Ceylon tea is still something of an unknown (or perhaps lesser known these days) quantity for me, but that’s gradually starting to change as more samples start to trickle in. I sampled a few from another merchant a while back that were good but not great. Most recently I took the English Tea Store’s Organic Ceylon out for a spin and I liked that one better.

Which brings me to the Tea Store’s Lovers Leap, which is also a Ceylon tea. Which are primarily black teas from the island nation formerly known as Ceylon and now known as Sri Lanka. This one is grown in the Nuwara Eliya district there, which is located at about four thousand feet above sea level. As coincidence would have it I ran across an article from the Chinese press recently about this very same region. According to the article it’s one of the most important tea production centers in the country and is sometimes referred to as Little England, a reference to its colonial roots.

My first reaction upon steeping a batch of this tea was disappointment. The Tea Store’s blurb refers to it as “a high grown lighter flowery flavor tea, very good after dinner” and I found it to be very light indeed, much too light for my tastes. Realizing that the leaf was a little larger than many of the black teas I’ve been drinking lately I decided I’d try using a little more of it and things improved considerably.

Well, now that’s more like it, I thought to myself, as I came up with a much darker brew and a flavor to match. I’ve been drinking a lot of bold and heavy Assam tea lately and prior to that one of my everyday teas was a very strong black variety from Yunnan. I’m not typically a fan of the more delicate black teas. While this one is a little lighter than what I’m used to the revamped formula made for a great batch and I’m sure I won’t have any problems working my way through the sample pack.

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