Satemwa Guava Wood Smoked Black

Description

Satemwa Guava Wood Smoked Black is a lovely lightly smoked black tea from Satemwa Tea Estate in the Shire Highlands of Malawi. Made from a blend of cultivars, it undergoes careful smoking using guava wood to achieve a finely balanced flavour. It has mild smoky and tobacco notes with a dominant fruity taste and pleasant sweetness. We source it directly from Satemwa Tea Estate. The current batch is from the September 2023 harvest.

Malawi is the second largest tea producing region of Africa after Kenya. Most of it, however, does end up destined for the tea bag industry of the UK and South Africa, being grown on large plantations owned by big multinational corporations. The Satemwa Tea Estate by contrast is family owned and operated. It was founded in 1923 and has stayed in the same family since inception. They have very strong social and environmental responsibility programmes that provide a fair wage to their workers and support to the local communities.

While also producing CTC teas for tea bags and similar applications, Satemwa Tea Estate are also pioneering high end orthodox tea production. For this they are utilising and experimenting with various cultivars found in Malawi, fusing the local plants and terroir with production methods and ideas they collated from visiting tea estates and farmers in other countries. Thanks to these innovative methods, their selection now encapsulates a whole range of teas: unique whites, unusual greens processed using Japanese production methods, oolongs, orthodox blacks as well as dark tea! As part of this process, the team from the Estate had to develop new techniques and even new machinery to produce their special teas.

While this Satemwa Guava Wood Smoked Black is a smoked tea, it is not like a typical Lapsang Souchong. The smoking is done delicately in order to compliment the nice base black tea flavour rather than overpower it. The large leaves have a light smoky aroma and produce a dark liquor with excellent clarity. The aroma has a touch of smoke but nothing like from a typical Lapsang, it is more reminiscent of smoked prunes. The same fruity edge with a touch of smokiness runs through the flavours. There are notes of prunes and apricots with a hint of fruity tobacco and just a touch of smoke. There is pleasant sweetness through the taste and almost zero tannins with just a touch of dryness at the end of the aftertaste. This is a balanced tea that we hope will find wide appeal. So even if you are not a huge fan of smoked teas, we urge you to give this one a try!

The pearls are best brewed at 90°C for around 2-3 minutes according to your taste, brewing 2+ times.

This Satemwa Guava Wood Smoked Black tea was first featured in our February 2024 Curious Tea Subscription Boxes.