Jin Jun Mei

I have sent the birthday boy off to a whisky related event with a crisp banknote and instructions to ‘buy himself something pretty. Or something wet if he prefers’. Meanwhile I’m celebrating his birthday in absentia at home with some more the Jin Jun Mei that Spoonvonstrup sent me, while laying wicked, wicked plans for an attempt at lemon surprise pudding. (If I can pull that off, I’m going to earn myself soooo many gold stars! :D) I may have to get a little creative with available crockery, but how hard can it be?

Now. This JJM is also one that doesn’t have a brand as such on it, but like the previous one, it came out of a red foil wrapper. Different from the last red foil wrapper though. Let’s just quickly, for comparison purposes, sum up what I concluded on the first one. It had a rather grainy sort of flavour and a late-comer note of smoke. Not much in the way of fruity sweetness I otherwise associate with LS, so it was a different experience than LS. In a whole other box in my brain. So this is what I’m expecting out of this one too.

The aroma is definitely grainy, but also remarkably malty-sweet. I didn’t remember that maltiness from the first JJM. Was it there? I don’t think it was. This note is so big that it would have been impossible not to notice. Again, however, there isn’t much in the way of smoke on the aroma.

The flavour is much the same as the first JJM I tried, although this one appears to just be larger somehow. It also has the smoke note showing up a lot sooner than the first one, almost at the very beginning of the sip. At first there is the grain, not as malty-sweet as the aroma, but there is definitely some of that in it, and then the touch of smoke hits. It sort of arrives in a pointed arrow-like shape and unfolds over the rest of the flavour. (Here we go with my cross-wired brain again!) Bright white against brown.

The first one had a bit of astringency to it, which the boyfriend told me was right on his border for astringency tolerance. After which he told me that a couple of the other blacks I sometimes serve have a little too much astringency for his tastes too. Apparently there is a huge difference between working this out for himself and telling me which ones it is he doesn’t care for, so that I don’t give them to him in the future. But I shouldn’t talk really. It took me a very long time indeed to drum up the courage to tell him that I don’t actually much like celery, and instead developed a technique of eating all the celery bits first, quickly without tasting them too much. Based on this and the memory of that first one, I doubt he would have enjoyed this one very much, because that too is just much larger in this sample.

I wonder if perhaps this wrapper had a lot more leaf in it than the other one did. It is a very strong cup. Perhaps even a little too strong for me. I think I liked the first one I tried better. Not because of the difference in strength only but also because this one seems a little too forceful.

And it has occurred to me that putting a rating on unknown brands is totally useless as most posts will be about different batches entirely. Therefore I have removed it and moved the amount of points into the body of the post instead.

Points: 82

Here’s Hoping Tea Box

This tea was such a relief after the Brioche! Dark, wine-like, just slightly fruity-sweet, this tea had a soft mouth-feel. It also had an understated maltiness and a slight astringency in the aftertaste.

It has a lovely golden brown color and nice musty woodsy smell, like a pleasant smell of burnt wood. A bitter and rice-like taste, but still full-bodied with a nice long sweet aftertaste. Being a black tea made of the buds, you have to be wary of not over-steeping.

The pleasant smell of this tea is almost reminiscent of chocolate. This is followed the standard bitterness, however this gives way to a very pleasant, lingering sweetness. In considering the process through which this tea is created, with the difficulty of picking the buds, and how the bushes grow from harsh mountains, the pleasantness of the flavor is all the more pronounced.

This tea is just great.. It surely isn’t for everyday drinking and it get’s overdrink very easily. It has nice candyfloss taste.