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My tin of this Uva Highlands tea is now over five years old, and I find today that I like it more than I did previously. Either it has gotten stale, or improved with age… You decide! Or perhaps this reflects my switch to using alpine spring water instead of murky tapwater. So I’m boosting my rating by ten points. The leaf is deep chocolatey-brown in color, and composed of broken particles a few mm in diameter, and swelling to about twice that post-steep. They do not appear to have been rolled as a typical CTC product. I used a rounded teaspoonful of tea in a stainless steel infusion basket and 10 ounces of boiling spring water, steeping for four minutes in my mug, western style.

The result was a medium brown, clear liquor. I still detect the characteristic wintergreen aroma on the nose and on the tongue at the start of each sip. But the tea is very strong, astringent, and slightly bitter. Overall, I am enjoying it, but have decided I just don’t like the wintergreen notes. Beyond that, I find a long cedar-wood finish, consisting primarily of what I call the characteristic Ceylon flavor, distinct from the Assamic flavor and others that you might assign to tea types and cultivars, such as China Black, Long Jing, etc. I think it may be interesting to try a steeping at reduced temperature to see if I can knock-down the astringency and bitter notes, allowing the other traits to emerge.