Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

thats horrible i see why my brain retconned that out of existence

oh no this fic just updated and unfortunately i must print a retraction

it was much worse than MCR it was cobra starship

at this point ive resigned myself to the fact that i will probably never find time to watch the whole thing, but that doesn’t mean i don’t deeply appreciate stuff like AurumCalendula’s God Is A Dancer when it gets shared into my feeds

https://archiveofourown.org/works/42316215

killjoys is such a delightfully viddable fandom <3

Glad me and this person I have literally never met or spoken to can, apparently, have the exact same 15 year cultural arc in our music tastes 😂​

oh i see we’re talking about Stray Kids cool

incidentally the other day, I clicked on a playlist some author linked in their fic notes and it had MCR and Stray Kids back to back and felt very uncomfortably seen

pale enough color that i wondered for a moment if i’d misjudged something in the steeping process (there’s a lot of variance in how you should steep oolongs in terms of temp / time) but it tastes fine

floral notes have been turned down to a more balanced cup, much more presence in the scent than the taste w/a nutty underlayer

p sure its a richer mouthfeel than the last tea, still don’t really pay much attention to this

This is a low oxidation oolong, which you can definitely see in the leaves here! Like the black tea I tried these are loosely rolled

dried leaves smell lightly vegetal with overtones that I suspect will develop into floral once steeped

They are a charming dark jade color after steeping (no picture bc inbuilt filter pot) & indeed v floral, mostly honeysuckle? Like going outside on a summer night after a rainstorm, when the humidity is still thick and makes the fragrance almost tangibly hang in the air

younger sister is out of town & i got a late start today so we’re using the baby tea pot (170 ml i believe) with 2.25 g Tie Guanyin in uhhhh, probably like 185°F water I do not own or use a thermometer so we’re doing that bit entirely by eye

(for anyone curious about judging temps by eye this guide runs a little lower than my own tests, probably due to differences in how high we typically fill the kettle: https://zhaozhoutea.com/fish-eyes-in-your-kettle-chinese-water-temperature-methods/ )

#Ao3TagOfTheDay technically I guess it’s a Musical AU but I feel like that has expectations that this will not fulfill

Considering setting up automated post deletion for this account....

«This unique black tea offering, “Zi Juan,” meaning “purple beauty,” originates from a purple bud varietal that was developed at the Menghai Research Station in Yunnan province. The purple-brown leaves have been loosely rolled and produce a dark amber liquor with a pronounced stone fruit aroma. The cup is smooth and sweet with a jammy/juicy character that hints of red wine. A suggestion of almond/nutty nuances leads to a clean finish.
STEEPING SUGGESTIONS

Leaf Quantity: 2.25 g/6oz cup
Steep Time: 4-5 min
Water Temperature: 212 degrees (boiling)»

Sweetness: no/not prominent enough to be worth putting as the primary note
Smooth: yeah sure
Amber color: definitely
Jammy/juicy with hints of red wine: clearly the same note i was picking out, though i would not have thought to use either of these words
almond/nutty: ok one of those weird quirks of taste is that almond, stone fruit, and cherry blossom are all very close cousins in terms of taste despite having very different effects. i’d be willing to give the floral note i mentioned in the second steep to ‘apricot’

5 min, had to re-preheat the pot because I filled it with cold water to measure volume between steepings one & two

color is lighter but not dramatically so — it makes the photo from the initial steeping look a bit more reddish by comparison but clearly in the same family

much milder flavor but still good (i would not expect to get a 3rd steeping out of this). I drank both both black but younger sister but milk in her first after we got thru the initial tasting discussion and didn’t feel the need for her second. Traces of floral sweetness in the aftertaste here, which surprised me bc I hadn’t gotten any in the initial cup

this is a very light color for a black tea! We’re very firmly in ‘amber’ here rather than red

nothing terribly surprising in the taste in comparison to how the steeped leaves had smelled — red wine still felt appropriate as a main flavor note.

We spent a bit of time discussing where the sweetness in the leaves had gone during steeping, since an oolong I’d just finished had very clear notes of honey (esp in the finish) when I steeped it but not when younger sister did. Speculated that it could be worth experimenting with steeping temp, which was the main difference between sister and my’s technique.

mouthfeel is…normal? idk not something i have a ton of opinions about

This is a rolled tea — by 4 min its mostly unfurled but you can still see some traces of shaping in the basket

rolled teas tend to be pricier but they help keep the leaves intact & can also lend themselves towards better / more interesting resteepings

strongest note on the dried leaves for me is dried fruit? more like the note one would call “raisiny” in sherry than raisins themselves. Younger sister (who was half asleep eating cereal) described it as “like black tea” and “warm and bright”

Steeped leaves loose the sweet smell from the raisins but keep the fruit, which combined with the much more prominent tannin smells ends up something closer to red wine

Yunnan congou from upton tea company, 4.5 g leaves in ~500 g water (i have a tea scale but not a kitchen scale currently, which says a lot about my priorities lol so this is converting from imperial cups) poured at just under boiling into a preheated pot. 4 min steeping time, no rinse

“wait Satsuma isn’t the opening shot where they like almost kiss from the last one how were you still wondering about this”
1) almost
2) i am a suspicious creature by nature