I'll show you mine if you show me yours

What an enjoyable afternoon Neil of Neil's Yard and I had trying a variety of tea. Am going to briefly go over the highlights, and possibly come back and go into more detail if there's more to cover.

I wanted to see what he thought of the Darjeeling I have from Darjeeling Tea Express, so I started with a Goomtea Pre Autumnal Black. You can read about it here: Darjeeling Pre Autumnal. This is a tea I like, but Neil was immediately smitten. He loved it. Couldn't help but taste the muscatel, he said. He could clearly see why I was so excited to share this tea with him.



Then I tried his Everyday Kenya from leaf. (leaf. tea), and I was similarly impressed. I've not had much Kenyan tea, but this was delicious. It smelled smoky like a good Yunnan, but was so smooth and spicy. Here's how the leaves looked before adding boiling water (Very dark brown with yellow tips):




Although many Darjeeling lovers wax rhapsodic about first flush tea, I've always liked the stronger second flushes. So I was excited to brew a bit of Gopaldhara 2nd flush (again from Darjeeling Tea Express Gopaldhara 2nd flush). Although he liked it, it didn't make nearly the same impression that the Pre Autumnal did.

This is one of the things I love about tea. Not just the variety of flavours, but the incredibly subjective response that can result from two different tea drinkers.

After we got the black tea sorted, we spent the remainder of our time on multiple infusions of something called Organic Blue Tea (again from leaf.). According to their website, Oolong is sometimes called Blue tea because it's somewhere between black and green. Had never heard that description, but why not? Here's how they describe it: Organic Oolong 'Blue' tea, and it's stated, 'this oolong tea is a Qi Lan from the province of Guang Dong in China.'

From both appearance and taste, this is clearly a highly-oxidised Oolong. Like many first infusions, the smell was more pronounced than the taste. Nevertheless, you could tell what an enjoyable tea drinking session was in store based simply upon this smell.




Sure enough as we drank multiple infusions, the taste of the tea developed. How I ever brewed one single infusion of a decent Oolong still makes me shudder. It was at this point that we sat down and looked at twitter. I think Neil was a bit impressed, as well as intrigued, that the tea companies he'd been in contact with were so easily accessible on Web 2.0. So often, twitter makes no sense until one can see it in action.

There you have it. A wonderful tea tasting experience, and the more he talks about it, I can't wait to see how Neil's Yard turns out. Stay tuned.

Camellia sinensis-fueled

For those of you waiting on the edge of your seats, the tea tasting went rather well. I waited until people arrived before I even opened the vacuum-packed sacks of tea, and as a result I experienced the tea for the first time during the tasting. There were advantages and disadvantages to that, but I'm sure I'd do it the same way again.

The disadvantage was that I couldn't easily be the impartial observer. I was right in there as one of the guinea pigs being introduced to five new teas in one sitting. Not complaining. Far from it. The thing is that my attention was split between assessing the qualities of the tea and making the others' tasting experience as pleasurable as possible.

So I'll give you a quick overview of the teas right now, and then over the next few days or weeks I'll go back and try these different teas. In the stillness I'll be sure to get a better understanding/description of each one.

Caroline showed up first, and we always seem to have twice as many stories to tell each other than we have time for. As a result, she gets through half of a tale before I've interrupted her with half of one of my tales. It means that we often say goodbye at the end of meeting each other promising to pick up where we left off. This event was no exception. Caroline briefly told most of the story about how she got into tea. She's not much for black tea at all, so I opted for starting with the Kangra Oolong.

It wasn't new to Caroline that in some Asian cultures the first Oolong steeping is poured out in honour of one's ancestors. We joked about not wasting tea, and it's a good thing we didn't discard it because that first pot smelled too good. It tasted a bit light/unremarkable, which is why I want to go back and experiment with this tea in the near future. We did brew it a second time, but that was later in the tasting.

By then Monique and Peter arrived and I was eager to brew the Gopaldhara 2nd flush. I'm partial to these darker Darjeelings, and I wasn't disappointed. As I was pouring it, a few people admitted that they didn't normally drink much black tea. Immediately after my assurances that Darjeeling isn't typical black tea, they had a few sips and were convinced.

Monique and Peter

At about this time Caroline had to go, but Jarrod arrived and took her seat. The discussion veered toward the appearance of the leaves and the Grade specifications of Darjeeling. For example, this Gopaldhara 2nd flush is a FTGFOP, which stand for Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. Everyone was impressed with this tea, but I'd spent so much time talking about the differences between 1st, 2nd and Autumnal flushes that they were eager to move on to the next victim.

As long as we were speaking German, we had no problem with talking about the teas that were plucked most recently right after the rainy season. But as soon as I started saying 'autumnal', we got lost in a fit of giggles. They all knew the word autumn of course, but I have no idea why they thought 'autumnal' was so urkommisch. But they did. The Castleton Autumnal was also one I enjoyed, but didn't get much response from the others. There were no negative comments, but I seemed to be the only one who wanted to wax rhapsodic about its merits.

It was around then that we digressed entirely away from talking about tea. We kept drinking, but the conversation had a life of its own. It was really enjoyable, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the excellent tea was somehow responsible. As I served the Gopaldhara green, Peter told us stories of hitchhiking in the United States. At some point we got into a rather heated debate about how many grams were in a scoop of tea, so we had to get out the scale and compare the weight of the black and Oolong teas. When I think about how much tea and non-tea ground we covered in a few short hours, I'm amazed.

After a second steeping of the Oolong that we'd started with, I brewed the final tea. It was a Goomtee Pre Autumnal flush and the others were really taken by it. I thought the cup colour was much darker, but the taste wasn't nearly as complex as the other black tea we tried. It wasn't bad. Not at all. And maybe when I drink it on its own, I'll see it for its strengths. Like I said, I'll go back through these teas again in the near future and give them a more careful taste.

The whole ordeal was rather enjoyable. The best parts of it were the parts that could never be planned. The conversation was unquestionably Camellia sinensis-fueled. The company was exceptional, and I'd happily have any of these people over again and again.