April Sipdown Challenge Prompt – your tea with the longest name
At present I don’t have much tea with long names as I am mostly out of Teavivre Tea which reliably had really long ones, and now I don’t want to order more for fear of somehow ending up paying tariffs and duties above the price. The teas I want are not in the US warehouse at present.
Back to this tea – in Chinese, “Scary Fragrance” is Xia Sha Ren Xiang, referring to Bi Luo Chun, so I assume one would add Hong to that to represent this tea. That’s my story and I am sticking to it.
Scary is not the word for this. This is a Golden Snail tea, so powerful aroma is more apt. My goodness, I swooned. First, this is a beautiful tea to look at in dry form. Little gold and brown snails, tightly curled. Slightly fuzzy. Already fragrant.
Steeped, it is a beautiful medium amber to orange that doesn’t reveal just how much flavor there is in the cup. The mouthfeel is thick and rich. I made two Western steeps yesterday and saved the leaves in the fridge for breakfast today.
The first two steeps had honey notes and were a little reminiscent of Golden Monkey. There was some chocolate in the aroma as well. They describe it as having squash notes, but as someone who grew up on yellow crookneck squash only and had other squash only after reaching adulthood, I would say it is more like zucchini that I note here.
Today’s steep was very good but much milder. One thing that really persisted was the creaminess of the mouthfeel.
A delightful tea experience.
This one is so chocolatey good, isn’t it? I think I have one last cup of this stashed for safekeeping and one day sad sipdown.