The title of this post sounds like it could be a video, but I didn’t take any so let me try to set the scene:

It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’m meeting a friend who’s been living overseas. After forgetting to bring teas once, I have finally smuggled a few packets into a local teahouse. We are supposed to be making and drinking the tea that we ordered, but with a full kettle of water, my friend and I decide to take a risk – let’s try some Georgian teas.

The first tea we drank was a keemun black tea, and it was pretty delicious – very sweet and fragrant. This set the standard by which we compared the other two teas.

Burnished Beauty

Since our first tea was a black tea, we thought it would be nice if our second was a black tea too! Also, we thought Burnished Beauty was a nice name.

Unfortunately, this did not go down so well after the keemun. The tea felt sharp and lacking in sweetness by comparison. I was reminded of the Smooth Jazz when I understeeped it, so we tried again with a longer steep and… it tasted the same. At this point, my friend wanted to switch to a different tea.

I did try this one more time at home, and I’m not sure if it’s the difference in water or because I didn’t drink a tea before this, but the Burnished Beauty tasted sweeter and was more fragrant the second time around. I was reminded of a Japanese black tea when I drank it.

Green Velvet

Since the black tea didn’t work out, we decided to try a green tea next! Green Velvet was very light in terms of the colour of the tea, but it had more flavour. We found this to be a more nutty and sweet green tea, and since we were in a Chinese teahouse, comparisons to longjing tea came up.

Out of the two teas we tried, was definitely the tea that my friend preferred.

Overall, this was a fun experience especially since tea drinking is normally a solitary experience for me, especially since I want to concentrate on the flavours and write things down (let’s be honest, it’s the writing things down part that stops me from drinking with friends – feels like I’m interrupting a congenial moment). Since I have a lot of sampler packets of Renegade Tea left, I’ll want to have more people try these teas and see what they think.