Blending black tea

Bart, I am so happy for you that you have taken the initiative to venture into doing something that is so purely empirical-based. As far as I know, there is not a lot of publicly available and at the same usable literature on the art of tea-blending. Older literature also based on the limited tea varieties available back in the old days. A lot of commercial operations are using additives and non-teas in their blends so there is virtually no rules. That is not to say I endorse that, though.

I get it. This is like learning to cook. You have to know the characteristics of all of your ingredients first. There is so much info in this site and I am happy that I have been reading it for over a year now, but if I had not really get to the different teas it describes, I would not really know the difference between a Phoenix and a White Peony!

I still have much to learn

I think tea blending is fun, but finding and appreciating high quality single origin, single harvest teas is even more rewarding!

I enjoy blending too, but just knowing all the varieties seems a life-time job already!

I am very interested in blending too. I have tried that with sheng and shu puer. The tea tasted quite good. I wonder if it would mature well. Has anyone tried that too? Any tips?

I think the good thing about this forum is that people respect each other to speak out what they think. Longjing43 has the rights to express his/her preference. It is very inappropriate to criticize him/her using such words.

Manila, I agree with you. I find the language in that comment very offensive.

It is hard to fully express one’s intent in just words, especially across the internet and the language barrier many of us have here.  I’m limited to a few words of Nederlands, for example.  Zilver, horzel, zvaard, zon.  Noticing most of those start with a Z.

In any case, what did you use to make your blend?  I’ve considered trying to mix a few teas, but so far the ones I’ve got are rather disparate and wouldn’t work well together.

M.