Curious Tea – Dian Hong Feng Qing Classic 1938
It’s been a while since I reviewed a Curious Tea tea, and in doing so now, I am reminded of 2 things. One, Curious Tea make amazingly good tea. They are astonishingly good. And two, it’s really, really hard to say anything about them without having to deploy proper tea-expert phrases like ‘malty’, ‘mineral’, ‘muscatel’, and the like. And I don’t really feel qualified to do that and get away with it.
Dian Hong Feng Qing Classic 1938 takes its name from the year black tea production started in Yunnan, a place in China now synonymous with tea production, especially Pu’Erh. I thought it would be helpful to point that out in case you thought 1938 was the year that this particular brew was harvested. My tea was somewhat newer than that, having been harvested in March 2021. Mind you, it’s been knocking about Tea Fancier Towers for a while now. The current Dian Hong Feng Qing crop on Curious Tea’s website was harvested in 2023.
This tea may not be a Pu’Erh, but it’s a proper dark black tea of the sort that you don’t really associate with Chinese tea, which tends to be at the more delicate end of the black tea gradient. This is because it’s made from Camelia Sinensis var assamica rather than Camelia Sinensis var sinensis.
Assamica is named after the Assam region of India, and Sinensis means ‘Chinese’, so it’s easy to assume that one is exclusively Indian and the other exclusively Chinese. But tea variants get around a bit, so it’s not a hard and fast rule. Darjeeling, for example, is made from Camelia Sinensis var sinensis. And while many far eastern teas in Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, and China are made from var sinensis, Yunnan is famous for its assamica plantations. It’s how it makes all those super dark Pu’Erhs, for a start.
When you take a sniff of Dian Hong Feng Qing’s dried leaves, there’s a distinct aroma of dark chocolate. The finished brew still has a bit of a cocoa husk aroma, along with [checks notes] unlit cigars, bran flakes and honey. Curious Tea don’t mention those things, mind, preferring to describe it as fruity and malty with a floral rose aftertaste. So that’s valid, too, I guess.
When I went to the Twinings tea tasting, our tea-tasting expert was very receptive to whatever flavours we suggested for the teas we were trying. She’d say things like, “I’ve never really made that connection, but I get what you mean”. I wonder if she ever just says ‘No’. You’d suggest that an oolong tasted like liquorice or rosehips or something, and she’d tell you that was the incorrect answer and ask you to try again.
I’m concerned that’s exactly what Curious Tea might say if they heard me comparing Dian Hong Feng Qing to chocolate and tobacco. “No, it doesn’t,” they’d say. “You’re doing our tea wrong.” But look, I said right at the beginning that I was unqualified to make proper tea-tasting notes of fancy high-end orthodox teas. In fact, I shall simply refer you to what I said at the start. This tea is astonishingly good. Seriously.
Today’s book pairing is Sam Pollard of Yunnan by E H Hayes. Pollard ws a Christian missionary, by the way. This book has nothing to do with tea. And yes, I did buy it just so I could use it in a tea photo.
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