How Does One Taste Fiction: Western Wild

One of the most wildly known about fictional adventures, for those I’ve met, has always been The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s of no surprise that I would do a Narnia tea; after all, how can you enjoy Lord of The Rings and not Narnia? Both are wonderful stories with a lot being said for the reader to figure out in regards to today, the past, and the future.

Picking a place in the Narnia world to create a tea for wasn’t hard at all. The beginning of the story (as some will say), symbolic to the Old Testament, is when a silver apple is bitten into which creates the White Witch. Take a forest area with pine trees, the idea that it’s winter now, and a silver apple with the whole idea that a witch was just created in this place… I got this!

Part 1: The Apple

Dried apple, check!

Edible silver, check!

Now wrapping those apple pieces with silver… well, what an experience! Blending tea has taught me so much in the food world such as how hard it is to use these edible sheets of silver.They want to attach to anything and hate doing what you ask of it. It’s also hard to take a decent picture. Anyways, all that hard work for something like this:

A little pile such as this may look pathetic to some, but now that I’ve done it… I know that this took time and it wasn’t easy.

Finishing up, this is all I ended up with sadly.

Par 2: Tea

I was so ready to blend this tea. For whatever reason, I already knew what I was going to do. I haven’t done anything floral in a long time and a forest surely has some flowers going on, especially when I think of an untouched one like this. So I used a jasmine scented white needle from China that wasn’t of the delicate sort; this is due to not wanting something so precious being over saturated in other notes that eventually make it disrespected in a weird ‘I’m a tea enthusiast’ point of view. This base tea provides substance for the root of the taste, but not the feel. Look at the green stuff, can you guess?

And from Canada they came! I was able to talk to someone who has pine trees on their property away from any roads and all that good stuff. Had them picked and dried for my blend which makes me super excited because they were really intense with aroma when I got them in the mail. I actually cut them in half because I was trying to get the needles (white and green) to be a decent size for compatibility without ruining the pine needle look.

Above you can see what it looks like. In my kyusu that I used to brew it up, it looked like a miniature forest patch itself.

Part 3: Tasting

As odd as a tea as this is… jasmine and pine? Well, it’s pretty awesome in this taste and feeling experience. The jasmine needles give off a light floral taste while the pine needle has this spike’ish note that comes across but does something much more unique. The liquid leaves this tingling feel after you drink it. Its as if you walked through the forest and the scents seep into your taste buds which gives a tickling sensation.

I was curious above steeping it longer than my own method and found the jasmine took over so this is a delicate blend that requires some attention to brew. There is a small amount of viscosity and if you drink 6 cups back to back, like someone who might have been testing out the brews, there is a slight throat dryness from the jasmine and pine.

This tea isn’t perfect in the sense that I want to feel like I’m in Western Wild, but that would never happen from a tea alone so I decided to watch Narnia with the tea which helped; even though it’s not in there. Reading has been harder to do with the busy end of year at work since I work in finance, but this is one calming cup to accompany a fantasy movie while winter is outside your walls.

I am actually sending this tea out with additional apple pieces so others can play around with the blend themselves. Really looking forward to what others say about this since it’s pretty unique in the way that you really feel the tea as the mouth is tickled.

 

Next up, a tea dedicated to Percy Jackson. It might be a good month though as it’s one of the hardest blends to do that I’ve worked on… just wait and you’ll see.

-Andrew / Liquid Proust