear soup that has a solid feel despite having a very mild flavor. I find that it easily makes more than 10 steeps of tea that I’m interested in drinking.
Re-reading my earlier review, I understand why I was surprised the first time I drank some tea off of my new cake. My first reaction was “this doesn’t taste like anything!” It was kind of disappointing, really. Later, after I broke up 100g or so and let it sit in a jar for a few weeks, it had more taste. Though it still seems a bit faint compared with what I thought I remembered. My dosage is lighter these days though, usually 6g/90ml compared to the 8g/100ml I was doing back then. And also I look at the steep schedule I used then it’s different from my default these days, which is lots more shorter steeps before ramping up the time.
I used a 90-ml anonymous red clay pot and 6+ grams of leaf. Most of the leaf was in a couple of big flakes, one of which I had to break a bit to get into the opening of the pot. i brewed it with tap water passed twice through a blue Brita filter, dispensed from a Zojirushi boiler set at 208F.
I didn’t count or time the steeps, though I can say I probably did 5 before I increased the time much beyond 5 seconds, though the pour time on the pot basically doubles that. Previously I was doing two 10s steeps and then ramping the time up by 10s/steep. I can say that I did not get a tea sweat this time.
I do have to agree with my earlier note on this: the main flavor that I get from this tea is a sort of sweet aromatic wood. It is beginning to develop a bit of camphor aroma also.
Flavors: Camphor, Sweet, Wood
