Tea and Zen

This is part of my Sample Demolition: Verdant Tea series. 

I find one of the best ways to tell the quality of a tea is to throw it into a gaiwan and brew it gong fu style. For any quality black, oolong, or puerh that I have had, it can stand at minimum five brewings before beginning to lose flavor. This one barely managed to, but it is nothing to hoot about. I like grandpa style as well, but I only had five grams so went with gong fu.

As for this tea, it began to lose it's flavor around the third brewing. The sweet aftertaste remains, but that's about it. The tea itself isn't bad, but there isn't a redeeming factor strong enough for me to say that it is good either. Three stars it is for this tea: average, and I'm being a little nice with this.

Upon opening the bag I was met with a nice, sweet, floral scent. I was pleasantly surprised, it reminded me of honeysuckle and orchids. The downside of this surprise is that it reminded me of Golden Fleece. I find Golden Fleece to be very floral and sweet, but lacking any depth. To be fair, Verdant Tea is the only vendor I've had Golden Fleece from and I've seen it elsewhere. I'd be willing to try it again. Lack of depth is what I was afraid would happen with this tea.

Wet leaves

I used 5g/120ml and 100C water. I rinsed the leaves once before moving onto the first brew.

The mouth feel was very robust and rasping. Considering I was expecting something like Golden Fleece and not an Assam, I was rather surprised. Very short taste and mouthfeel, though your dry tongue remember it was there. If there was no after taste, this tea essentially tasted like an Assam (Irish Breakfast comes to mind first) with a much higher astringency than usual.
The aftertaste was floral and tasted just as the tea smelled: honeysuckle and orchid lingered on the sides of my tongue.

Liquor on the 2nd Brewing

I became excited with the second brew. It was much less astringent, the mouth feel was much smoother, and both the maltiness and sweetness had increased. The increase in malt wasn't a big hit with me, but the change in mouth feel was a good sign that the tea may begin to flower into something very nice.

It didn't. Generally speaking, so I'd say 9/10 times, if a tea does not start to get going by the 2nd or 3rd infusion are either absolute crap, or average. That is this tea, if that's all you really wish to know, save you some reading time.

The third brewing resulted in a brewing equally astringent to the first, but with less malt and sweetness. At this point my tongue felt like sandpaper from how astringent the combined three brews had been. I sipped on some water to help re-hydrate my tongue and the floral notes spread all across my tongue instead of just the sides. I thought that was very nice.

Leaves after 3rd brewing

For the fourth and the fifth brewing the astringency finally began to die down tremendously, as did the maltiness. The sweetness stayed more or less the same in both brewings. Sadly no more depth or complexity to the tea.

The 6th brewing had a nice aroma, somewhat chocolatey, it was not present before. The liquor however, was now almost tasteless.

Dry leaves, I apologize for the quality

Despite this I decided to give the leaves one more try. The liquor was several shades lighter than the 6th. All flavor save for a tiny speckle of sweetness was gone. Slightly more astringent.

Overall I enjoyed this much more than I did Golden Fleece, but still wasn't much of a fan. I felt like the Golden Fleece was missing a lot of something, namely depth. While this tea had no depth and complexity, it had the strong, astringent body to make up for that, but it was no saving grace. To reiterate myself from earlier in the post, if you take the sweetness away from this tea you may as well have an especially astringent CTC Assam. That is not at all what I was looking for or expecting in this tea.

If you would like to try this tea, you can purchase it here.