Curious tea – Tai Ping Hou Kui
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Keen followers of the Tea Fancier Tea Cup Championships, please rest assured that play will resume again on Monday. Championship matches aren’t being played at weekends. This gives the competing teams a chance to rest and recuperate. It also means I can review other weirdier teas.
This Chinese tea from Curious Tea is called Tai Ping Hou Kui, which roughly translates as ‘Peaceful Monkey King’. This may be the best name for a tea I’ve ever come across. I am relieved to know that monkey kings can be peace-loving sorts as I’ve always considered them to be rather frenetic and unpredictable rulers. (Although this observation may be entirely based on King Louie in The Jungle Book.)
This is a fascinating tea even before you’ve done anything with it. The leaves are large, bright green and impressively flat. They look rather like sheets of dried seaweed. One of the really satisfying things about the Curious Tea monthly subscription box is the diverse range of formats that that the teas come in. If they were a film subscription service – rather than rather than a tea one – they would be sending films out each month on DVD, Betamax, 35mm film reels and zoetropes.
Tai Ping Hou Kui is an absolutely beautiful tea. It’s a delicate pale green tea, the colour of Pinot Grigio, that has a fruity and slightly sweet flavour. (Not that it tastes like a sweet fruity tisane you understand. It tastes like what it is – a really good green tea.)
The word that comes to mind when drinking this tea is ‘smooth’. I’ve tried to unpick what I mean by that, because as a hot drink, it’s not likely to be crunchy, is it? Smoothness is definitely a recognised attribute of tea though, much like Whisky Fanciers recognise smoothness as a virtue in their favourite tipple.
You know when you’re on a beach and you find a piece of glass that has been worn down by the sea to a smooth opaque pebble? This tea reminded me of that. (I have no idea which teas would be jaggedy bits of unworn glass in this scenario; this metaphor is still very much under construction.)
Drinking this tea was a calming, tranquil experience. I felt a bit like a Peaceful Monkey King myself. (Maybe not an actual king. I’m not that important. Maybe a Peaceful Monkey Mid-level Civil Servant.)
Today’s featured book is The Story of the Stone by Cao Xueqin.
