Comins Tea – Eastern Beauty
I have a lot of tea stashed in the corner of my office/living room/cat kingdom. When I first started my tea blog in 2021, I exercised a no-holding-back, follow-your-whims policy on buying all the tea that caught my eye. I had a decent-paying job back then, mind. Now I’m eking out a living as a writer-for-hire, and the coffers aren’t nearly so flush. But I do still have an awful lot of tea that I bought three years ago. Which is a good thing, really. My socks might all have holes, but at least I’m not short of high-quality Camelia sinensis.
Except, for the most part, I don’t drink it. The boxes sit glaring at me like a leaf-based To-do list. If I crack open a new pack, then I’m committing myself to reviewing it. And I’ve become a lot shoddier about doing that sort of thing these days than I was in my 3-or-4-reviews-a-week heyday. I’ve got some kind of mental block on it. My ADHD-y depressive brain likes to pull up a great big drawbridge sometimes and go, “Nope. You’re not doing that. I don’t care that you enjoy it. It’s on the banned list.”
(Like for example, I promised a raft of tea articles to one of my favourite teamongers and totally failed to deliver. I lay awake at one o’clock in the morning feeling guilty about it, but I am apparently powerless to do anything about it.)
The tea situation has gotten even more complicated because, like I said, some of the tea is quite old now.
Can I review this Comins Tea Eastern Beauty and do it justice? When Mrs Comins (not her actual name) packaged it up for me in 2021, I’m sure she expected me to consume it a lot sooner than this. The thing is, it’s still absolutely great. And while the current crop (harvested in 2023) is all sold out online, I expect there will be more available when the 2024 harvest is ready to go.
Eastern Beauty is the sort of tea that demands you slow down your day to drink it. It’s best slurped in a quasi-meditative state. This Yunnan-grown oolong is a bug-bitten tea, which means its leaves have been pre-nibbled by friendly leafhoppers of the Cicadellidae family. (At least, I assume they’re friendly. I’ve never actually met one.)
In response to being attacked by insects, the tea plant produces compounds as an insect repellent, which make the tea taste sweet and rich and muscatelly to humans. (But presumably not to bugs, otherwise it would be a pointless endeavour from the tea plant’s perspective.)
The two compounds it releases are hotrienol and 2,6-dimethyl-3,7-octadiene-2,6-diol. I won’t remember that, obviously, but I did feel a bit cleverer just typing it out.
I don’t know why I have been passing up the opportunity to enjoy this tea for so long. It’s an absolute delight. It’s rich and flavoursome and tea-y in all the best ways. Perhaps it would have been even nicer three years ago, but that’s difficult to imagine. It tastes absolutely perfect.
Todays book pairing is Tea: A Nerd’s Eye View by Virginia Utermohlen Lovelace. It’s where I got my 2,6-dimethyl-3,7-octadiene-2,6-diol information, obviously.
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