Umi Tea Sets – Colorful Tea – Litchi Chinensis
Hey fellow tea fanciers, you’ll be excited to learn that my tea blogging shenanigans have moved up a gear. Tea companies are now sending me tea for no actual money on the understanding that I will review it.
Okay, using the plural of ‘tea company’ in that previous paragraph was a bit of an exaggeration. One tea company so far has done this. But I reckon if any other teamongers are reading this and want to make me an offer, I’m all ears and tea-caddy-grasping outstretched arms. Sending me free tea in no way guarantees that I’ll be nice about said tea, obviously. Because – when it comes to tea at least – I do have some scruples. Also, I can’t actually think of any consequences of giving free tea a bad review, other than the probability that the teamonger wouldn’t send me any more, which would probably be a blessing under the circumstances.
Not that this is an issue with today’s tea which, if you read on, you will discover I rather enjoyed. If you’re on Instagram, you can check out the video review that I made. I’m not putting it here, because while such frothy frivolities are all well and good on Instagram, I prefer to keep my blog pages neat and tidy and free from any content that makes me cringe so hard that I almost turn myself inside out. (Note the usual disclaimer about the inclusion of Amazon, associate links also applies.)
Litchi Chinensis Tea is a black tea from Colorful Tea sold by UmiTeaSets.com. The lychee (or as they prefer to style it, ‘litchi’) in this tea is apparent as soon as you open the box when great big wafts of unmistakably lychee-based fruitiness assail your smell buds. (I’m pretty sure smell buds are a thing, although I may need to rewatch CBeebies’ Nina and the Neurons in order to brush up on the science.)
Once this tea has been brewed, the lychee flavours settle down and assume the role of supporting character to the dark and richly flavoured back tea. I’ve had quite a few cups of Litchi Chinensis now and I keep telling myself that I’m going to try it with milk at some point. It’s a black tea, it should be able to handle it. However, I can’t bring myself to do so. It seems disrespectful somehow.
This tea certainly doesn’t need anything added to it. It slips down so smoothly that you find yourself finishing a pot of it in no time at all. I tried steeping the tea leaves a second time (because as I mentioned recently, that’s the thing that fancy tea people do). I can report that the leaves stand up to reuse admirably and this tea was just as delicious the second time round.
There is something wonderfully evocative about the smell of lychees. I imagine that I will polish this tea off fairly quickly. But until the tea caddy is completely empty, I will be regularly sticking my nose in and just enjoying the smell.
Today’s featured book is Teas and Tisanes by Jill Norman. This book was published in 1989 I’m not sure whether tea classification knowledge has expanded over the last thirty years or what, but in the chapter called ‘Processing’, the author asserts that there are three types of tea: green, oolong and black, which seems to be at least five tea types short.
