One of the things I have come to really enjoy since I had to say good bye to my coffee and especially my beers is tea. I am still a novice though when it comes to selecting and picking out some of the characters of the individual teas, at least in comparison to what I can tell you about an individual beer. I am learning though and while I live in a small Midwest town I have been able to locate a very close and wonderful source to find the teas to try.
This week I bought myself several ounces of Formosa Oolong which is basically the tea you would drink in many of the Asian restaurants here in the US and I picked up Darjeeling Fine which is new to me.
I have so far had several cups of the Oolong and I am really liking it, with just a touch of sweetener. It by far seems to be one of the few teas I have had that has a "calming" effect. One of the funny things I am having to adjust to is the dry finish it has on your tounge after a sip. My guess is that it is from polyphenols which are an anti-oxidant but in 99% of the styles of beer it is a serious flaw that comes from a variety of sources but detract from the overall profile. Learning a new hobby that ha crossover traits from another is interesting, especially when those traits are desirable in one and despised in another.
One of the crossover traits from brewing to tea is the fact that so many type of tea can be made from the same leaf while in brewing you can have a variety of Specialty Malts can be made from the same base grains. I think finding some of the similarities has been more interesting then I expected but maybe that's because having an understanding of brewing like I do (I was the head brewer in a small brewery) allows me to be openminded about the teas I am trying.
I have found with tea, much as I did when I started brewing, that there are several types/styles that I just do not find pleasing and would pass on if offered. It is not that I do not understand them, in fact in brewing competitions I have often had to judge styles that I would not ask for on my own.
Some of those teas are any of the ones with green tea as the base. They seem to have a "leafy" taste and I cannot shake it while with black teas there are only a few that I found to be less then pleasing. One of those would be Lapsang Souchon which I can only describe as disgusting. It is a smoked tea and the smokiness of it is more intense then I prefer but here once again we find an interesting crossover because one of my favorite beers is a style that originates from Bamberg Germany, the Rauchbier.
These beers are made with anywhere from 10% to 100% smoked malt, with the beers coming from Bamberg using Beechwood to smoke the malt. Obviously the more smoked malt you use the more intense the flavor is going to be. I brewed all my Rauchbiers with no less then 80% smoked malt from Weyermanns Malz which is a maltster located in Bamberg Germany.
I look forward to continuing the discovery of "new" teas and flavors and sharing them as I find them.
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