Woah, this tea is a DRUNK, lemme tell ya what. Starts off medicinally herbal with an interesting twist on the dried date flavor if it was stored in weird conditions, and then a pretty heavy astringency kicks in that never leaves, unfortunately. There’s a fair amount of bitterness too, but that fades while the astringency doesn’t, and I hate astringent tea, :(.
The heavy brain tickling, lead finger weighing qi starts to trickle in early, around steep 3 or 4, along with a sweet, syrupy red fruit flavor I quite liked, but doesn’t stick around. Still that heavy undercurrent of woody astringency that is the base of this tea, but wow, I started losing track of the steeps we were on and where the last steep when and where did my notes go around steep 6. Flavors don’t really change much from that sort of ‘medicine woody goodness’ according to my jumbled notes there on, it seems.
Overall, I wasn’t much of a fan of the flavor profile of this one, although I did find the interesting variation on dried date flavor cool. The energy is where this one delivers, however, holy cow! Most tea drunks are like a muted giggly high or tunnel vision/heaviness for me, this was full on stop what the heck is going on, where did my tea go, oh, did I… drink it? level of drunk, lol. I’ll save the rest of my 43g and see if maybe the astringency dies down with more time.
Flavors: Astringent, Dates, Herbaceous, Medicinal, Red Fruits, Wood
