Winter Frost Tea

$22.50 Regular price

An unusual looking tea, our unique limited edition Winter Frost Tea with its green flakes and dark wiry leaf exudes a well-structured taste with balance and finesse.

Following bright and sunny days Winter Frost Tea only arrives if the temperatures in Nilgiri dip sharply resulting in a heavy frost settling over the tea fields fresh young shoots. This temperature snap presents the right conditions to result in the flavour compounds within the leaves being at their best to make this tea.

A rare and unusual tea, which has a milder flavour than Indian black teas, with its eccentric blend of green spring freshness drawing a light, straw-yellow tea infusion enhanced with an interesting and smooth barley-sugar, long-lasting sweetness with floral hints.

How it's made: The green leaf for this particular tea is plucked from a section of the estate that is pure CR6017 which is a unique high quality ‘China’ type cultivar, accepted as being amongst the top quality tea clone of the Nilgiris.

The pluckers add to the quality of this tea by going for a very fine pluck so that only the tender-most new shoots enter the factory. Once in the factory, a very hard wither reduces the moisture content in the leaf by as much as 65%. Since the relatively thick stem of the CR6017 absorbs more moisture than many other cultivars, this hard wither results in the leaf borders becoming completely dry, so that the extremities of the leaf retain their green appearance and flake off during the rolling process. It is these flakes that are responsible for the unique green characteristics of the flavour profile.

This hard-withered leaf is loaded into a 36” deep-well, double-action rolling table in which it is rolled for an hour without any vertical pressure application. The resultant final bulk has a negligible quantity of smaller particles, as a result of which the tea requires no grading through sifting machines.

For best results, we recommend 2-3g/250ml at 95˚c for 3-5 minutes. As this is a light black tea it is best drunk without milk to enjoy the full flavour of this tea. It produces multiple infusions of high quality, with the smooth uplifting qualities of a fine black.

This tea is not organic, but don't hold that against it. It is lovely.