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It is interesting how many sweet and sour berry/fruit flavors could be discerned in this tea: sour cherry, cranberry, lingonberry, honeyberry, cloudberry, rowan, bird-cherry, green plum… Most of them are not even an option in the Steepster’s drop-down flavors/scents menu and that shows that this tea is pretty unusual.

I like it, it is a nice change of pace from other puerhs.

I like Keemuns and can appreciate many different kinds of them. There are fancy ones, with a complex aroma and many flavors. There are working horses packing a welcoming punch in the morning for those who prefers them to morning coffee. This Keemun from Yunnan Sourcing is the comforting, cozy type.

The dry leaves are pretty long even for Mao Feng Keemuns. The aroma has less malt and more of dark berries, wild flowers and honey: it is a pretty good. I brewed it Western style since I treat Keemuns as not a tea to savor but a good working companion helping you to get through your busy day.

The taste is mild, comforting and relaxing rather than bracing. The original punch of malt is there but it is much more muted than many lower-priced Keemuns. It has some quality of the rush one feels after downing a shot of strong hard liquor and it quickly transitions to a more complex second taste of berries, oats, honey and something certainly floral. The aftertaste lingers for a long time and is VERY pleasant.

The second infusion was markedly less smooth, with a pronounced maltiness and a strong taste of bitter-sweet dark chocolate. Plus a hint of molasses. It was still a very good cup of tea but with a very different flavor profile, as if they were two completely different teas.

Overall, I liked this Keemun a lot. I have to admit though that I am partial to Mao Fengs and prefer them to most Hao Yas. Yunnan Sourcing started offering Qimen just recently and, I believe this is the only kind that they sell but it is quite good and I hope they would consider expanding their selection.

An impulse buy it was. There are a lot of bulk teas at Wegmans ( a large American grocery store chain) and from time to time I try them hoping against hope to discover a hidden gem : they are very inexpensive and you can get as little as you want.

No luck this time as well. This tea as all the previous ones I tried proved to be rather meh. It has large twirly leaves that look decent but the only flavor they give off is of roasting. The taste is pretty basic, with heavy roast and smoke pre-dominating and very subdued notes of baked bread, berries and honeyed sweetness in the background. The aftertaste is VERY lingering but it is just intense roast that is not particularly pleasant at all.

But wait, there is more: the second steeping (western style) came out still pretty dark but lost almost all of its taste and was pretty close to a typical tea bagged generic Chinese tea.

It is a very one-dimensional and rough at the corners tea that manages to successfully misrepresent Wuyi Oolongs. I am afraid that quite a few people that have had not anyprevious experience with Wuyi Oolongs will never even attempt to buy any other tea labeled as Wuyi after trying this one. Sad.

I had this tea gong fu with 6g per 100 ml and originally short (10-15 secs) increasing to medium (20-25 secs) steepings. I could discern a typical dianhong profile of sweet potatoes, baked bread, flowers and blackberries. What makes it a bit different is a lot of honeyed and brown sugar- like sweetness combined with spice. Not a calming tea: this drink has a definite vibrancy. However, overall the taste is pretty mild and the aroma is not overpowering.

The aftertaste is long and pleasant and the taste is consistent across multiple gaiwan steepings.

I am not sure if I like this tea a lot. Such strong and almost cloying sweetness is not something I am looking for in teas . However, I can see how someone (and even me!) can grow to like and appreciate it after drinking this Wu Liang Hong for a while. It certainly expands the borders and expectations of what a tea could be for me – I am just not sure that I would like to visit that part of the tea spectrum often or only occasionally as change of pace.

It is a typical Yunnan. Pleasant, sweet, no astringency. It smells of malt, baked bread, sweet potato and dark berries. The taste is consistently pleasant but there is no wow factor or anything unique. In addition to malt, baked bread, sweet potato, and blackberry it also has notes of baked apple, caramel and raspberry.

All of these components blend together well creating a unified taste without any differences in the second taste, aftertaste etc. The problem is it loses its complexity fast when you have it Western style as I did: there was still some baked bread and pleasant caramel sweetness but a lot of the previous undertones disappeared and some gooseberry-like sourness surfaced. That made for a very muted and way less interesting second cup. So if you are to brew it Western style you better add a lot of water and wait a bit longer to produce e a lot of tea from the first steeping.

You cant go wrong with this one but I did not find anything remarkable that would make me want to reorder.

This is the tea that confused the heck out of me. The 2018 harvest. It is showy: long twisted black leaves that smell of malt, dark chocolate, smoke and dark berries. Very few golden tips.

I just threw about 3 grams in a teapot and did it Western style, steeping for 30 seconds. Since I have been having a lot of tippy Yunnans lately I somehow expected some variation of a typical Dianhonh and it was nothing like that. First it hits you with a maltiness that is quite Keemun-like, which is quickly and completely replaced by a lingering beguiling sweet floral / berry aftertaste that reminded me of Wild Lapsang Souchong. Quite complex, actually. I was confused but liked it.

Then I made the second cup. It smelled very strongly of ash (?) and chocolate and had a completely different, unified taste of complex and pleasant honeyed sweetness. Totally different from the first cup. Oh, and it also had a noticeable minty undertone- so convincing that I had to physically change my cup to make sure that I had not accidentally poured it in a cup from which one of my kids had just drunk mint tea or something. Now I felt that this tea was just messing with me!

Finally, with some apprehension I added the water for my third cup . This time I let it sit for 3 minutes to get all it out. Now the tea smelled of cocoalte and baked bread and, despite the dark color, still tasted rather subdued. You could still discern some notes of malt and mint but now chocolate, cherry and wood predominated – with a lingering aftertaste of mint.

What kind of wizardry is that?! I am certainly going to gong fu this ever-changing tea to death tomorrow. I don’t know how to rate it: the taste and aroma are not strong (which I usually strongly prefer) but it are pleasant, always unexpected and sometimes baffling. The whole experience was almost like some tea-induced tripping.

First of the batch of new harvest teas I got from Yunnan Sourcing. The dry leaves look good as they should for Golden Monkey: long twisted leafs with at least a third of golden tips. The smell is not that good though: I expected it to be very sweet and intoxicating but it instead got a smell of old dry leaves, spices and some sourness.

I brewed it western style and got rather mixed results. I put about three grams per a large coffee mug (drinking at work) and first let it sit for 50 seconds. It turned out to be pleasantly malty and sweet but it felt that the taste was a bit lacking and not intense enough. So I brought the infuser back in the mug for another 20-25 seconds and it was too much: the sweetness turned into slight sourness.

All in all, it is a pleasant tea but not very intense and captivating. and finicky about the steeping times. I will try it gong fu but I am not holding my breath. It is not a bad tea but there are certainly better Golden Monkeys on the market: the one from Teavivre, for example.

This, unfortunately, became my all-too-common experience with Yunnan Sourcing: their standard and, often, premium teas are all solid and pleasant but rarely wow you. To get to really impressive teas one needs to move up all the way to the Imperial grade and it will cost you. Don’t get me wrong, the selection of teas at Yunnan Sourcing is almost overwhelming but I was able to find outstanding teas in the non-premium category of other online Chinese tea vendors way more more frequently.

It was the Autumn 2017 harvest. The tea is intensely green and vegetal and works very well in a gaiwan. A VERY good and complex first steeping followed by several decent ones. The western-style brewing produces a solid drink as well, although less complex. Asparagus, broccoli, butter, pepper, grass, mushrooms. Tulips and chrysanthemums on the nose.

This tea is showing a certain familial likeness with other green Anxi oolongs from Yunnan Sourcing like Hairy Crab and Ben Shan. If you liked this TGY (and I did) you will certainly like them as well. Overall, it is a very solid Tie Guan Yin but does not knock you off your feet. A good – and affordable- daily drinker.

It looks good and smells good, like a Dian Hong should. The taste is nothing remarkable though: some malt, some cherry, some sweetness. Kinda reminds me Yunnan Gongfu Fragrant Black from Teavivre but waaay less interesting and lower quality. Nothing remarkable at all and what it does have declines rapidly over the subsequent steeping replaced by off-putting astringency.

One of the rare teas that I am surprised why does Yunnan Sourcing offer them: their other teas are so much better. Not going to buy it again for sure.

This tea (the Spring 2018 version) steadily grew on me over the course of finishing a 50 g. It has a luxurious smell and appearance while dry: tight golden and black curls redolent with malt, sweet potato and carrots – and a heavy dusting of magical golden dust everywhere, which I LOVE.
The taste is strong, fairly complex and instantly recognizable: dark chocolate, malt, sweet potato, floral, flowers and some sweetness. It does well with gong fu and Western brewing, but goes downhill rapidly with subsequent steepings.

Not for the folks who prefer understated teas and love to tease out multiple flavors out of them playing with the steeping conditions. This tea is ideal for drinkers who are into puers, roasted oolongs, Keemuns and other bold teas.