Tea Tasting at The Chinese Tea Company
So back in October I got a rather excited text from my wonderful friend Lindsey, she'd found a tea tasting experience on Groupon, we both thought this sounded perfect for me to expand my knowledge & for Linz to toe the waters with more than just my stash & spotty factoids so she signed us up straight away!
As life has a funny way of getting in the way we ended up not booking our trip until after New Years, so I found myself excitedly counting down until February 20th.
From where we live it was at least an hour by train but so worth it!
When we arrived we spent a good 15 minutes trying to work out how to get in as the store is located within a mall, once calling the store it turned out we'd missed an email advising us to do as such, doh!
The store itself is a quaint little slot that almost doesn't belong in its surroundings, appropriately there is a Gizmo plush hiding in the corner of the window display as it reminds us of the curio store from Gremlins somewhat!
Once inside the store, you can see a rectangular table with benches set up, at the far end were all the accoutrements you'd associate with tea in China. As we were the first to arrive we spent the next few minutes oooing & aaahing at all the tea, teapots & sets and wishing for a larger pay-packet!!
Once most of the guest arrived we seated ourselves on the benches to begin our journey into tea knowledge! As the last two attendees were running late we started without them, our host Juyan Webster immediately showed her knowledge and passion for tea.
Our first tea was a fabulous White Peony, of which we had 4 infusions, each tasting different while Juyan explained how each leaf was harvested & prepared, at what time of year, what parts of the leaves were used & the age/type of the plant (Juyan explained that a young White Tea plant could not be used for example to produce Puer).
Our second tea was a wonderful Oolong, Tie Guan Yin, as many of my readers/Twitterbods may have noticed I love Oolong & drink it every day. The Oolong was served with an additional little tasting cup that allowed us to fully appreciate the full bodied scent this tea has, again we had 4 infusions of this blend and Juyan explained how the leaf was prepared & what parts of the leaf & bud are used to create this glorious tea. In fact I loved this tea so much I actually bought some once we had finished!
Our third tea was a gorgeous Red Tea, Yunnan Dian Hong. Not to be confused with Redbush/Rooibos, Red Tea is what is generally known as Black Tea outside of China. Red due to the colour the tea goes when infused, but Black due to the colour of the tea leaf before infusion. This was unlike any tea I had tasted previously, I could taste the freshness of this blend and in each subsequent infusion (each and every tea for sale in the store states when it was picked and what province it comes from). I also treated myself to a bag of this too.
Our fourth and final tea was a beautifully earthy Puer from 2005/6, I have a soft spot for Puer as it always makes me feel like I'm in the woods after a rain storm and it takes me to many happy memories! This is no exception, I found this tea so fantastically rich even after multiple infusions. The leaves for this tea came from a huge pressed cake, I own many miniature cakes but this was my first time drinking from a larger cake and I could taste the difference! My birthday is coming up soon so I will be majorly hinting at the Mr to buy me one of my very own!
To wrap up we both had a wonderful time & learned so much in such a short time, definitely an experience I hope to repeat soon only this time if Juyan doesn't mind I will be taking notes or see if I can record the session as even by the time we got home the knowledge was filtering away.
