I loved last year’s Tiltshift so much that I immediately ordered the 2021 when I saw it pop up on White2Tea’s site around Black Friday. I fired up the kettle and tossed a Tiltshift mini into my gongfu bottle as soon as the package arrived this afternoon.
Glass gongfu bottle, double-walled glass cup. I like brewing in glass…no weird flavors from the teaware and it’s fun to watch the leaves swirl around. Water just under boiling. 130-ish ml of water (bottle about 2/3 full) for 7g ball of tea. Steeps starting at about 30 seconds.
The dry tea smells sweet, kind of like melon slices and strawberry candy. Wet leaf smells more citrusy and sour, way stronger scent than when dry. It tastes delicious. There are a bunch of fruit flavors, some vanilla and candy-like sweetness. It reminds me of what happens when I decide to make a smoothie. No recipe, just grab whatever’s available that sounds good and hope the flavors work well together. Melon chunks, pineapple, apricots, strawberries, some white grape juice, a squeeze of lemon, a good splash of vanilla…a handful of sweet-tart fruity candies? Sometimes you end up with something absolutely amazing (and of course those are the times you can’t remember what you did to try to replicate it), sometimes not so much. This is like one of the really good crazy concoctions. Not too sweet, not too tart. It has the same sort of smooth, light powdery mouthfeel as last year’s Tiltshift did when it was new. My 2020 is now starting to move more toward that malty black tea tongue coating feel and I imagine this one will too with time. After three steeps the leaves had loosened some but were still mostly a ball. I had to take a snack break here and come back to the tea a while later. It went quite a few more steeps after my snack, lasting me all evening. The tea left me happy and drowsy in a state of “tea stoned” derpiness…but I’m the weirdo who tends to get sleepy with caffeine instead of waking up.
