Reviewer: Tchuggin' Okie
✓ 397 teas reviewed
✓ 76 of Black Tea
✓ 114 of Pure Tea (Camellia sinensis)
✓ 61 of Murchie's Tea & Coffee Ltd
✓ 1 from Nepal
Review of Himalayan
September 19th, 2024
| Aroma | Flavor | Value | Total |
| 8 of 10 | 4 of 5 | 5 of 5 | 80 of 100 |
| Excellent | Good | Outstanding |
My first Nepalese tea was a pleasant experience, but only after a little trial and error. First, the aroma: a good bit milder than the flavor, but pleasant, earthy, and floral, as if in a freshly watered flower garden with just a few active blooms of marigold or carnation wafting their scents airborne.
The first cup was more error than trial. I brewed about 6–7 minutes, as often is the case, and it slammed me in the mouth with a jiu-jitsu thrust kick of bitterness. The good news is, that's avoidable, and when you do, a stout, muscular but well-balanced tea results. The fairly narrow temporal window of excellence, however, is why I docked this a bit on flavor. You don't have to be surgically precise, but you will need to pay close attention.
More trials: This tea does get quite bitter fairly quickly if one steeps past about 5 minutes. Until it does, however, there seems to be a "Goldilocks zone" of about 4 minutes where it gets really strong in all flavors, but not excessively bitter-dominant. Play with it some. If you want more subtlety, maybe 3–4 will work. Once you find your balance, you'll still have a potent tea with quite a good kick. [This seems to have a lot of caffeine in it too.]
The liquid brews up a light orange-amber for a couple minutes, then in the Goldilocks zone, gets pretty dark tan-brown. So you at least get a visual clue when to pull the leaves. From inside the window, the flavor stays earthy, almost as much astringency as bitterness, fairly intense overall (which I like), with the background essence switching from floral more toward pine or spruce, and at times woody. The aftertaste is piney and a little floral as well.
Folks with a better tongue for discriminating flavors probably can pull a lot of complexity out of this tea...if brewed just short of where the bitterness blows up and overwhelms everything. In this regard, it actually reminds me of a couple high-grown Kenyan teas I've had. I don't do much second-steeping, but this seems like a tea that should take very well to it. As for value, I pretty much rate any Murchie's tea high, if it's good quality, because of the still-favorable Canadian/U.S. dollar exchange rate.
