September 2019 harvest
The tea is so smooth. Too smooth for me, too smooth for western brews. But it’s strong! The profile and caffeine remind me of some Assam or Japanese black tea profiles. Dried cherries, tobacco and cherrywood are the most prominent flavors and they feel like they were sitting out in frosty evergreen forest air. It’s a cooling tea despite the warm flavor profile.
Check out the old note because I feel like so much of what I have to say is redundant. https://steepster.com/derk/posts/391280
Strange how I fell hard for a June 2018 harvest but this one has left me feeling ambivalent enough that I used most of it to make weekly pitchers of cold-brew for Kiki (which she loved and I never tasted). Looking at the wet leaf, I think this is more highly oxidized such that it presents as simpler and more straightforward.
93 for June 2018 harvest, 72 for September 2019, average 83
Flavors: Bitter, Butter, Cherry, Cherry Wood, Chocolate, Coconut, Dried Fruit, Evergreen, Fruity, Honey, Lemon, Lychee, Molasses, Orange, Prune, Raisins, Rosehips, Smooth, Tangy, Tannin, Tart, Tobacco
Wow. Funny how the harvest varies—greatly, in this case.
I’m foggy about which years my two harvests of this tea were from, but I liked my previous sample more than the 50 g bag I bought during our big Black Friday purchase last year. I have a feeling that batch was from 2019, not 2020, though I could be wrong.