Hello, steepster! I’m trying to catch up on my ‘follow’ stuff — I haven’t changed that in months. I will probably be adding people willy-nilly over the next few weeks (or months).
Anyway, tea! Not my first cup of tea since getting back from my travels, but close enough. Decided this morning that I was feeling lazy, wanted to toss two teaspoons of tea into my travel tumbler from Teas Etc. (since I didn’t get to use it after it came in!) and just continue to top it off with fresh water whenever it got sort of low. Usually I’m pretty militant about my steeps. This morning? This morning I was bunkered down into some sort of creative maginot line, trying like hell to put sentences together in comprehensible English after two weeks without writing, and could absolutely not be fussed to bother.
It held up rather well to that sort of abuse, overall. Subsequent ‘steeps’ in the running chain of repours were good through several trips to top off the tumbler, but kind of uninspired. It’s a solid green oolong, floral but less buttery than some others I’ve had. It’s tasty, but there are no revelations in store for the sipper.
(Even now, some five hours after the fact, a sip from the two or so inches of liquid left in the tumbler — in which the two teaspoons of leaves have been wallowing throughout — produces a mellow, standard green oolong flavor. It’s neither oppressively buttery nor uncomfortably astringent in the bitter-green and vegetal sense, and would probably make for a very forgiving iced tea if brewed this way (though I personally find that green oolongs lose a lot of their character when they’re on ice. Refreshing but insipid when cold).