Yesterday a prominent priest with a popular radio broadcast, blog and twitter feed both ping-backed and re-tweeted a blog entry of mine and my site got 708 unique views in one day. I think that doubled my unique views for the lifetime of the blog (just a few months).
So I’m celebrating with Golden Fleece.
The dry leaf aroma is maturing as it rests. Sweetness and fruit, but also roasted nuts, malt, and cacao.
The wet left is almost overpowering with a kind of toasted cashew or graham cracker scent.
And yet the cup itself is gentle. A sweet start but a dry finish.
With the second steep the characteristic thickness emerges as well.
One thing I notice with this tea is that the flavor is almost entirely in the nose, not on the tongue. I wonder if that’s true of other teas and I don’t notice?
Preparation
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So who did I miss? Fr. Hopko?! I think this is a celebration tea for sure! Wonderful!
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
JIm…….I think that’s true of alot of what we eat and drink. I’ll pay more attention to it in the future.
Yes and no.
True, our tastebuds only register the six basic flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami and spice/heat, and the nose does the rest.
But what I mean here is that my tongue isn’t registering any of those six things, from what I can tell, only the presence of the textured water in my mouth.
The whole mouth feels the slight drying astringency after swallowing, but that’s not a taste, either.
Any flavored tea is going to act directly on the tongue, I suspect, although scented teas probably don’t.
I don’t believe tea, no matter the processing, has any actual sugar or salt in it, nor spice/heat nor umami, so really the only possible tongue registering options are sour and bitter.
I’m starting to think tea is all in the nose.
Don’t you think some teas have a natural sweetness to them w/o being sugar sweet?
Well, yes, yunnan golds particularly.
But unless it is a chemical compound that the tastebuds can trigger on, it will still be in the nose, not on the tongue.
I’d have to talk to a bio-chemist who knows tea, but I don’t think any of the processing which is done to tea brings out a natural sugar of any kind. Tea is essentially zero calorie which suggests it has no sugars, naturally.
So who did I miss? Fr. Hopko?! I think this is a celebration tea for sure! Wonderful!
Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick
JIm…….I think that’s true of alot of what we eat and drink. I’ll pay more attention to it in the future.
Yes and no.
True, our tastebuds only register the six basic flavors: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami and spice/heat, and the nose does the rest.
But what I mean here is that my tongue isn’t registering any of those six things, from what I can tell, only the presence of the textured water in my mouth.
The whole mouth feels the slight drying astringency after swallowing, but that’s not a taste, either.
Any flavored tea is going to act directly on the tongue, I suspect, although scented teas probably don’t.
I don’t believe tea, no matter the processing, has any actual sugar or salt in it, nor spice/heat nor umami, so really the only possible tongue registering options are sour and bitter.
I’m starting to think tea is all in the nose.
Don’t you think some teas have a natural sweetness to them w/o being sugar sweet?
Well, yes, yunnan golds particularly.
But unless it is a chemical compound that the tastebuds can trigger on, it will still be in the nose, not on the tongue.
I’d have to talk to a bio-chemist who knows tea, but I don’t think any of the processing which is done to tea brings out a natural sugar of any kind. Tea is essentially zero calorie which suggests it has no sugars, naturally.