Lake-town’s Lament (Lapsang Souchong, There & Back Again)

Lake-town’s Lament was blended due to the combination of my desire to make what I do accessible and my Tea of the Month Club.

I had selected ‘Drums in the Deep’ as the tea I wished to send out for September 2023, but could not send it to all of my tea of the month humans, as one of them has a need for his teas to be gluten free.

Tea from the tea plant is gluten-free, but this is not the case for every ingredient in my toolbox. ¹

Drums in the Deep is a smoky tea where the smoke comes from a cherrywood barley and from a smoked version of red chile.

And, while he needs his teas gluten-free, the rest of the flavour profile was something that I thought he would enjoy.

Cue me deciding to make a new foundational tea so that I could get the combination of flavours of the black tea blend that I used for Drums (There & Back Again) with the smoke that had primarily come from the barley.

I played around with There & Back Again and Lapsang until I felt I had gotten an appropriate balance, and set aside those notes because it was a step on the path to my goal of the time, rather than the end result I was looking for.

Later, I returned to it, because it was a good tea in its own right (another cousin to Baker Street Blend, as far as that goes), and settled to the rest of the tea process.

The name followed another pattern.

Thinking about smoky There & Back Again, my mind immediately leapt to Lake-town’s interaction with Smaug.

“That’s a terrible name for a tea!” I cried. To myself. But checking in with some of the Tolkien fans I know in the fic community as well as some discussion in my own Discord ² led to the decision that I should include Lake-town’s Lament as an option in the naming poll in the DSN Discord server and see what happened.

It won.

And, as has happened almost every time I have cried “That’s a terrible name for a tea!” it became the name of the tea.

Now for the basics:

Organic Ingredients: Lapsang Souchong, There & Back Again (Ceylon, Assam Breakfast)

Batch Size: 3.8 ounces, approximately 107 grams, 45+

Containment: Loose Tea (5 serving sample (Bag or Tin), Full Batch (Bag)), Teabags (Single Teabag, 5 teabag sample (Bag or Tin),  Full Batch (Bag))

For the moment this tea can only be found in the store on this website.