February Sipdown Prompt – a tea you hoard
I wrote this prompt and yet I couldn’t decide what I really meant by hoard. Do I mean tea that I buy lots of and keep buying before it can run out, like a dragon adding coins and sparkly bits and bobs to his cave? Or do I mean a tea that I have and just don’t drink because I don’t want it to go away.
The beauty of it is that we are all free to interpret the prompts as we wish. I do hoard Lost Malawi, because I don’t want to run out. The tin doesn’t get very low. I drink it whenever I wish, though.
This tea I have purchased only once, after having a sample of it from lovely, wonderful beerandbeancurd. It always felt too nice and too rare to just open it and drink it, and Ashman doesn’t love bergamot so I knew I would be drinking it alone most likely and there it sat still sealed until today.
I was afraid I had left it too long and the flavor would be dulled, but the packaging must have really worked because it is fresh and lovely. The dry leaves are a thing of beauty – soft curls, impossibly light, gold and brown mixed but mostly gold. It looks like ashman has been using a handplane on an exotic soft wood.
For this first steep ever from this pouch, the bergamot is strong but not obnoxiously so. The base is one that tends to medium and low notes, which carries the bergamot nicely. I dislike bergamot on high grown Ceylon and other tea that has natural sharp or high notes.
For the previous samples we had, a few of us noticed that the bergamot fades quickly once the pouch is opened. I have transferred this to a double seal tin to see if that preserves the aromatics, but if it doesn’t I won’t be mad honestly, because the base is really good. It would probably also bring the bergamot to a level Ashman would enjoy.
