Tea Adventure: Tie Guan Yin “Iron Goddess” from Teavivre

Here is the latest “Tea Gang” adventure with:


Tie Guan Yin “Iron Goddess” from Teavivre [More company info]This is a Straight Tea [About straight teas vs flavored teas.]

Be cautious when ordering from this company, since there is no information available about who the people behind the company are other than some vague statements on their web site.

Teavivre has been busy sending out samples around the U.S., selecting people off of Twitter and Facebook. This little teapot received several recently and was hard pressed to select which one to begin with, since they were all teas that had a reputation for quality. I finally decided on a version of Tie Guan Yin (also called Ti Kwan Yin and “Iron Goddess”), a tea my humans enjoy quite a bit. Time to see how this one stacks up to the others we’ve tried.

True to my principles, the tea was steeped according to the vendor’s instructions: boiling water and steep for 1 to 3 minutes. My buddy little white teacup with the infuser basket that fits perfectly in it did the honors and was able to get three tasty steepings of 1 minute each. There could easily have been a fourth or fifth. (Libre Tea Mug wanted to do this, and this type of tea would have done well in him, but the tea came in little vacuum-sealed subpacks inside the large silver pouch and did not contain enough in that subpack for steeping in the large mug. So, he helped me supervise.)

The taste results: As Tie Guan Yin teas go, this was probably one of the lesser ones, in part because it had been oxidized very little and so had a greenish planty flavor that was also a bit grassy. The taste was not smooth as we were used to but was also not bitter. We ended up with quite a lot of tea leaf bits in the cup and had to strain it again. I’m thinking that my humans should have given this tea a quick rinse before steeping.

The tea leaves after 3 steepings:

A note about the package: the labeling is pretty thorough, including such as place of origin, factory, production date, shelf life, and a brew guide.

Oxidation ranking:

Disclaimer: This tea was provided by the company named. However, any opinions concerning this tea and the company are always strictly objective.

© 2011 A.C. Cargill photos and text – All rights reserved. No copying, posting on other sites, or other uses allowed without written permission of the copyright holder.