Sopa Estate – Coffee Flower Tea
Happy Lunar New Year! It’s the first day of the Year of the Dragon, so expect a slew of Far Eastern teas over the next fifteen days of New Year celebrations.
My daughter went to stay in Chiang Mai in Thailand over Christmas and New Year. She brought me back a whole bunch of teas as a Christmas present because Thailand is a tea-growing nation. and she knows I’m rather fond of tea. I shall be reviewing them all in due course, but I’m starting with Sopa Estate coffee flower tea as it’s the weirdest.
It’s not – even though it has tea in the name – actually a tea. It is, as the more astute of you will probably have figured out, from the flowers of the coffee plant. If you’re in the coffee plant growing business and you want to harvest coffee flowers, then you need to have your wits about you. There are only a couple of days a year when this is a feasible thing to do. The trick is to remove the flowers without impacting the growth of the coffee bean, which makes it quite the specialist operation.
Sopa Estate coffee flower tea wants to be brewed at 96 degrees, a level of precision even my fancy variable temperature kettle doesn’t cater for. I had to settle for setting it to 95 degrees and cross my fingers that the 1% difference wouldn’t balls-up the whole operation.
I think I got away with it because my cup of coffee flowers was a subtle yet intense combination of all kinds of flavours. First up, there’s the coffee flavour, which is just about perceptible but nowhere near as dominant as I expected. There’s also a flowery flavour going on. Apparently, coffee flowers in full bloom smell like jasmine, and the coffee plant was historically misclassified as part of the genus Jasminum.
More unexpectedly, this brew has a savoury umami vibe, a bit like a delicate vegetable and soy stock. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be into that, but I rather enjoyed it. I resteeped this tea a few times, and in subsequent resteepings, the umami flavour became less prominent, and the flowery flavours took over.
So how, you may wonder, does one go about getting hold of some coffee flower tea? Well, if you’re planning to buy some for yourself, good luck to you. In the UK, at least, it seems pretty much impossible to get hold of. The one listing on Amazon is currently out of stock. I found a Thai website selling the brand I had, but you need to sign up to one of those Asian mega-internet conglomerates to access it, and I’m not sure if they do international shipping. The easiest way to get your hands on it, I reckon, is to have your daughter go to Chiang Mai to housesit for her friend’s parents and bring some back for you.
Today’s book pairing is Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. It’s Chinese rather than Thai but it does have the word “flower” in the title so it qualifies.
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