Tea Tasting Session - Indian Assam Latumoni Black Tea
- Harvey Cocks
- Jan 17, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 1, 2020
Today, I try out some wonderful Indian Assam black tea sent over by What-cha as an included sample in my recent purchase from them!
Please note that today's tea tasting is not in any way sponsored, the tea I am tasting has been bought by me from their own shop. Links as always will be posted at the bottom!
Firstly let's start off by taking a look at my little tea setup here!
I will be using my pro gong fu Mei Leaf tea tray, my Jianshuichinese teapot as well as my Jianzhan teacup.
Onto looking at the tea, I ordered a sample, so hence why its in a tiny little packet. But on the packet, it contains some cool little information about the tea including the origin, harvest date and directions on how to brew.
Onto the leaves themselves, after opening the packet, I can clearly see by what they mean "Handrolled Tippy" here, the quality of the leaves are quite nice, large and clearly hand-rolled.
Firstly I began to smell the dry leaves and noticed quite a potent smell however it smelled in a sense quite sweet which was interesting as most black Assam's are quite not like that. However, I could smell some of the more earthy, malty and dark notes coming through after the sweet smell.
Now onto the brewing for the tea! First, I decided to rinse the tea leaves by using near-boiling water at around 95 degrees Celcius. And of course, we will feed our little tea pet a little drink of it.
If you want to know why some people rinse their teas, it's purely for opening up the leaves and making sure that the full flavour is extracted from the second brew onwards. On top of this, it also helps for some people when they are smelling and tasting the tea in a full experience to open up the aromas of the tea and finally, to wash out any broken leaves or small leaves before drinking.
As you can see below the liquor colour of the tea is a very rich dark red hence why some people call most black teas red teas! If you want to learn more about black tea click here to see my blog about it!
But most importantly, it tasted incredibly bitter for my first brew, but strong with notes of malt and vegetal tastes. It was honestly quite a lot to take in for the first brew but was incredibly interesting.
I started to notice as the brews went onwards that the taste of the tea started to become much more easily manageable and from the 3rd infusion onwards it started to really shape its form and move away from those vegetal notes to a more chocolatey and heavily malty taste.
As the infusions were going up, I started to notice as well that the vegetal taste at the beginning started to completely die down which let room for the dark malty/earthy tastes to come in.
Below you can see the leaves, and they are quite interesting as they are very brown/dark however you can see the leaves starting to open up from the 2cnd infusion onwards.
Below you can see the colour difference being quite minimal between the 3rd infusion to the 6th. However, you can see the colour going from red to a more browny-orange colour.
Overall I think the tea was quite nice, but it's one of those teas that you have to be in the mood for. If you want a strong, powerful packed black tea, then I would totally recommend this Assam tea from What-Cha.
If you would like to buy this tea or check it out, click the link below:
I hope you enjoyed this little tea tasting review/session today, be sure to check out my other reviews on other teas in the near future!
Don't forget to stay away from those tea bags and keep with the loose leaf!
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