I’m getting down to the last few sessions worth of this, revisiting it after not having tasted it in some months.
Maybe at the same time I got these I also bought a sample of the Milk, Cream & Alcohol: at the time, I was thinking that MC&A was about similar to this. When I mentioned that to 2Dog he was emphatic that MC&A was better tea, which thought I filed away for a while.
Later I bought a cake of MC&A and have been drinking it almost every day: it’s what I started with today, and I thought it would be good to do a near back-to-back comparison. Which is not totally fair to this tea, because it’s down to the last bits and is mostly chop at this point, while the MC&A I’ve been drinking has been looser, closer to whole-leaf material. But the session was instructive nonetheless.
This tea is definitely thinner than MC&A, especially considering that I was brewing chop (Basics) v. mostly large leaf pieces (MC&A). Spring Basics also has a considerably stronger bitter bite and comparatively powerful mouth-drying effect after 4-6 steeps. Basics has killer sweet dry-cup scent (in early steeps anyway) compared to the relatively bland one of MC&A, and Basics gives a nice fruity aftertaste, while the MC&A seems more about thickness in the mouth and an overall feeling of more power.
Anyway that’s my $0.02. I think maybe I will also do a comparison of Basics Huangpian against Fade. Basics Aged against Repave might be instructive also.
Flavors: Biting, Bitter, Drying, Floral, Hay, Sweet
If you ever end up doing these comparisons, I’d like to read about it.