Things are starting to look up weather wise.

I can’t be sure, but it did at least feel as though we had finally broken through the double-digit temperature barrier, albeit briefly.

Other encouraging signs were the sight of geese returning from their winter-time playgrounds far to the South, and the fact that I was able to go outside with just a tee-shirt and light jacket on and not succumb to hypothermia inside 10 minutes.

Spring? Possible. It’s possible. As good a time as any to focus on the state of the tea stocks, in any case. A spring clean. Renewal. Out with the old, in with the new. Stuff like that.

When it comes to tea I am terribly sentimental, and this manifests itself as a complete inability to throw away tea, even if it’s a tea that’s well past its best and one we are clearly never going to drink.

At the back of the middle drawer  in the primary tea chest, sandwiched between a strawberry tea of unknown origin and some ancient Chinese teabags I was astonished to find an unopened tin of Kusmi BB Detox. Nobody is claiming responsibility for buying it, which is a bit odd. At those kind of prices it’s not exactly something you casually throw into a shopping basket and then promptly forget about.

I’m not one for that kind of thing normally, but might actually give it a whirl. Watch this space.

I also found another Kusmi tea tin, and on opening it found several mini Pu-erh beeng cha.

Beeng cha is the name given to the compressed disks of Pu-erh that usually weigh in at around 357g. These mini beeng cha are about as big as your thumb-end, and tip the scales at a hefty 5g.

I half-recall picking these up at one of the tea shops in town. They cost about 5 Swedish Crowns a pop, if I remember right.

If you like whimsical and novelty in your tea, then you’re on the right track here. The individually wrapped little nuggets of fermented goodness even have the required indentation on the reverse side, just like their big brothers.

At this size they are perfect for dropping into a 150ml gaiwan or similarly sized steeping vessel. Part of the fun is watching them slowly fall open from the compressed shape during the course of a multi-steep Asian style infusion session.

They appear to have some lighter tips or buds in the mix, too, which puts them on a slightly higher level than the run-of-the-mill loose leaf shu Pu-erh you can pick up. Still, you shouldn’t expect the earth to move for that price, drinkable would be sufficient.

And drinkable they were indeed. I won’t be hot-footing it back to the shop and hammering on his door for more when they’re gone, but for all that they were nice enough to drink during a spot of late afternoon goose-spotting.

Still not sure what to do with that Detox concoction, though…