A Tea Addict's Journal

Sample from Hong Kong, via Vancouver and New York

September 24, 2007 · 3 Comments

Today I drank a sample sent to me from Lew, creator of babelcarp. This is from Aroma teahouse in Vancouver, which is actually a branch of Lam Kie Yuen in Hong Kong, operated by the daughter of Mr. Lam in Hong Kong and selling, I believe, mostly the same teas. This is something he bought there, and he said what it tasted like in the store is a bit different than when he got home. I got a sample of this along with a sample of his own pressed cake in Yunnan.

The dry leaves look like a recipe cake

With the outside surface coated with smaller buds while the inside uses bigger leaves. The dry leaves are rather brown, and smell a little wet stored.

The tea brews a slightly cloudy (initially) and dark liquor.

The taste is a little funny. Despite the strong colour, the tea is not particularly strong in taste. At first there’s an obvious taste of the storage, but after that fades, the tea gets a little more bitter and there’s also a bit of sour in there. Despite what must be at least somewhat wet storage, there isn’t a lot of the smooth sweetness I expect. The tea is smooth, but not that sweet. I am thinking it probably needs more time, actually. It still seems rather young for some teas.

The leaves seem to show more age than the taste though. I’m not sure why

All in all, a pretty curious tea. I do wonder if the act of shipping it over in a small envelope has done something to it, or perhaps the Vancouver storage has changed it a bit. I’m not sure of the answer to any of those question….

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3 responses so far ↓

  • lewperin // September 24, 2007 at 3:55 pm | Reply

    he said what it tasted like in the store is a bit different than when he got home.

    I want to make it clear that I don’t think Aroma/LKY did anything sneaky. Honestly, this tea seems to taste different each time I brew it.

    I do wonder if the act of shipping it over in a small envelope has done something to it, or perhaps the Vancovuer storage has changed it a bit.

    In Vancouver the cake I took home was shrink-wrapped (not sure for how long before I arrived.) The cake Eliza Lam brewed from, which had been partially used up, presumably for other customer sessions, before I showed up, wasn’t shrink-wrapped.

    On a more general point, I’m starting to think that there’s basically no limit to how dark and opaque early steeps of a sheng tea can be if it was stored wet enough. So what once seemed to be an infallible way to separate aged sheng from shu – sheng clear, shu murky – is useless.

  • MarshalN // September 25, 2007 at 12:19 am | Reply

    Oh, yeah, if it’s been wet stored the thing can come out pitch black, looking like tar or some such. And it’s often a little murky too.

  • MarshalN // September 25, 2007 at 12:39 am | Reply

    By the way, if you’re going to drink this soonish, have you considered breaking the whole thing up and mixing it together? Might make it more consistent, if nothing else.

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