Tea Snobbery

Dried Tea

Wuyis tend to be a darker oolong, a little smokier, a little more roasted then many other oolongs. This explains a lot of why the leaves are a deep emerald green, tightly rolled. It looks like the leaves are pretty badly smashed, but that is something that is harder to avoid with bagged teas. It also looks machine picked.

The smell of the tea is that of something deeply roasted. Not as smokey, but more woody, maybe maple. There is an end note of mint, which surprised me.

I did not try to taste the leaves. I don’t want to take them out of their package.

Wet Tea

The leaves are still tightly rolled and I am a little worried that this size of bag is too small to let these leaves unfurl enough. They are still a deep emerald green coloring, although if it was possible, they have turned darker than they were dried.

The leaves have an incredibly salty smell, almost like seaweed. I want to taste them to see how they taste, but I don’t want to open up the bag. It is quite a dilemma.

First Brew
190 for 5 minutes

This brew is a light sunflower coloring. It is pretty and light, which is pretty common for a Wuyi. The smell of this tea is strange. If you have ever had collard greens, that is basically what this smells like. It is smokey and salty at first, with hints of seaweed and kale.

The taste of the tea is sweet right off the bat, with undertones of salt and a subtle pinch of mint. Slowly a roasted maple taste starts to creep in for a different kind of sweet middle tone. End notes seem to be a bit more subtle for the most part though. While the mint feeling lasts till the end of the taste, the flavor becomes more of a cooling menthol, and less of a mint taste.

Second Brew
198 for 5.5 minutes

This second brew is equally as light in color. The smell is more on the roasted notes this time. There is still not a smokey tone, but it is like roasted pork, without the pork smell. The Partner in Crime suggests that it may be a little like the smell under a smoke house, but for me it doesn’t have that fire that smoke has. This isn’t a complex smell though, just a hard one to describe.

The taste of this brew is also darker than the last brew, with more of a roasted tone up front. There is less sweet to this brew. The sweet hasn’t gone away completely, but it has gone away some. There is still a little bit of a maple syrup sort of a taste to the tea. There are no mint tones to this brew.

Third Brew
201 for 6.5 minutes

This brew is a light sunflower color. The smell is less intense than it was before but it still has a salty smokey flavor to it.

The taste of this is far lighter than the last two brews. The first note is clearly a roasted maple tone, sweet and sort of like roasted fat. There is something else to the brew, something that is a little lighter than before. It is neither floral or fruity though, so I’m not sure what it is.

A Short Experiment

Even if this is a bagged tea, I have a hard time imagining that this would be a tea that a beginner would choose to drink. However, that being said, my Partner in Crime and I did an experiment. We made another cup of this tea, with a separate bag using microwaved water, unmeasured for temperature and we threw the bag in for 5 minutes. To me it was undrinkable, for her, it was reasonable for a cup of work tea. She thinks it’s because I’m an expert and have a certain palate, I think it’s because I’m picky and have never liked tea that tastes like that. She also drinks Navy coffee.

I only had one sip of it and all I can describe it as was BITTER BITTER BITTER! I think I even made a face and handed the cup away.

Effects and Afterthoughts

I have such a craving for collard greens after drinking this. In fact, minus all the garlic that usually gets put into collard greens (the way I was taught to make them), that is what this makes me think of.

Overall, I was not impressed with this tea. What I noticed the most was what I was afraid was going to happen with the tea, which is that the leaves did not have enough space to unfold. This actually got my Partner in Crime and I into a whole conversation about who these teas are aimed at and what they would like. I remain adamant even after the short experiment semi documented above that I can not say that this is a tea I would recommend unless Adagio started putting less leaves in the bag. I could also never recommend this for someone who doesn’t really know a lot about tea and wants to have it for around the office unless they are good at taking the bag out before sitting down and getting involved in work. This tea is just too temperamental for my tastes to recommend for that sort of thing.

However, if you love Wuyi and want it in a bagged tea, this is an ok tea bag to use. Note that it does have too much leaf in it so you may want to accommodate for that when brewing.

I got a message from a tea company the other day with an article in it about water and how it changes the quality of a tea. It got me to thinking about the fact that I haven’t really written on this for this blog before.

I actually had an interesting experience with this not long ago, which my Partner in Crime will remember. We sat down for our weekly tea one day about two months or so ago. We were drinking a black tea of hers that we had been monitoring because things had happened to it before that which made us worried that it might grow some mold. The taste on this particular day was strange. There was a metallic taste to it and I wasn’t sure what was going on with this tea because it didn’t taste like it was moldy, but it didn’t taste the way that it was supposed to taste.

Finally I told her what I was worried about and she looked at me and told me that she had actually changed the type of water that was being used to make the tea. It threw me off because first I thought that the water was going to stay the same, it had been pretty good water that we were using before that. It also threw me off because I knew that water could make all the difference and I never even thought about it.

Later on I decided to try the water, just to test out our hypothesis. The water did have a metallic taste to it that was not pleasant.

What does this mean for brewing a great cup of tea? Hopefully something you already knew, but it means that you need to taste test your water first. Tea is mostly water. There is no getting around that. In fact, most beverages, even your soda, is just flavored water. That means that the flavor of the water will change the flavor of your beverage. In this case, it will change the flavor of the tea.

People who are sensitive to taste already probably know that fact. However, for those of us who aren’t all that sensitive most of the time, it might be something that is a little harder to get into the habit of doing. If you are buying water from a new place, asking how it tastes before buying the water may be necessary if you are afraid of how it will change your tea. Taste the water like you would a tea. See if there are any flavors that stand out to you, anything unpleasant or pleasant. After you have done that, you can decide if you want to brew tea with that.

What do you think? Have you ever had water effect your tea? What kinds of water do you like to use for your tea?

Today’s tea review also doesn’t have pictures, but next week’s should.

Dry Tea

This tea is made with a Chun Mee which makes a lot of sense for a Jasmine tea. Jasmine has a bitter taste as does Chun Mee which should compliment each other rather well. This tea looks pretty good. I always love a Jasmine tea that has some flowers in it. The leaves are a dusty green color and are pressed and small. It doesn’t look to me like they are really rolled though, instead it looks like the leaves are badly mangled and are thin because of this.

This tea smells very sweet and sort of like mint and Jasmine. There is also a hint of allspice as an end note on the smell. The taste is sort of bitter and sweet at the same time. If this is a Chun Mee then it is a higher grade Chun Mee that has been in the shade for some time before it was picked. That is what makes the sweeter taste.

Wet Tea

The leaves are a deep emerald green. The soft yellow flowers from the dry tea are now white flowers that have not opened up. The truth is that the change in color in the flowers is not significant like it would be if they were rose petals. For me this makes the wet tea more beautiful.

The tea smells strongly of Jasmine when I first take the lid off the cup, but that smell quickly goes away if I leave the lid off the cup. The smell without the lid is that of butterballs. I’m not sure if you know what this is, but it is butter and cream and spices breaded and lightly pan fried. Which I guess when you break it down that means that it smells to me like butter and cream and fried wheat.

The tea tastes like arugula with it’s spiced and slightly peppery taste. The leaves are very broken up and obviously machine picked. They are not missing as much leaf as I was expecting though.

First Brew
156 for 4 minutes

The color is a golden yellow and rather translucent. There ended up being a lot of leaf pieces in the cup. The smell of the tea is that of Jasmine and peppercorn. There is a hint of a smell like that of the taste of steel, like when you lick a spoon. It’s not bad, but it reminds me a little bit of chrysanthemum. There is an after note of rain to the smell of this tea.

The taste of the tea is that of peppercorn and allspice as a front flavor. That quickly turns as the mid flavor turns to Jasmine and the tea becomes sweeter. This is an interesting taste because given both the Jasmine flavor and the type of tea used I was expecting it to be more bitter. However they processed the tea seems to have cut down on the bitter of both of them, which was probably helped by the low temperature that I brewed it at.

Second Brew
163 for 4.5 minutes

The tea retains the light yellow coloring that the first one did. In fact, not a lot has changed between the first brew and this brew in terms of color.

The smell this time is sweeter. It is a softer sweet than the mid tones of last time. It is almost like a soft honey smell. Instead of Jasmine, this brew smells like honey suckles. It is still floral, but not in the same way that the first brew was. There is a much more base smell to this that lies under all the other tastes. It is a leafy vegital smell that makes me think of red tip lettuce and spinach combined. It has a little bit of a mineral smell to it that I can’t quite place.

The taste of this is a slightly lighter version of what I was tasting in the last brew. In this case the peppercorn and the allspice flavors override most of the other flavors in this tea. They are not more powerful than the last brew, just more powerful than the other flavors. There is still a taste of Jasmine. It is sweeter than the last brew but not as noticeable overall.

Third Brew
172 for 5 minutes

This brew is only a little bit lighter in color than the last brew. It is more of a lemon chiffon or light goldenrod kind of a color with this brew.

The smell of the tea is almost too light to tell. There is a sweet and floral hint, but I can no longer make out what it once smelled like.

The brew, while still lighter than the first two is still flavorful. The first note is the Jasmine which hits the tongue running. There remains a sweet and floral tone to it even as a lemon pepper taste starts to creep into the brew.

Effects and Afterthoughts

This tea must have some caffeine, but after three cups of it I haven’t noticed anything that makes my body buzz. The leaves are mashed to bits, but this tea did make a move with me and some of that may be from that. Overall, I like this tea. It doesn’t give me the same mental images as most Jasmine teas do of Chinese restaurants I went to as a kid, but that makes this tea feel more grown up to me actually. I’m not sure what they did differently, but there does seem to be a difference in the way that they infused the jasmine into this tea and I think that makes a difference in the way that this tea tastes when it is brewed.

For me this partially came out of an advertisement I saw that at first felt like more green tea hype until I thought more about it.

Green tea is the new things right now, and so it is impossible for me to get away from the hype, which is part of why it makes it hard for me to let it go. However, there are some things that are being said about tea that may actually be true, and what I saw today amused me and actually impressed me a little bit when I started to think about it. I saw today an advertisement for matcha as a study aid for all us people back in school working on our homework. It wasn’t gum, it wasn’t tea bags, it was a matcha set that was being advertised as helping concentration.

Well, the truth of this matter is that yes, matcha as well as other teas can be used to help you concentrate. Pretty much anything with caffeine in it will do this for you though. That is why many college book stores will have caffeine gum and coffee in it, because caffeine actually stimulates and taken in moderation, can help concentration.

In that case you might wonder whether you should be reaching for something with more caffeine in it then your regular cup of tea. I have two points to that. The first one is that there is actually an interesting combination with tea, because it has caffeine and something else called Theanine which tends to calm people down and reduce stress has also been shown through studies to interact with caffeine in a way that enhances both of their effects on our brains.

Here is one of the first of those studies, at least that I know of.

The second answer to that actually has to do with the Matcha itself. Instead of a regular cup of tea that has to get both of those chemicals into the cup for you to drink out of the leaf and into the water, with matcha this is not the case. Matcha is the leaf itself ground into a fine powder, placed in a bowl and warm water is added to the powder. The drinker then consumes both the fine powder and the water which is slightly brewed at this point. Matcha is also grown in such a way as to encourage both of these chemicals to develop more in the leaf than in many other teas. With both of these things, Matcha is a better delivery system then most cups of teas are for these two chemicals.

Before I thought about these things, I was a little unsure how I felt about this being advertised like this. What do you think of this?

There are no pictures today because I don’t have my phone. I will put up pictures as soon as I can again.

Dry Leaves

With bagged teas it is kind of hard to really get a good look at the leaves as always, but since it is a silk bag it is a little easier to see the leaves. Dragonwell has a specific way that it is folded in order to produce the effect that it has when put in water. They look to be machiene picked, but all the same pretty well folded and pressed. The leaves are a light jade green, ranged into a light forest green. They seem a little dry from what I can see, but I can’t really feel them through the bag.

Wet Leaves

I have to say, that as a tea bag, the leaves are getting enough space to expand and are acting the way tea leaves should, which is nice to see. The leaves have unfurled a bit, but Dragonwell doesn’t usually unfurl all that much on the first brew. The leaves are pretty badly damaged.

The smell of the leaves is a soft floral smell with a hint of baked bread. The floral smell is sort of sort of like jasmine. The smell isn’t as strong as other Dragonwells that I have had, but it is pretty good for a bagged tea.

First Brew
164 for 2 minutes

The color is a medium light golden marigold color. It is darker than I thought it would be.

The smell is that of baked bread, which is something I always seem to get from Dragonwells. It is a warm and soft tone that reminds me of home cooking. There is also a smell of grass and jasmine that combined are sweet and bitter at the same time.

The brew of this tea tastes of jasmine as a first note. The jasmine taste does not dissipate, but instead the taste of baked bread starts to sneak up in the middle. the bakes bread taste brings with it a salty flavor that I was not expecting. There is not really a taste of grass like the smell would have suggested. As the flavor sits in my mouth, there is a mint aftertaste that is surprising. It is not strong, but it is enough that it is noticeable when the other flavors start to fade.

Second Brew
176 for 2.5 minutes

The color of this tea is much lighter and more usual for Dragonwell. It is a light dandelion gold. No one else I know smells this tea the way I do, but it still smells like baked bread to me. It is always the first smell that comes to my mind when I smell this tea. There is still definitely a smell of grass. With the second brew that smell has gotten stronger.

The taste of this second brew is interesting. The grass taste is pretty strong first taste, but it is mixed with the jasmine that I experienced in the last brew.  While the baked bread smell is first in my nose, it doesn’t really hit my tongue until it is a mild middle tone. The end of this no longer really has a mint note. Instead it ends on more of a seaweed salted tone that blends well from the fresh baked bread taste before it.

Third Brew
191 for 2.5 minutes

This brew is just about the same color as the third brew. Combining that with the smell, I expect that the tea has held up rather well. The smell is sort of like butter and eggs with a hint of jasmine still mixed in. It is fainter than the last brew, but not by much. Although it smells of butter and eggs, there is taste to it that still makes me think of wheat. There is no longer a smell of fresh grass though or the bitterness that goes with that.

The taste of this brew is more bitter than I was expecting, but not by much. It does make the grass and jasmine tastes stand out first and foremost a whole lot more than it would have otherwise. There actually is not still a taste of baked bread, but more of a sweeter tone. It seems as though the jasmine tone dissipates into another floral flavor, but exactly what I am not sure.

Effects and Afterthoughts
I did two tea tastings back to back, one day after another. The tea review that went up last week and now this one. What this means for me is that I am having a hard time being really sure the exact effects of this tea on my system. I’m not entirely sure that the caffeine from yesterday is out of my system or that the caffeine effects I am feeling today are all from this tea. At the end of three cups of tea I am rather hyped up. It is probably a good thing that the next things on my list today are chores and spending time with friends in the pool.

Dragonwell always makes me think of home baking, warmed flour and yeast. Which of course always makes me think of home and love and warmth. Even being bagged and not of the greatest quality leaf wise could not change this. Of course, that last sentence being written I would like to note that this is one of the best quality bagged teas that I have seen in a while. The leaves were not the best for loose leaf, but in terms of bagged teas, the leaves are in better condition than most. If you are going to buy bagged Dragonwell, this is not a bad choice to make. This one did hold up really nicely.