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We’ve had a few disappointing teas recently, so I decided to break out the good stuff. Curious Tea are currently my favourite purveyors of fancy schmancy teas. They do a fantastic range of beautifully packaged, single source tees with wonderfully unbroken leaves which are – with the only tiniest amount of exaggeration – the size of salad plates.
Qing Xin Gan Zi is absolutely gorgeous. It is a white tea harvested in February this year from Nantou County in Taiwan and it’s the first Taiwanese tea I’ve tried. Taiwan is particularly known for its oolong tea, but the country also does a brisk business in black, green and – as we can see here – white teas.
There’s a buttery malty taste to Qing Xin Gan Zi which smoothly sits alongside its fresh, flowery flavour. Subsequent steepings bring out another level of flavour, which I’m rather at a loss to describe. Green and white teas are often referred to as having a ‘seaweed’ flavour. And there is certainly something in this tea which reminded me of brisk ocean breezes, but I am loath to describe any tea as seaweedy. It doesn’t sound to me like an admirable characteristic for a tea to have, presumably because I really dislike seaweed as a foodstuff.
Another tea tasting term, which I will probably use one day when I’m feeling brave enough, is ‘vegetal’. This is a recognised tea descriptor used for teas which have a green, slightly savoury vegetable-like taste. This sounds to my untrained ear and still learning taste palate like Not A Polite Thing To Say when it comes to describing a cup of tea. “Hey, thanks for this cup of tea! It reminds me of broccoli!”
To be honest, this whole using proper-tea-connoisseur-words business is a bit of a minefield. I have been cheerfully describing teas as “earthy” in my reviews and have only intended positive things by it. I have now discovered that “earthy” is a bad thing in the tea tasting world. According to A History of Tea by Laura C Martin, earthy means “a little mouldy”. Huge apologies to any teamongers who I have inadvertently insulted in the last two months.
So in the meantime, until I am confident that I’m using all this proper tea terminology in the right manner, I have decided just to make my own words up when talking about tea. I feel confident that if I say a tea blend is ‘spoofy’ or ‘ghurh’, you will fully understand what I’m driving at.
So, with this new policy in place, I am happy to report that Curious Tea’s Qing Xin Gan Zi white tea is oishy, trekkle and mashardful. Also, it’s absolutely bloody delicious.
Today’s featured book is The White Company by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for no reason other than it has the word ‘white’ in the title.
