the_skua steeps

It was easy to tell from the beginning that this tea was something different. These needles, unlike their brethren, were achingly long, graceful, and delicate – earth’s spring spires. After my session, I visited Rishi’s website and read the description of the tea. I try to stay away from such grandiose illustrations as these before I drink a tea, because as MarshalN points out, the narratives a vendor provide can have a significant impact on our perceptions even before we see the leaves. That being said, reading the narrative for this tea after drinking it only confirmed and made concrete my feelings about it.

At first, I thought that this tea was overly subtle, punishingly delicate, and fleeting. The first steeps didn’t have that punchy strong glowing pale fruit juiciness, the hay and straw scents restrained, a faint bit of starchy squash lingering in the background. But as the leaves warmed and steeped, the soup settled into what I can only call a graceful, complex maturity. This tea has a very refined air to it, with quiet, but complex, soft notes of fresh garden herbs, warm dawn earth, and just-peeled tree bark.

Sometimes it takes a quiet mind and a patient palate to pull from tea what it has to give. I think this one requires that level of detail, as it has not been processed to beat you over the head with that full-of-juice, spring-like, dewy sweetness and flavor that comes on strong in the first steeps of so many silver needles, only to evaporate quickly and leave you with something grassy and plain. No, this tea has stamina and grace out in the seventh and eight steeps. A truly notable and sophisticated example.

Tags: silver needle, white

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 9:14 AM and is filed under group tastings, silver needle, white. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.