Do you have tea that has been lying around for too long?

Almost every one of us has tea that has been lying around for way too long. You don’t feel like drinking it, but you also don’t want to let it go to waste? Here is what you can do to jazz up the tea and have a little fun:

Try heating it in the oven! That’s right. Bake it in the oven. Here’s how we did, and we think you can do it too: 

We took some Tie Guan Yin, spring 2018. We have had it for a while now, and we wanted to revive it, to make it rise like a phoenix from the oven (ashes)! We placed a thin, even layer of tea on a baking tray, making sure that there were no tea leaves on top of each other. We made a total of two batches: one batch baked at 300°F for 40 minutes, the second batch baked at 350°F for 20 minutes. We used “bake” mode both times. Here is the final result (the tea described below is displayed on the photo in order from left to right):

Tie Guan Yin that we did not heat: the aroma is grassy, floral. The taste is sweet, buttery with a rich floral taste, completed by a creaminess.

Tie Guan Yin, 300°F, 40 min: the aroma includes notes of cookies and nuts. The taste has acquired notes of cherry with a light sourness, the aftertaste includes oatmeal cookies with no sugar.

Tie Guan Yin, 350°F, 20 min: the result is an intensely heated TGY. The aroma is of baked plums and apples. The taste includes a slight tartness and begins to bear resemblance to slightly aged Lao Cha Van. The aftertaste is long-lasting and sweet.

Conclusion: definitely worth trying at home. It’s a very interesting experience that will help to better understand tea. If you don’t get the desired result the first few times - don’t give up! Keep trying and you will definitely succeed. Light Oolongs are the perfect base for a heating experiment of this kind, but you can also try heating Green and White tea.