It’s been a while since I’ve sat down to do a Tea Blog. First of all because I’ve been on holiday. And I’ve been to London again to stock some Mei Leaf tea again. However the tea I’m drinking today is not a Mei Leaf tea! This tea was a gift from my nephews girlfriend. She got this tea from her uncle who travels a lot to China and is gifted tea. Fortunate enough for me she and my nephew didn’t like this tea and knowing that I am seriously into tea she gave this tea cake to me!
And this tea is a proper Tea Cake! I felt so lucky!! My first Tea Cake!
This is not the first time I had a session with this tea. However today I felt this tea deserves it’s own blog. A few Months ago someone recommended a translate app for my phone. You can scan the text with your camera and translate from almost every language including Chinese! So that is what I did with this Tea Cake and that gave me more information about this tea! There was a lot of information on the wrapper once I translated everything and I found out that the leaves from these tea were picked and processed in 2008! So this cake is pressed into a cake and has been ageing since 2008!!
The producer of this tea is a company called Yunnan Dianhong group. They are producing tea since 1939.
The tea that I’m drinking now is made from the Feng Qing’s large leaf variety. The trees grow at an high altitude and the picking is leafs and buds.
As I said, it’s not the first time I drink it today. I had a few sessions with it and it never disappoints! The colour of the liquor is bright but dark. Red like dark cherries. And really thick. The taste is clean, fresh but it feels very warming and round. The smell of the cup smells like liquorice and hay and it reminds me of the barns I used to play as a kid. Luckily it doesn’t taste like that. The taste is sweet and refreshing with notes of chocolate and fresh mountain river water. I have literally been drinking this tea all day and the colour of the “soup” as the Chinese call tea is slightly lighter but still bright. The dark cherry colour is now more chestnut brown. The taste is more crisp like mineral water and still it remains warm and soft. I really love the overal feeling of this tea. Sometimes a tea can make you feel a bit stuffed. Especially when you drink the same tea all day there sometimes comes a point that you had enough of that particular tea. But this one keeps on going strong and stays interesting even after more than 10 infusions! I am so happy with this tea cake!
So a big thank you to my nephew and his girlfriend for not liking it. On the other hand I feel sorry for them on missing out on this spectacular tea as I am pretty sure they didn’t like it because they did not taste it in the right way.
So this is also an open invitation to my nephew and his lady to come over to do a proper tasting session with this tea. I am pretty sure it will taste different when they taste it when it is brewed in a Yixing clay pot and is being drunk from the Jianshui cup.
In the meantime I am the lucky lady that is happy to drink the rejected tea. Enjoying the luxury of my Gong Fu Guru with my Yixing clay teapot and a fancy Jianshui pixelsquare teacup. I will tell you more about my new tea ware in another blog.
I hope you had a lovely weekend too. For now I wish you all the best!
