I’m not sure what’s wrong with me, and I’m pretty sure the wrongness is on my end and not the tea’s fault.
The dry smell: Coconut milk- the kind we like to use for Vietnamese desserts or curry, with no added sugar. Yum. The leaves were quite large and fluffy, which made me use heaping teaspoons each time. It kind of made me wish for a weighed measurement recommendation, but then again I haven’t a scale so that would not have helped me much anyways.
The brew aroma: Roasted coconut. What? Still very exciting but it’s interesting how that takes a turn. Not aged roasted coconut though, like very young roasted coconut that’s been toasted for a little bit. If you took coconut flesh or juice from a young coconut (still in the wood) and stuck it in a convection oven to make coconut chips. I’m not sure where the cakey smell is supposed to come into play. It definitely doesn’t have that heavy coconut macaroons or even maracrons smell that I associate bakery coconut with. It doesn’t have that coconut jelly cake smell… which is layered flavors of agar if you’re not familiar with it. The aroma does become more creamy as it cools, but oddly the creamy that accompanies adding dairy cream/milk or creamer to your tea and not the coconut milk type creamy.
The base smells/tastes like a green oolong. It’s a beautiful whole leaf that creates a light green liquor. It’s also very very light in flavor. Despite how light the flavor is, it doesn’t veer into green, despite not being a roasted oolong. The flavor is fresh light and I would say vegetal? It goes well with the coconut aroma, which doesn’t translate to the taste very much at all. It’s very much a dual experience, where the tea is giving off the aroma of a young but creamy coconut, veering on the side of coconut juice, but the taste and mouth feel is such a light oolong that it’s bordering on warm oolong tinted water. I wondered at the fact that it didn’t change much though from steep to steep.
Much better in a small teacup. The large mug experience was lacking.
Maybe I’m too used to dark oolongs. I was expecting a much more robust and full flavor out of this one, but I’m not yet terribly disappointed. What I’m mostly surprised at is that I brewed at least four or five Ingenuitea ‘pots’ today- I went through my kettle’s 3L of water, I know that much, at least two of which were after 8pm, and I don’t feel very caffeinated at all. Slightly sleepy even.
I’ve not been enjoying alot of teas lately, goodness knows why, unless it’s a particularly full or heady brew, or dripping with honey. Take this review with a grain of salt.
