This is the third and final tea that I bought from Renegade Tea Estate, and a part of me is a little sad because I’ve really been enjoying these teas! But, I do have an advent calendar that starts tomorrow, so it’s probably for the best that I keep my tea stash to a somewhat manageable level.

This tea is called Prodigy Mesame and it comes with the following description:

The aroma is fresh and quite floral, you can feel the sweet aroma of butter biscuits and sweet summer flowers. The taste profile is well-balanced, not too much to the green nor to the black side. Though it has quite a strong floral flavour at the same time. Mesame means third in Georgian languages and represents the third try for Prodigy’s recipe. We think this one is here to stay 😉

From the Prodigy Mesame Product Page

First Impressions

The dry leaves are a dark brown colour and they have a rich woody smell. It’s similar to how a lighter black tea (like a Chinese tea) would smell.

Tasting Notes

The recommended steeping method for this was to use 85 degree water and steep for 3-4 minutes, so that’s what I did! The first steep produced a light orange tea liquor that smelled really sweet, a bit like Renegade Life. But, this sweetness didn’t really translate to the taste – it was more of a floral note. For some reason, the sweetness appears as an aftertaste, which is a pleasant surprise.

For the second steep, I steeped it for about 4 minutes. It looks very similar to the first steep but the taste is really much lighter. One thing I realised is that although I tend to use hotter water for the second steep, it’s probably better to use water in the low 80 degrees celsius because the floral notes seem to be stronger with cooler water. If I use freshly boiled water, the tea just tastes light and rather flat.

The tea is pretty much over by the second steep, in my opinion. I tried to brew it gongfu style as well, since that worked for the green tea, but brewing gongfu-style didn’t really improve taste (unsurprisingly, it was just lighter) and the tea didn’t really taste good past the second steep either. So for this, I’d recommend sticking to the recommended brewing instructions.

The spent leaves were a lot lighter than expected, with a green tint to them.

Overall, this was a pretty good oolong! I think my favourite tea from Renegade Tea Farms is still the green tea, but I like all the teas I’ve tried and I want to try more teas from them! I’ll have to remember to get more teas before I move back to Singapore (or, buy enough to hit free shipping when I’m in Singapore).

My next tea post will be a SustainabiliTEA post about… Renegade Tea Farms, so stay tuned to find out more about the farm making these amazing teas!