An adventurer I interviewed years ago tried to persuade me that he had once seen a woman with a tail in Burma. He was dead serious when he told me the story and insisted on it. She was the missing link, he said. To this day, I don??t know whether he really believed in what he was saying, or was simply very good at taking me for a ride.
Beyond that, what I know about Burma or rather the Union of Myanmar, as the governing military junta rechristened the country, is rather disheartening. The opium fields. The liberticide regime. The repression of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the 1990 democratic elections only to be placed under an on and off house arrest for the last sixteen years.
For this reason, I thought long and hard before buying Burmese tea. Anything that will bring money to the local military regime bothers me. But then I weighed that against the fact that income from tea trickles down to the local growers and maybe??just maybe??buying from them can help sway them away from opium. If only tea became more profitable than heroine. Silly as it sounds, it convinced me.
So I ordered some 100g of Ko Kant from Mariage Frè:res. The tea in itself is very interesting. Picked from ??nearly wild? trees, according to Mariage Frè:res, it is entirely handmade.
I followed the brewing instructions, steeping 5g of leaves in water at 95C for three minutes, but found the cup slightly too bitter. So I brewed it again steeping 5g in steaming water for two minutes. It yielded a rich golden cup with a vegetaley scent and just a hint of earthy undergrowth. A fleeting floral sweetness hit the mouth first, followed by a long, sober vegetaley note.
Maybe I am prejudiced by its origin, but Ko Kant tastes austere, dark, almost barren, like the moon on a bad day or a Morandi still life. It is an interesting tea, though not one I see myself drinking regularly. Still, I drained my cup this once, in silent toast to a better future for the Burmese people??and to the girl with a tail if she really does exist.