The month of June seemed to disappear on me in a blur of work and July has caught me unawares, however I did enjoy a new tea last month so it’s high time that I wrote it up. My latest tea is a Milky Oolong from T2. This was one of the teas I treated myself to back in January when I bought my tea ball and has been tempting/taunting me to try ever since. I’m always seduced by their cute packages – little cardboard cubes and cylinders – though the use of little plastic inner bags is a subject of small annoyances, they’re just so much more awkward to handle than the more common foil packages – perhaps it’s just their small size but they seem to have an inbuilt tendency to catapult tea leaves everywhere at the least convenient moment. And because the outer packaging is so cute – but not remotely air tight enough to keep the leaves fresh – I can’t bring myself to decant them into a more practical container, aesthetics over practicality I feel, annoying me all the more for knowing that I’m buying into it regardless!
Something that interests me about my recent adventures in tea drinking is what makes one tea the kind that I will make a pot of and happily drink cup after cup of it as I work on something else, and what makes other teas single cup teas. My little tea ball has proved to be an excellent investment, ideal for experimenting with new teas as I figure out how to best enjoy it – brewing time versus how many spoonfuls of tea per cup, but while some teas move quickly into tea pot territory, others remain tea cup only endeavours.
Unlike a few other new teas I’ve tried this year, this month’s adventure did not take many experiments to get ‘right’ for me. (Two little spoonfuls in the ball, brewed for 5 minutes, water just off the boil.) I wouldn’t normally make an oolong for anything like as strong as that, as it would acquire a bitter aftertaste that for me undermines it’s natural softness that is a big part of why I favour oolongs. However this one retains a mellowness, and in fact the buttery creaminess increases with brewing time, it’s not as refreshing a drink as many other oolongs I’ve enjoyed but nonetheless it’s been a definite summer beverage. I’ve been happily drinking it all month, yet it’s never occurred to me to make the leap from a cup to a pot. I’ll often finish a cup and go and make another cup, but two cups seems to be the limit. It is also, I note, a tea to be drunk with snacks or biscuits rather than with a meal. It’s a lovely post-meal pleasure in it’s own right, like a dessert when you’re not hungry enough for an actual dessert, a drink for curling up on the sofa with a book for a bit, or to sip between rows of knitting or paragraphs of writing. A tea that satisfies rather than leaves me wanting more.
Cupboard Life 