Brewing up this tea has been sort of a comedy of errors for me. I was super excited to get some in my last YS shipment (I’d split 50g with a friend), and decided to brew up a big thermos of it for work in the morning. I did what I call “speed gong-fu,” which is essentially a normal gong fu session minus the drinking part—I just dumped everything into a thermos. I sealed the lid and looked forward to some delicious sugar-roasted tea in the morning.
I was so wrong.
So yeah, the way I brewed this tea made it unbelievably bitter, like bagged black tea that’s been in the cup all day. I could take a few sips of it here and there and got some nice sweet potato-y notes, but otherwise it was awful. I poured it on my little dorm plant, in the end.
This afternoon my friend decided to make a big mug of it western-style, which I also tried. Much less disgusting than before, but it still had an unpleasant (read: not chocolatey) bitterness on the end, and just tasted sort of…weird. Maybe because of the sugar I expected it to be super mild, but it’s got a very strong taste, with some definite sour and bitter notes. It’s also strangely salty-tasting—last night when I did my little tea session my whole room ended up smelling sort of briny…which is strange.
Anyway, not loving this at the moment, but I’m planning to do a more definitive session today or tomorrow and see how it goes!
