A Tea Addict's Journal

I tried my new shuixian today.

The first two or three infusions were great…. and then the dropoff was rather sudden. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if it’s the way I brewed them, the amount of leaves used (this tea takes up a lot of space so I couldn’t stuff as much tea in there), or what, but the tea somehow didn’t come out as good as I had hoped.

The tea is medium roasted, with very long leaves and looks pretty good when dry. The longer leaves you see in this picture are more than an inch long. I had to break a few of them to make them fit into the pot.

The first few infusions were great… with that roasted aroma, but also underneath it something very fragrant. It’s like an incense for some reason — smells like those Chinese incense, but I’m not sure what they’re called in English. It was an odd thing to detect in tea, but a pleasant one.

Then around infusion 4 something didn’t go quite right. The tea experienced a bit of a dropoff that was pretty obvious. The tea got more watery, etc. I wonder if it’s because I didn’t add enough leaves. Normally I would use more for this type of tea, but this one I couldn’t because of the way the leaves are. I might have to crush some to get more into my pot. Right now they just prop each other up and thus making the total tea/pot ratio to something like 1/3.

I’ll try it again soon and see what happens.