T F Tea – White Blooming Tea with Marigold and Peach Flavour
Today’s Tea Review is White Blooming Tea with Marigold and Peach Flavour from T F Tea. This review should have been posted yesterday to celebrate Lantern Festival, the last day of the Lunar New Year festivities. But you know how it is, sometimes other things get in the way. The pesky day job for one.
In fact, I had planned to review a whole bunch more teas from Far East Asia during Lunar New Year than I actually managed. But no matter. It’s not like I’m restricted to a 15-day window when it comes to reviewing teas from some of the most important tea producing regions of the world. There’ll be plenty of time this year to review all manner of Chinese, Thai, Taiwanese and Vietnamese teas.
T F Tea’s Blooming Teas arrive as vacuum packed, compacted balls of dried foliage. When steeped in hot water, they unfurl into something which looks like a cross between an exotic sea anemone and a triffid.
Surprisingly, the tea instructions specify using boiling water which is usually considered much too hot for white tea. I complied with the instructions – because apparently I do what I’m told – but I am curious to make this tea again with water at the 80 degree mark to see if it produces a better flavour.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the flavour of Marigold and Peach White Blooming tea. It’s a light, refreshing, pale tea with a distinctly fruity vibe, which is, admittedly, almost certainly down to the “peach flavour” rather than any inherent fruitiness in the tea itself.
And – of course – it looks fabulous.
My usual complaint with flowering teas is that they don’t sit at the bottom nicely like they do in the promotional photos. They bob around at the top of the water like a tentacle-y beach ball.
I hosted a Lunar New Year lunch for my family last weekend, and the blooming tea I served (T F Tea’s White with Marigold and Lily) did exactly that. My sister helpfully suggested I resolve the issue with some lead weights she has for anchoring aquarium plants. I was sorely tempted. I mean, sure, it might have poisoned my guests, but it would have been more aesthetically pleasing.
Amazingly, when I brewed up the tea for this review, the tea anemone did exactly what it was supposed to do. It unfurled, sank to the bottom and then sat there looking pretty. I have, literally, never had that happen to me before.
Tea blossoms are a pretty showy-off-y construct. But then we all need something a bit showy-off-y in our lives, sometimes. And Lantern Festival seemed exactly the right time to do it.
Today’s featured book is The Story Of China: A Portrait Of A Civilisation And Its People by Michael Wood.
