Guest blog: A special tea

A Special Tea

Sometimes you need something simple, just a moment of peace with little else around you. To create and maintain that peace, I always find it wonderful to drink tea. I am very often busy, and often too busy. Then my head starts spinning, and I get a bit carried away. Recently, I've been trying to keep this in check a bit more, and thus take my rest. Fortunately, tea is a great help with that.

A while ago, I received a beautiful jar of tea from Kaldi. It was a tea from the “SpecialTea” series. These teas are beautifully packaged in a glass jar, and the jars feature cheerful drawings by the Danish artist Poul Pava. You should really collect them all and display them on a shelf in the kitchen.

Buying Tea

The tea itself is fortunately also of high quality. This particular green tea comes from a tea plantation called Long Sheng, and its leaves are beautifully twisted together. Because of the shape they take, the tea has been given the name Jade Needles Yi Zhu, also known as “Pillar of Jade”. The dried tea looks beautiful; I have never seen this shape before. When you brew the tea, the pillars unfurl a bit, allowing the flavour and aroma to be released properly.

Then the taste, the tea has a green flavour, but without the "grassiness" that we know so well in a green tea. I would describe the taste myself as soft, but with a "green" aftertaste; a slightly dry taste lingers. Kaldi itself describes the taste as; floral and mild.

After brewing, I was very curious about the slightly unfurled pillars; these were fairly easy to separate, but the leaves themselves were also still rolled up. I know that if you unfold them, you can see the leaves (and thus the quality) very well. It took some effort, but eventually, I managed to unfold a few leaves, and inside the leaves, there was a neatly folded smaller leaf and a small bud. The tea not only tastes beautiful, but after a little effort, you also see a small work of art on your plate. And if you don't feel like making that much effort, you can simply enjoy the artwork on the jar itself.

Guest blogger Nikki Looman writes about tea on her blog leuketheetjes.nl