Sweetest doke black fusion 🍵

This morning’s pot o’ copper. Or rather … this afternoon’s. I didn’t get up until the crack of 1PM. The last couple of days have been unusually social. A part of me thought I should put forth the effort to be less hermitic. The rest of me is not used all the activity.

I slept for nine hours.

When I finally rousted, I honed in on brewing something strong. Like, REALLY strong. In my backlog, I still had an unopened sample of Doke Black Fusion (Autumn Flush, 2019). Throughout the year, the Doke garden in Bihar has emphasized consistency over individual flush profiles. This was especially apparent in this year’s iterations of their flagship black tea.

That is, until autumn.

Every other seasonal version of this tasted the same – earth-chocolate, honey-nut-spice, and dollops of malt. Well, this late-autumn batch had all that … but MOAR! Which is weird, since autumn flush Indian assamica teas tend to get woodier, due to the courser leaf material available. Not the case here.

I’m not sure if the results were due to processing or favorable weather conditions (i.e. plentiful monsoon season, followed by a temperate/dry fall), but this last autumn black tea was the sweetest I had … from all of India. What a surprise to wake up too. I’m also plenty wired, hence all the words.

Written by Geoffrey Norman as The Lazy Literatus 🙏 – with kind permission of