This note is liable to turn into something of a saga.
My previous notes were made on a sample of this I had and I found the brewing of it quite problematic. I got really excellent cups of tea by using less tea and bland ones by using more – which didn’t make any kind of sense to me. However, when I got it right it was one of the finest teas I’ve tasted – really special.
So, a month ago, I decided to treat myself to 100g of it. It was the most expensive tea I’ve so far bought in other the sample quantity. I felt it deserved a little better than my mugs, so I bought an ornate infuser cup with a lid, from the same site. Determined to sort out the problem of exactly how much to use, I also bought a cheap, 100g x 0.01g scales. Trying to accurately weigh just one or two grammes on my regular kitchen scales was clearly wildly optimistic.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it was all a waste of money.
The excellent results I previously had were all with small quantities steeped for two minutes, boiling water. So I made brews the same way with 0.5g, 1g, 1.5g, 1.75g, 2g, 2.5g and 3.5g, though not in that order. In each case I got disappointed. At the best, I got a little basic tea with touches of chocolate and grass and not much else – a reasonable cup of tea but really nothing at all special. I’d pretty much written it off by this time but, just for experiment, I tried steeping for three minutes with 2g, and then 3g. The only difference was a possible tiny-tiniest hint of white pepper.
This is clearly not the same tea as the sample I had. Whether it’s because they come from different seasons – I bought them five months apart – I don’t know. But it’s been a real disappointment and I’m going to drop my rating drastically.
