2010 Spring Imperial Yunnan Jinggu Black Tea

First of all, thank you everybody who commented or liked yesterday’s post. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around it all yet, which as the boyf fiancé(!!! I shall have to learn to spell this word now) said, nothing has actually really changed, but everybody is suddenly very excited.

Second, is it really six days since I last went through the recent posts page??? O.o I forgot to pay attention to how many pages it actually went back, but it was many! Okay, granted, I could have just caught up with the dashboard instead of going through all posts, but these days somehow reading the dashboard instead of the all recent posts feels a bit like reading the summary instead of bothering with the whole novel. It’s cheating and I’m obsessive-compulsive. The problem here, I expect, is probably especially the latter. :p

Thirdly, the thing about catching up with recent posts, especially when there are many, is that it’s inspiring! It makes me want to drink tea, which isn’t a bad thing at all. It also makes me want to drink tea to post about, tea I’ve never had before, which makes it all rather more complicated, because I can’t write a post at the same time as catching up on other people’s posts. I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work. One or the other always ends up being neglected and I find myself with half a post and cup of cold tea which wasn’t supposed to be cold.

In other words, I now get to compose a post based on some quickly taken down keywords. It will therefore likely be short and to the point and not very interesting. (‘To the point’ she says, having just written all of the above…)

I was given this tea by ssajami in our recent exchange (return package should be in transit) and as it was a shared pot I used the whole thing in one go. Very suitable amount of leaf for that too, as it turned out. I wasn’t sure about that at first, I thought I might have used too much, but otherwise it would have been a ridiculously small amount to save.

The aroma was extremely sweet. I thought it was very caramel-y with only a very small bit of that hay thing I normally associate Yunnans with.

Flavour-wise it was the same thing. Very sweet, very caramel-y and with no hint of either pseudo-smoke, pepper or spicy hay to be found, except a very small amount of the latter buried deep deep underneath all that caramel.

As the cup cooled a bit and the flavour developed some more, it was completely opposite. At that point the spicy hay that I’m more familiar with dominated the flavour, and it was the caramel buried deep underneath.

The weird thing was, though, that at the very bottom of the cup when it had cooled even more, the flavour turned itself upside down again, once more resembling the first impression.

Tempted to quote commercials and say, ‘because first impressions last’ here, but I shan’t.

All in all a very nice cup that I was pleased to get to sample.