I was recently playing around blending teas since I haven’t bought any new teas in a while. So might as well blend some of my old ones and see if it turns out interesting. This idea like most of my (tea)ideas came while my morning tea meditation. It’s funny how my brain is just firing and developing new exciting things to do.
So my idea was to mimic an old pu’er which is very vibrant, diverse, strong aged taste and has a good deep “aged” energy.
I started the blend with Water Lily (~20yr brick shou) since it has a strong aged taste and very calming character. It’s very hard to blend teas if the biggest portion tea is strongly specific in another way. So the watery/calming/harmonizing tea is a good tea to start. A few years ago I was making five element blends and watery/calm teas were good for the base (as Wu De suggests in February 2016 GTH issue). If interested in blending teas I recommend checking the issue out.
Also recently I tried out a blend with 90/10 ratio super calming liubao/super strong 5yr old old tree shou. It didn’t work in harmony and the mere 10% of the strong tea was overpowering the blend. So the taste profile and energy were not in balance.
For this blend I wanted to get some vibrancy, upliftiness and nice medicinal taste more. So I chose “normal” liubao #1 since it’s quite uplifting and has a diverse taste profile. It’s not too overpowering compared to the other teas either.
Finally I added a 60-80s “voodoo aboriginal blend” to give more aged taste, character and deep energy.
Of course I had to play around with the ratios to get the blend in harmony. Too much any tea and it would have not be “in sync”. The ratios in the final blend were about 70/18/12 Water lily/nlb1/voodoo
At least for me this blend was a success. Very harmonious energy with lots of aged taste, vibrancy and aged tea energy. I shared it with a few friends and i’m now waiting for their impressions of it. The price of the blend turned out to be about 10% more than only Water Lily. So this blend made a lot of sense also for the price since with small price increase there was a lot more quality increase.
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