Adding anything to Tie Guan Yin sounds like sacrilege to me, but this one turned out better than expected.
The aroma is of sweet, dried fruit, but surprisingly the fragrance of the tea is also very much intact. The flavors in this one lean more toward berries or currant, but not really pomegranate. Which may be a good thing—anything stronger or more tart would have been more suited to a black tea instead, but this level of fruit is just right. The overall effect is a delicate brew that has the lingering fragrance expected from a TGY. But I can’t give a higher score because something is a little off—maybe the preparation, the leaves, or the blending process, but the tea tastes as if it’s been overly cooked (panned/fired) even with a short steep. The first few sips even have a hint of oiliness to them, and made me think genmaicha, which is definitely not what you want here.
