Lin Yun Downy ~ Simpson & Vail

Today I’d like to showcase two of my favorite cups (no it isn’t as pointless as it sounds). They’re both beautiful and have great back stories. The first (the penultimate photo pictured below) is actually one of two identical glass mugs from my 8th Grade trip to a Washington D.C. dinner theater (I was fourteen). Why do i have two identical ones? At the time one of the class clowns decided to pour salt into virgin strawberry daiquiri. The teacher saw this and got me a second one before i drank out of it. If you couldn’t guess, I was picked on a lot growing up for being smart and girly. Astoundingly, twenty years later i still have both glasses.

The last image depicts another of my favorite cups. I forget who made it, but she was a colleague of my close potter friend and lesbian crush in college. I picked it up at one of the Kalamazoo Institute of Art’s pottery sales, a little over ten years ago, near the end of my undergrad (I was twenty-four). At the time I was finally dabbling in cross-dressing in public and talking to therapists about coming out as Trans. Two cups, representing two periods in my life separated into decades. What bothers me (like an omen) is that i haven’t found as awesome a cup to continue the tradition yet this year now that I’m thirty-four (and celebrating my first year after surgery).

Anyway… >.> Lin Yun Downy is a great name in its simplicity. Keeping with the traditional Chinese tea-naming convention, Lin Yun Downy is produced in Lingyun County, Guangxi and it is high in tip.

Sometimes the best tea aromas are the subtle ones. In aroma, Lin Yun Downy has the essence of a rainforest (or botanical gardens)’s profusely wet chlorophyll and orchid scent. Thanks to its complex makeup (and the fact that it isn’t organically produced), the aroma isn’t Lin Yun Downy’s only selling point. In flavor this gentle giant soars with a bittersweet coffee tongue with an even more bitter sipping chocolate aftertaste. Texture-wise, Lin Yun Downy is quite the treat as well: a full roll plus generous tip that’s almost too textured, if such a thing could be said. Finally, a grainy yellow-green liquor rounds out this already quite excellent tea.