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I am usually apprehensive about trying “smoky” teas. Too often in my experience they used some low-quality base and tried to hide it by overdoing the smoky part. Besides, I tend to agree with many people in China that Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong, the main ingredient of “smoky teas”, is better enjoyed in its more natural unsmoked state. So, I made a cup of Russian Country tea and prepared myself for a disappointment. I was wrong.

This tea combines Lapsang Souchong with 4 other teas and they actually blend quite nicely together. The smokiness is not overdone and is being quite pleasantly complemented by the sweetness of Keemun and the vegetal sourness of Oolong. And Assam and Ceylon, which are often to heavy-handed for me in tea blends, kept their worst qualities at bay. Leather, malt, pine and salted caramel.

I am not a big fun of tea blends that are not built around some herbs or fruit but this one certainly has legs to stand on a reason to exist beyond the necessity to sell less than exciting teas. I most likely will not re-order it but will certainlyenjoy finishing the 100 grams that I bought.

This tea charmed me right off the bat as soon as I opened a pouch with my sample. It has one of the best dry leaf aromas that I encountered with puerhs so far: a potent blend of wood, plums, apricot.

I prepared it gongfu (5g per 80g of the 212 degree water). My steeps were 15s, 5s, 10s, 15s, 25s, 40s, 60s, 90s, and 120s.

In the first steeps it came out very sweet, fruity and smooth, with just a hint of dry wood decay and camphor. The aftertaste is long and also comfortably sweet, full of camphor, apricot, peach, flowers, honey… All these flavors blend exceptionally well together and it was a lot of fun to sip and observe the interplay of various tastes. Around 4th-5th steep this shou started to lose some of its power and complexity but still remained cheerful, sweet and enjoyable.

All in all, it came out as an exceptional puerh for me, with every element of this tea -appearance, aroma, color, taste, aftertaste – having no flaws whatsoever. The tea’s character is confident, powerful and cheerful. I had it very early in the Monday morning at work before the arrival of most of my coworkers and ended up aimlessly wandering the office corridors, smiling and happily greeting everybody I met like a some sort of a resident office fool. A very enjoyable experience and an awesome way to kick off the workweek.

A blend of 8 different teas for a 1990s international political summit. Intriguing. I prepared it with 300 ml of 212 degree water: used 3 grams of leaves and let it steep for 3 minutes.

The dry leaves looked not that exciting for a mix of 8 teas: it was mostly medium-sized black tea leaves with some small broken pieces of greens and an occasional white needle. They also had NO aroma, which was predictable for (most? all?) Harney and Sons teas but still rather disappointing.

The brewed teas presented a rather unusual tea profile: a brief splash of Keemun/Fujian, quickly replaced by bitterness and lingering sourness. The dominant notes are of unripe berries, red currant, grass and floral. The overall effect is bracing and energy-giving. This tea was less complex than I had expected and the flavors did not really blend that well, however, this bitterness/sourness was intriguing. It is quite possible that this tea may grow on you after trying it several times. It reminded me a young exuberant and hot-headed sheng, with its imperfections tempered by addition of mellow and wise teas.

This tea looked promising: unusually short for Yunnans but certainly unbroken leaves with a definite presence of golden tips. Unlike many Harney and Sons’ teas it even had a dry leaf aroma of raisins, pears and malt. This aroma quickly transformed itself into some generic overripe berries in the wet leaves and subsequently mysteriously completely vanished from my resulting cup of tea (3 minutes per tea spoon, Western style).

The tea itself was eminently smooth and unispiring: some (honey? apricot?) sweetness plus some bitterness (cherry? chocolate?) There were probably some notes one can recognize via extreme concentration but why on Earth would I force myself into doing it?
In short, some very generic Yunnan that does nothing to charm you outright or even show a promise worth exploring via gongfu.

Oh, and as all other basic Harney and Sons teas it needs a looong steeping time to acquire a decent taste with disernable elements and there is NO possibility of steeping it one more time: it produces something utterly undrinkable despite it deceptively dark color.

I was attracted to Harney and Sons’ teas because of their price – about $5 per 100g after discounts. And yes, they are about 2-3 times cheaper than basic offerings from Yunnan Sourcing and Teavivre but this advantage is negated by the fact that you can steep those more expensive teas multiple times and gongfu them as well. And oh, they also taste MUCH better and are way more complex. And they actually offer you the info on harvest date and location. So in the end Harvey’s teas provide you with about an equal number of tea cups – that have very little smell and taste quite basic – as direct-from-China web vendors. I can still see Harvey’s advantages for the fanciers of flavored blends or basic teas to mix with milk and sugar but that is really not me.

After following for a while excited reviews by Stoo of Harney and Son’s teas and looking at their super-low prices I decided to get a bunch of them and see if I can make them my workhorse everyday teas. The results so far are not even “decidedly mixed” but one never-ending disappointment.

This review will start a string of my reviews of basic Harney and Sons Chinese blacks and blends.

Malachi McCormick is one of their legacy mixes, named after one of tea enthusiasts of the 1980s and 90s. It includes basic Assam and Keemun. The dry leaf has little to know smell save for a faint generic “black tea aroma”. The aroma does not suddenly appear in a brewed tea either. the taste has three distinct peaks, with the initial malty heaviness of Assam quickly followed (and tempered) by a sweet wave of Keemun, which, in turn, is replaced by a lingering starchy Assam-driven aftertaste. The taste profiles of those peaks are quite basic and one-dimensional. This tea is almost exclusively suited for the Western-style brewing, when I – despite my grave misgivings – tried to gongfu it, the heavy bitterness of Assam overran everything else and the resulting tea was BAD.

This tea is certainly not for perusing and nuance-looking. Looks like a each of its ingredients have several flaws and combining them mutes them somewhat but certainly does not cancels out completely. And this is typical for all tea blends that I tried so far: all of them are made out of lower quality teas. I begin to suspect that I never encountered tea blends out of higher quality teas because those have enough complexity and balance on their own. Also, Malachi McCormick is certainly well suited for addition of milk. Or Sugar. Or for drinking with jams-preserves-any kind of food. But what is it as not an attempt to further hide and rectify the imperfection of the original materials? This tea -as many other Harney and Sons blends – seems to be destined to play the part of a bass guitar in a song where the major task of carrying the melody is reserved for other instruments. It could be fine for other folks but I strongly expect each tea to be able to stand on its own and shine and that is something that Malachi was incapable of doing for me.

I have been drinking this tea for a while and my good opinion on it has not changed. It is certainly better than other basic Chinese teas from Harney and Sons that I tried (their Keemuns or Yunnan). It has a nice sweet and smoking aroma and the taste, if you let it steep for several minutes – this tea is not suitable for short gaiwan steepings – is eminently enjoyable. Honeyed sweetness, nuttiness, baked bread, a hint of smoke, some overripe dark berries…

If you are on a budget and looking for a solid Fujian tea you cannot go wrong with this one.

I see that this tea had a few very high scores here but my experience was somewhat different. I like the flavor of black currant since my childhood and thus am I very fond of black currant-flavored teas but this blend just did nothing for me. The base tea is of a poor quality, the aroma and the flavor of blackcurrant is rather faint and generic: just a tiny notch above some random black currant teabags at the supermarket.

I have trying to finish a 100g pouch of it for a year and have to literally force myself to choose it over any other tea I have. I will probably have to just throw it away ( which I HATE doing to any tea!) and try my luck with black currant blends from Harney or Simpson & Veil.

I found a free sample of this tea at the very bottom of my pantry. It must have been from an order that I received a year ago so it is quite likely that this tea would be better when fresh but I would likely never know: I have pretty much abandoned Upton as a source of cheap everyday tea in favor of Harney and Sons and so far have been having very few regrets.

So I tried this sample. It has very little to offer for the nose: I had to breath like a whale to pick up some faint generic Yunnan smell. No points for that. The leaves look rather boring: small, slightly twisted, no golden tips. More than a few appeared to be broken.

Then I made it Western style for a minute or two and it came out awfully weak. Undeterred, I steeped another teaspoon for something like 4-5 minutes and was pleasantly surprised: this tea displayed a comforting cherry maltiness and sweetness. It lingered and was quite pleasing. I still had a bit of this tea left and was really looking to that final cup to set my impressions but oh horror – someone from my family mistakenly judged that pouch to be empty and disposed it. Ouch.

I was bummed by it more than I want to admit and had to reinforce the rule that any tea-related thingies randomly strewn throughout my house are to be treated with the utmost respect and never touched /moved by anyone but me, be they full, empty, broken etc.

In any case, this tea will probably remain my personal unsolved mystery. Despite all of its typical cheap tea drawbacks it had a simple comeliness and some potential that will be never realized with me. In any case, I can totally see how somebody else may choose to use it as an affordable everyday sipper.

I had this tea again and again it was Western style. I am starting to warm up to it, actually. Yes, it is till very demanding to its management (i.e., easy to oversteep), it is still not particularly intense and thus requires a very neutral or sweet water to shine… but I came to enjoy its understated sweetness and generally muted but oh so pleasing flavor palette. This seems to be a very good tea for a very particular kind of mood: relaxed, quiet, mellow, self-contented.

Recently I started finding many teas while not being suitably for the role of the everyday drinkers to be perfect companions for very specific moods. Unfortunately, most of these moods only rarely descend upon me and, consequently, I am becoming increasingly saddled with many highly mood-specific teas and cannot find anything I really want when I am in my “general mood” despite dozens and dozens of tea in my cupboard.

Which makes me want to immediately place another order in this never ending quest for the elusive tea that I would want to drink day in and day out like a happy koala bear.