Well well well, it seemed it was only a matter of time before sommerier.com fell off the slippery slope and added a blended tea. Though let me specify, there is no ‘non tea’ in this, there is no filler dried pomelo zest or its flowers; there is also no chemical flavouring and the base materials already stand on their own as fantastic teas available on this site. So… I’m trying to blend away old teas to cover up their weaknesses? If we’ve spoken in person, that’s how I generally feel about blended teas and the companies that create them, but no — that’s not correct either; I was inspired!
Pomelo Flowers, have you smelled one? I haven’t – but recently I’ve had a tea that claims to smell like them. It was a great tea session, though during my time drinking it I couldn’t help but think “I could recreate this”. I wrote an article last year about aroma, how we process it, what I found cool about the science behind it, etc. One of the things I thought was the most interesting was the concept that if you put tomato, basil, balsamic and mozzarella cheese in a cup and allow someone to smell it blindfolded, some might say ‘hey that smells like caprese salad!’ while others might fire off the list of its specific ingredients. I’m the type to describe the latter. So when I was drinking this ‘Pomelo Flower Tea’ and breaking down what I think it smelled like, I felt I had the ingredients on hand to essentially mimic the aroma and flavor, it would just take some tinkering.
From my successes over the years with cocktails, blending base ctc’s for chai, and work in the world of matcha, honestly this task was rather simple. I initially described the notes of this pomelo flower tea being citrusy like mandarin orange, while pungent like aspen poplar buds in the spring, and intoxicatingly floral fragrant like jasmine. I have a phoenix oolong that smells ‘orange’ and floral, a jasmine tea that is intoxicatingly juicy and floral, and a few tieguanyin teas that can give off this pungent aspen poplar note. Making a blend based on how well I know the components and their relative power, I mixed up a little carafe of tea.
It’s a great feeling when you attempt something you’ve never really done, with only tertiary experiences to guide your rationality and you just nail it. This ‘Pomelo Flower’ tea is seriously good, I should sell it, and it has the kind of flavor set that I am absolutely down to drink anytime but –
I can’t. I can’t contribute to the blended tea world, not in the way that it exists currently. I am an artist dammit, and I will not put a bunch of leaves with significantly different mass in a jar and hope that the correct proportions randomly appear in someones tea pot at home, not unless the person buying it knows that it’s something I’m against. It’s like that scene from Casino when Robert DeNiro demanded an equal number of blueberries in every muffin but the chef preparing them said it wasn’t feasible. I agree with DeNiro’s rage on this one, workload be damned, if you’re going to do it, do it perfect.
How do I do this perfect? I blend and package according to someone’s teapot size. Sounds ridiculous? It is. Measuring out 3 teas by hand on a scale down to .1g per bag, sealing it, writing instructions? Fuck that – right? Fuck that right?
No, I’m going to do it.
The packages you see being sold here fit my glass carafe size of 330mL but I can create them to fit any size, probably up to 450mL (due to size constraints on my packaging) and will be packaged (with love) to order. If you’d like me to blend another size, please reach out by email to josh@sommerier.com
I bet it’s the best blended tea you drink, by far. Please buy some. Thanks.
PS. If you really want, I can sell it as a large blended batch. Though I don’t recommend it (for reasons cited above) because the pot to pot flavor variation will be huge. However it’ll be much less costly overall and comes in a beautiful porcelain caddy, very suitable for a gift.
PPS. Why so expensive? It’s the phoenix oolong used in the blend. Sorry.
