Rare Tea Co – Tie Guan Yin
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Tie Guan Yin lies at the green end of the Oolong green/black spectrum. The Rare Tea Company say that this tea can be infused up to six times, which I have to admit indicates a commitment to re-steeping that I haven’t yet achieved. Maybe I need a smaller teapot.
The packaging tells me that this tea will “reveal astonishing flavours from soft florals to rich tropical fruit”. I can attest to a certain amount of floweriness here, but I didn’t detect any tropical fruit flavours. Maybe they come to the fore around the fourth or fifth steeping.
The dried leaves arrive in little clusters reminiscent of a fancy green granola. The leaves unfurled to an extraordinarily satisfying size, which doesn’t seem physically possible given the size of the original pellets.
Tie Guan Yin is the Iron Goddess of Mercy. It sounds like a name for a heavy metal band but, in fact, she is a revered Buddhist bodhisattva associated with compassion. Her name literally means “the one who perceives the sound of the world”.
I enjoyed this tea a lot. It was fresh and floral with a satisfying depth of flavour. Although to be honest, if I had been handed a cup of Tie Guan Yin without context, I would have totally assumed it was a green tea. If you wanted to put together some kind of “Green or Oolong?” parlour game, I reckon Tie Guan Yin would present quite the challenge to the participants.
Today’s featured book is A Journey to the Tea Countries of China by Robert Fortune, first published in 1852.
