Panyong with Paklum

I’m so tired of drinking nothing but Pickwick or Lipton when I’m at my parent’s house. Recently they’ve had Twinings which is a step up. A very small step, granted, but still up. So for Christmas 2010 I decided to do the sort of thing I hate and give someone else something that I was interested in rather than something they were interested in. I bought some free flow pyramid bags (because I know better than to throw loose tea at someone who only ever have a cup once in a blue moon anyway) from A C Perch’s, stuffed as many as I could fit inside a 250g tin from same and wrapped it for her. In my defence it wasn’t her only present, I also got her something from the Body Shop. Further in my defence, she had bought me a tea light holder. AGAIN! I counted them all yesterday. I now have in my possession 16 tea light holders. And I never light candles, tea lights or otherwise.

Those bags come in boxes of 30 and I wanted there to be something to choose from, so I got two different boxes. I could have got one of the sampler-y boxes they had with four or five different kinds in it, but I liked these better. This one and the breakfast blend. They’re classic basic teas without a ton of flavouring and stuff.

Anyway, that left me with a total of 60 teabags. In case you haven’t tried it yourself, that does NOT fit inside a 250g tin. So I stuffed as many in the tin as I could and kept the rest in the boxes and just gave her the tin. If she founded she didn’t really like these I saw no reason to saddle her with two whole boxes of them. I’ve told her I’ve got the rest and she can have those as well if she wishes.

Which she does, I’ve decided, because later that Christmas my father asked me, no ordered me to get some tea that I could have at their place because he was tired of giving me that cheap stuff knowing that it was a lower quality than I would ever buy for myself. He despises tea, thinking it one of the most vile substances on the planet next after bananas, but he’s into whisky (which I think is absolutely horrid and disgusting) so although neither of us can have the others’ drink of interest without pulling faces, we understand each other perfectly.

So I’ll bring the rest of these boxes up next time I see them. (I have considered doing something like that before, but never did. I can do it now because I’ve been told to, but otherwise I was raised to take what I was offered when a guest in someone’s house and not make a lot of unnecessary dietary demands. So everybody in my family knows it’s not what I drink at home when they give me a cheap teabag because that’s what they have, and I never complain about what they give me.)

In the meantime, I’ve nicked one.

This one I included because I expected it to be similar to my beloved Tan Yang Te Ji (♥), and I stared myself so blind on that fact that it wasn’t until I was asked about the Paklum (or in English apparently Packlon) was that I realised that it was a blend. It has white tea in it, supposedly the Paklum. What is Paklum? I’ve never heard of that before. My initial guess would be some sort of flowery scented something, but I’m assuming it must be the white tea in question. Paklum. News to me. Consulting the literature I can’t find anything about it, but according to the Google results I get it is indeed the white element.

Obviously this means that contrary to what I was expecting this is in fact nothing at all like the Tan Yang that I was expecting it to be. The smoky element is very very light, almost non-existant unless you know precisely what to search for, and the Paklum is giving the whole thing a floraly scented note.

It’s got a spicy sort of note that I recognise from the Tan Yang, but it’s much more obvious here. It’s more like the main note of it all here, along with the floral note, and I miss the deeper notes of cocoa and smoke and oranges. It has the grainy rye-y note as it should, but it seems thinner here. A bit diluted.

All in all, it’s not a bad blend. I could have lived without the white addition, but it’s infinitely better than whatever artificially flavoured stuff Pickwick can come up with. I wouldn’t buy huge amounts of this for myself at home, but it’s definitely good enough for having when visiting my parents.