SPRING CHARTREUSE – 75 Gms

Peace did not come into my life.
My life escaped, and peace was there.
Often I bump into my life,
trying to catch its breath,
pay a bill, or tolerate the news,
tripping as usual
over the cables of someone’s beauty –
My little life:
so loyal,
so devoted to its obscure purposes –
And, I hasten to report,
doing fine without me. – Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen came down from a Zen mountaintop and wrote that. Once a year, the Yabukita turns ‘Green’, comes down from the mountaintops to find itself doing fine without its ‘Black and not so black’ life.  This is how it begins, far from any deep, rich meanings, adjectives or expressions: with a calm, serene expression; with an awareness of its own presence before the seasons do what they must.

The Yabukitas of Summer and Autumn are much simpler to make and describe. The cultivar does not allow much time for plucking in Spring if it’s to be done right. For a humble Japanese cultivar, that derives its name from the Japanese ‘Yabu’ meaning Bamboo-grove and ‘Kita’ meaning North, it is surprisingly difficult to describe as a green tea of Spring not to mention it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of its Summer or Autumn expressions! The calm, casual familiarity of ‘meeting with what we thought as life’ expressed in Cohen’s poem best represents the Spring Chartreuse’s perspective – For us it’s still paradoxical but aspirational!

Every now and then we run into the paradox of self-reference when it becomes necessary to describe the ‘Qualia’ of a tea – its ‘teaness’, freshness or the presence of an absence that itself becomes a presence and we are reminded of what the mathematician Kurt Gödel so elegantly stated in his theorem of Incompleteness – “There will always be true statements within a system that cannot be proven within the system itself “– any attempt to prove or disprove such truths, ultimately end up referencing the truth itself!  We are pretty sure that there are mathematical caveats attached to that idea that forbid such a blatant generalization but there’s no denying its consolation in admitting that there are flavors in this green tea that we cannot describe without referencing the flavor itself!

So, here we are taking our chances with the next best thing: Describing what is, as is. Hoping the calm casual familiarity of meeting with the incompleteness of life- the truths we can’t prove – can be found in the ‘Greenness’ of Spring named Chartreuse, after the Yellow-Green color of the herbal liquor made by the French Carthusian monks, this green tea is how the leaves of the Yabukita cultivars start in Darjeeling. Grown in natural shade, the dry leaves owe their dark green color to the much-desired high chlorophyll content. The large leaves have a slightly sour and floral aroma. Brewed leaves, bright green in color have the aroma of sweet corn, butter and again something slightly sour. The sourness has a more vegetal note of something steamed. The color is, well, Chartreuse – very transparent, very serene green.  The brewed tea has a very buttery texture with the distinct aroma of Sweet Corn with, again a ‘sourness’ and the native floral Spring notes. The taste carries a richness, a ‘zing’, a certain freshness of a very subtle fruitiness, with the sweet corn and the sourness always present with a hard to describe aftertaste that is more savory than sweet but is best described by an absolving freshness.

As much as we like our senses immersed into the aromas and flavors of teas, the Chartreuse is a tea that comes bearing an awareness of that immersion, in a very mindful and practical sense – familiar yet aloof; true yet incomplete.  Our only suggestion is to experience its absolving freshness before the seasons do what they must.