A Tea Review from a Casual Tea Drinker

I like tea. I like good tea. I drink a lot of good tea. But I also have a confession: I’m a casual tea drinker.

I don’t measure the temperature of the water (but I will wait a vague amount of time for it to cool down if necessary). I weigh the leaves, but I don’t actually remember the exact volume of my different brewing vessels. And I definitely don’t do tasting notes. Sometimes I get a bit envious of all the people who drink tea and go “I can detect a hint of alfalfa over the cherry notes”. I know that it takes a lot of conscious effort to be able to develop that kind of skill and I just haven’t put in that time and effort.

None of those things prevent me from being passionate about tea and drinking way too much of it (is there even such a thing as “too much tea”? I don’t think so). I still enjoy pretty much every single cup I drink. And I’m learning to accept that my way of drinking tea is okay too because at the end of the day, we all need to be able to enjoy our tea drinking in whatever way we can. If it’s not as fancy or as formal as some others, that’s okay.

So now that’s out of the way, let’s get on with the tea. Oscar the tea pet and I decided to drink Tuyet San from Camellia Sinensis. This a green tea from Northern Vietnam.

I measured 4 grams of tea and I stuck it in my kyuusu which I think is something like 120ml or something thereabouts. I could be wrong.

I have no idea what temperature it was brewed at. It wasn’t boiling.

I won’t even attempt to say what it smells like because I have bad allergies right now and can’t smell much, so we’ll skip right to the taste (talk about further handicapping myself!). First off, I don’t think it tastes at all like a lot of my green teas. There’s something that I can only describe as very “green” about green teas. They almost all have that green taste. Tuyet San doesn’t have that. If I really think about it, it’s more like a white tea, almost but with the caffeine hit of a green tea. It’s ever so slightly floral. I read somewhere that it’s got artichoke notes. I’m not sure if I taste artichoke, but I agree that there’s something in that direction. I just can’t figure out what it is.

It’s not astringent, which is always nice. It’s got a slight almost chalkiness about it. Like, it doesn’t taste chalky but it feels ever so slightly chalky in the mouth.

I really love this tea. If it was cheaper, I would buy a mountain of it and just drink it all the time.

And so concludes the review. I definitely spent more time thinking about how a tea tastes and feels than I normally do. It’s definitely a fun exercise but Oscar's way too impatient to do this every day!

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Katherine

IG: frozenleaf