GUD BLOG: SINGLE POST
Crab Leg
I’m swigging crab legs. And it doesn’t involve some sort of new aerosol fish product that you might find on the shelf between Chee-Z-Whip and Krab Stix.
It’s one of the newer tea selections available at Goldfish Tea in Royal Oak. As the absolute pinnacle of what the Detroit area has to offer in terms of tea, Goldfish specializes in Chinese teas. While their extensive menu is generally static, they occasionally have something new and/or truly special that comes through their shop by virtue, I suspect, of their direct importing arrangement.
So today, I’m sitting in Goldfish with my laptop, drinking a tea called “Crab Leg.” The name fits: The leaves are narrow and long, punctuated every several millimeters or so with a joint- or knuckle-like bulbous ridge. There’s a faint mushroom quality to the aroma of the moistened leaves, which gives the impression of a puer-style tea. But its golden, medium-brown color hints at more of a robust oolong treatment, as it is indeed labeled at the tea shop. And its flavor, equal parts medicinal, buttery, and earthy, leaves me fairly dumbfounded.
After a bit of research, it appears that several online retailers qualify Crab Leg (or”char yong”) as puer but offer little detail in support of that. Puer can be tricky to classify, of course, in that its green/raw form is so very different from its richer, earthier post-fermentation “big brother.” If I were to reach into my bag of over-used diagramming tools and pull out a simple Venn diagram, I’d say that Crab Leg tea falls in the middle of an overlap between raw puer, fermented puer, and an oolong.
It’s fascinating stuff — almost as fascinating as the salon job interviews some hair stylists from the next shop over are conducted a few tables over. Give it a try. The tea. Not the salon gig. Unless you’ve been to beauty school and love the word “like.”
2010.04.30 Evan Hansen at 5:21 pm
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One Response to Crab Leg
I had a pot of this at Goldfish the other day. Loved it. I would add that there is a perceived honey-like sweetness to it that makes it stand apart from most of the other oolong teas that I have tried.