Well, hasn’t it been a while. After the craziness of Christmas, I admit, it’s taken me some time to get back into the blogging groove. In the meantime, my White2Tea tea club packages, previously taking their very sweet time to get over here from China, have unblocked. I now have a big stack of intriguing teas to dive into. Here’s the lowdown on September 2021 tea club.
Curious Cultivars: Oolong Tea Tasting [Japanese Oolongs and Dan Cong]
My interest was most certainly piqued when I saw that my favourite teahouse in Helsinki, TeeMaa, was putting on a tea tasting of Japanese oolongs. Oolong teas are unusual in Japan, a country most famously known for its green teas. So I was very intrigued to taste some Japanese oolongs. Plus we were going to taste them alongside a favourite category of oolongs for me, Dan Cong.
Kombucha has seen a huge rise in popularity over the last few years. Once an obscure potion on the shelves of health food stores, it’s now gone mainstream! Known for its probiotic health properties, Kombucha is a slightly sparkling fermented tea drink made with a live culture called a Scoby. I’m a relative newcomer to kombucha. It’s only over the past couple of years that I’ve started to drink and appreciate it. And now I decided to give home brewing kombucha a go!
I’ve been meaning to join White2Tea Tea club for some time now. So this year I gave myself a birthday present and signed up! That was back in July, just in time for August's tea club. I knew it was going to be a waiting game, what with the state of shipments from China. So I was pretty excited when the notification of its arrival came towards the end of August.
In my Matcha 101 blog I wrote about the four main Matcha producing regions in Japan. Matcha has a very distinctive vegetal and savoury (umami) taste. And each region further adds its own unique flavour which is influenced by the growing environment - its climate, landscape and soil. In this post I compare Matcha from three of the regions - Uji, Fukuoka, and Nishio.
More tea tasting this week courtesy of Tarmo who has joined Yunnan Sourcing’s Sheng Pu’er Club. We tried four different Sheng Pu’ers. This time around we blind tasted each tea for three infusions. Then we wrote our own notes before comparing. Finally the details of the tea were revealed. It was a great experiment in showing just how differently people experience taste and flavours. For some infusions we had similar notes, for others, wildly different!
In a land of coffee drinkers, how happy was I to come across a newly created Meetup group – Helsinki Tea Tasting. Last Sunday I joined four other tea enthusiasts for some Sheng Pu’er tea tasting kindly hosted by Tarmo. We tasted four from his Sheng Pu’er collection before I reached my tea drunk limit.
