Jaya is not well today. Some minor cold and congestion, and she kept me up all night long. So when I woke up this morning I felt like having a nice cup of tea. I decided to go for 2004 Thurbo first flush, which has a nice floral aroma, and an infusion that gets better with longer steep. Here is a picture of the infusion of Thurbo.

You can see the large leaves in the infusion with the thick veins, but hardly any stem. This is a characteristic of good tea. This Thurbo is graded FTGFOP1 Clonal, which means, Only the Finest Tips of Golden Flowery [containing a lot of buds] and Orange Pekoe [largest leaf - the best variety of leaf in Darjeeling teas that were not broken at the time of picking] from Clonal bushes, were used for producing this tea.

Simply put, this tea was produced using some of the finest large leaf and contains a fair amount of golden tips and flowery buds. Important to note that there are no tea FLOWERS in this because tea flowers are NOT used in producing tea.

Ahh, what a wonderful tea this Thurbo first flush is…just opens up my heart like nothing else. The delicate floral aroma, the muscatel flavor and the light taste, all just made my troubles go away. As I sit here writing this piece, the aroma still swirls around me rising from the open cup.

One thing about Darjeelings that many people who are used to drinking Chinese and Taiwanese Oolongs don’t understand is that Darjeeling teas are cut leaf teas, so they require quite a bit less of a steep time than the full leaf teas like Oolongs.

It is also important to note that I used only 1 round teaspoon of tea with 2 cups of hot water for preparing this brew (the picture above is that of the second steep), and I kept drinking out of the tea pot until the tea was gone. Doing this you will notice that the tea gets a bit stronger as it sits, but you won’t notice any bitterness whatsoever. On top of that, the second steep seems to bring out some more of the delicate muscatel flavor.