“Sencha Origin Unknown”
Today has been a day of data gathering.
Confusion abounds again. It certainly doesn’t look like a Japanese sencha. Maybe it’s Chinese or Taiwanese. It looks dead whatever its provenance. Mixed in are very thin stems all cut to the same length. Closer inspection reveals the stems to be small bunches of pine needles I guess, blanched in their age. The dry leaf smells like sweetgrass and perfume. The aroma once brewed contains the vestiges of fruity jasmine. There isn’t much taste — dry sweetgrass I guess and a whiff of perfume. Certainly no pine so I question the small tufts of needles — it’s some kind of shrub. Almost no bitterness and no astringency. Butter on swallow. Undefined lingering stonefruit aftertaste with a hint of butter.
The tea’s not entirely dead but it shall remain a mystery.
addendum: after sniffing the wet leaf, I’m pretty the tufts are pine.
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I need to do some of that “mystery bag” cleaning out myself. I found a baggie this weekend of some very ruffly green leaves and I have no idea, for the life of me, where they came from.
So it is sencha with pine needles?
That’s my guess, Martin.
I hope you make a note for your neglected find, gmathis.
That’s so weird combination.
I have decided to break my steepster silence specifically to comment on this note. In researching sencha blends, I have discovered that sencha and pine needle blends are, in fact, a thing. I know of at least one Middle Eastern vendor that currently sells blends of black sencha and pine needles. I am not certain that such blends are common, though, as I couldn’t find tons of them floating around on the market. I would say you probably are dealing with some sort of limited edition blend (perhaps even from a vendor that is defunct at this point).
Thanks for popping in, guy. You’re a wealth of information :)
No problem.
Yeah we miss him around here!
I need to do some of that “mystery bag” cleaning out myself. I found a baggie this weekend of some very ruffly green leaves and I have no idea, for the life of me, where they came from.
So it is sencha with pine needles?
That’s my guess, Martin.
I hope you make a note for your neglected find, gmathis.
That’s so weird combination.
I have decided to break my steepster silence specifically to comment on this note. In researching sencha blends, I have discovered that sencha and pine needle blends are, in fact, a thing. I know of at least one Middle Eastern vendor that currently sells blends of black sencha and pine needles. I am not certain that such blends are common, though, as I couldn’t find tons of them floating around on the market. I would say you probably are dealing with some sort of limited edition blend (perhaps even from a vendor that is defunct at this point).
Thanks for popping in, guy. You’re a wealth of information :)
No problem.
Yeah we miss him around here!