Tea talk

I promised earlier that I'd tell how the Baroness Gray tea turned out. I'm pretty obsessed when it comes to tea - buying, tasting, handling and storing it. For example, I never keep tea in the original bags it comes in, I always transfer it into tins to keep it fresh. At the same time, I only never have two varieties open at any one time, typically one straight black tea and one flavoured tea (which Dragon prefers) so that when we drink it, it's still at it's best.

I generally don't use tea bags, or drink herbal tea (as the taste is pretty much always a disappointment) - but there are sometimes exceptions. Since I discovered chai tea couple of weeks ago I did buy a packet of black chai tea teabags, now that I've confirmed I love it (and with milk, nonetheless), next time I'm at Teaz I'll get some loose leaf variety of that - bound to be better. The only herbal tea I've ever liked is made by The London Herb & Spice Company, their teas are almost like juice, so rich is the taste. And sometimes I do feel like a cup of chamomile, but I'll get over it as if I buy a whole packet I'll just drink couple of cups until I get bored.

But I digress. I haven't mentioned Baroness Gray earlier on, as I didn't open the package until we'd finished the extremely ordinary peach and apricot tea we had open. One word to describe the Baroness: disappointment. Don't get me wrong, it's totally drinkable - it's just that I bought it because of the cinnamon, but the lemon and especially orange peel totally overpower the cinnamon taste. If I wanted orange flavoured tea (which I don't), I'd buy honest orange peel tea. I tried a bit of experimenting and put some cinnamon sugar in Baroness, but then it tasted of nothing else than cinnamon.

We went to Teaz last week to top up the selection, and ended up with a very promising blackcurrant tea and some rare and very expensive white tea called 100 Monkeys, which we of course chose because of the name. Today I've been trying out the 100 Monkeys, too. This is my first white tea, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Firstly, it really is white. The leaves are kind of silvery light green, and when brewed the tea is so pale yellow that it's difficult to tell when it's brewed enough, even in a white cup. Taste is very delicate, almost sweet - resembles some good quality Japanese green teas I've drunk, although the fragrance is different, even more gentle. Good, but I think I'll still prefer a good quality Darjeeling over that.

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