a bit of sugar and sass in your tea
I hope you’ve all had a tea-rrific Christmas & holiday season!
I got even more tea to add to the tea stash and some teaware that I’m very excited about – including a gong fu tea set from China and a tea mug with an infuser! More on all of that later when I get around to doing some reviews.
The regular twice-weekly tea reviews will resume next week. If you have any tea suggestions, please let me know here.
Happy holidays and best wishes for 2016!
Mint Oolong by 3pm Oolong Tea
Oolong Tea / Straight
This is a review of a tea that I received for my birthday in 2015. I won’t be doing too much digging into the costs of the gifts that I’ve received. For Mint Oolong, I genuinely couldn’t even find the product on the company’s website.
First Impressions
The presentation of Mint Oolong is really nice. It comes in a clean, clear glass jar that comes with a glass stopper. The jar holds 50g of tea, the label has information in both Chinese and English – and there’s even a nutritional label in English and French on the bottom of the jar. The design is really nice, and I really appreciate how pretty it looks (the glass stopper even has some nice design elements to it to keep it interesting). The fact that it is clear glass makes it not the most ideal tea storage container, but as long as I keep it in a dark place I’m okay with it because it has a great air tight seal to it.
The tea itself smells delightful. Very minty, and you can see the mint leaves in it, but it isn’t overwhelming the natural fragrance of the oolong. It’s quite a refreshing fragrance though, as a lot of minty things often are. The tea itself is quite fragrant, the stopper on the glass jar is quite snug to help keep air from getting in with the tea, which is a great feature since it helps to prolong the shelf life of the tea. The tea is very simple with two ingredients: oolong and mint.
Preparation
3pm Oolong Tea recommends steeping in boiling water for 3 to 5 minutes. I steeped for about 4 minutes.
First Taste
Mint Oolong steeps to a golden yellow colour, it smells more of the oolong base than it does of the mint leaves. The tea itself is pleasant and enjoyable. Steeping for about 4 minutes yielded a nice cup of tea that is smooth with no bitter notes at all. I found that the mint wasn’t as pronounced in the taste, although there is a hint of it at the end of each sip. The oolong plays the starring role in the tea, as it should given that it is an oolong tea. It’s very enjoyable, and tastes great hot. I allowed the second half of the cup to cool down and it’s really enjoyable as a cold tea as well (I didn’t have it concentrated enough to try it with ice).
A Second Cup?
Mint Oolong does amazingly well with one more steep. The flavour of the oolong is still very much present, the mint plays less into the overall flavour and it continued to dissipate with each subsequent steeping. I found that the oolong did well for about four steeps altogether and the smoothness of the oolong got more enjoyable with each cup.
My Overall Impression
I liked 3pm Oolong Tea’s Mint Oolong. I love how well this tea does with resteeping, it really showcases the quality of the tea when it can be resteeped and still taste really great. I really wish that the enticing mint that I could smell in the dry leaf was more present in the tea with the oolong flavour because it didn’t really do much for me. I felt it was a bit of a let down that the mint didn’t have more a presence in the overall tea flavour, but the smoothness and the pleasantness of the oolong made up for the fact that the mint didn’t have a bigger role in the flavour profile.
Curious about the cup rating system? Click here to learn more.
There are people who don’t think that tea can go bad because it’s dry leaves and it just stays in a cupboard for when you need it. But tea can go bad and nobody wants to open up a bag, hope to inhale the beautiful aroma of their favourite tea and be left with a hint of what the tea used to smell like – before it was left to mingle with air and the heat from being stored above the stove. In general, the factors that cause tea to go bad or to go stale include exposure to:
There is a reason why it’s recommended to keep tea in a cool, dry, dark place – like a cupboard.
Humidity/moisture is a big one – if your tea leaves get wet and then continue to stay wet or don’t dry out properly, you end up with mold. Dry tea is shelf stable, but only if it’s dry.
Heat is a problem for tea because heat speeds up the degradation process. The quality of tea degrades when it is exposed to heat, one of the reasons why a “cool” tea storage place is idea.
Air is a tricky one for a myriad of reasons. Air flow can introduce unpleasant odours to your tea as they can pick things up, but it can also introduce moisture to the tea leaves as there is water content in the air. A good air tight seal is ideal for most teas unless you happen to have pu-erh teas. Pu-erh teas do better when they can “breathe” and will benefit from air circulation (pu-erh teas is a tea that gets better/stronger with age as it ferments, but it can only do this if it’s allowed to have contact with air, so an air tight container is not necessary).
And then there’s light. Sunlight can degrade tea leaves by damaging the tea leaves. This is one of the reasons why clear glass jars are not ideal for tea storage. I do have some tea in glass jars, but I also keep them in a dark box so they’re not exposed to light all the time. The rest of my tea lives in tea tins or bags that can be sealed.
I personally use a combination of methods to store my teas. A lot of my teas live in their original packaging (especially if that packaging includes the dry leaf being in zipped baggies that live in metal tea tines), while some have gotten transferred. I find a lot of retail packaging is sufficient, but I will transfer the tea into clear zipped bags if necessary. And when I have a spare tea tin, I like to wash it out, dry it, and refill it with a tea that could benefit from being in a tea. A lot of my tea tins are from DavidsTea, but a lot of places now carry similar storage tins (e.g. dollar stores, kitchenware stores, other tea retailers).