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I think it is a new tea offered by Yunnan Sourcing – and one of the cheapest on their website. I had the one picked in October 2018, merely a month before my tasting.

The tea looks, smells and feels good in the bag: huge twisted wiry leaves, very hard and strong. It has an unusual dry aroma of vegetables: carrots, cabbage, raw potatoes…

It steeps well (western style) and fast to a bright red soup. The smell changes somewhat to a smell of vegetable stew with a hint of sweetness. The taste follows the nose: vegetables, a bit of floral sweetness, some sourness and copper, and a long minty and sour aftertaste. The flavors are changing and evolving, and the taste not nearly as rough as I expected based on the size of the leaves and its low price point. This tea re-steeps
fairly well and in the process acquires a pronounced sweetness as if the ever-present carrots had just been roasted.

All-in-all it is a tea with a bit of unusual taste that may grow on the drinker substantially after trying it several times (it surely happened with me before). And I really liked the look and feel of it. Yunnan Sourcing claim that this tea has been grown without pesticides and that it will improve and change flavor with age. I will probably reorder it and store for a year or so to see what happens. I was not swept off my feet by this Assamica but I was certainly intrigued.

I got it as a free sample among with several others from AprTea which is really appreciated. Da Hong Paos are probably my favorite oolong so I have high expectations when I meet a new Da Hong and this tea while not wowing me totally met them.

This tea has all of the necessary flavor components: roast, mineral, a touch of bitterness, some grass, and a coda of floral sweetness. A nice and long aftertaste is present. Finally, this Da Hong Pao is very pleasant for enjoying its smell from the cup in front of you: it is strong and balanced.

And this is the strongest quality of this tea: while not especially complex it is very well balanced in both taste and aroma, with all of its components coming seamlessly together. Now about the negatives: not the most complex (which, by the way, it does not pretend to be that since this tea is openly marked as a basic Da Hong Pao), the taste does not last for many infusions with the regrettable astringency appearing fairly soon.

While not likely to become one of the all-time favorites this tea can successfully perform the role of a daily Da Hong Pao for a budget-minded tea drinker.

This was my first Ginseng Oolong so I was curious. There is not much of smell in dry leaf except for some slight grassiness with a touch of pungency. When sipping first you get a quick impression of a roasted oolong with some grassiness again – but it quickly replaced by a powerful medicinal flavor of ginseng that tapers off into an extremely long and somewhat choking licorice-like aftertaste. And I am not a big fan of licorice.

All in all, it is weird drink that is not much of tea but rather some kind of a miracle health potion. I bet this tea was invented primarily because of a Chinese obsession with ginseng and, undoubtedly, is being promoted as curing a thousand of illnesses. I am glad I tried it but not being a fan of herbal folk remedies nor licorice I will not return to this tea again.

A tightly compressed tuo that has a disheartening tendency to break apart into small particles. the base tea is not one of the best but the lengthy ageing balances it out. In the taste first that you feel is a strong metallic flavor like… copper. Which is immediately replaced by warm grain, aged wood, bamboo and sugarcane sweetness. Somehow it reminded me of the whiskies from the Highlands. With subsequent steepings the sweetness intensifies, while the metallic overture fades away.

An interesting combination of flavors but not very complex.

I am eternally surprised how Chinese tea growers come up with so many different variations of Tie Guan Yin. And they are all good! Teavivre calls this tea “slightly roasted” but I found the roast to be pretty strong.

The wet leaf aroma is very distinct, intense and immensely pleasing: a campfire in wet woods, moist grass, sea, mineral. And it is not only leaves: the tea itself is quite fragrant. The taste follows the smell: grass, smoke, minerals, some sourness, some sweetness, a touch of bitterness. It blends together very well. After the tea is gone a long smokey, mineral and spicy aftertaste lingers, and lingers, and lingers… Because the aroma and taste are so well-defined and fairly complex this tea is quite evocative and awakens a swarm of memories and associations.

I usually not big on roasted oolongs because the roast often overwhelms the complexity of the tea, but in this Tie Guan Yin it actually brings together all other elements and creates a distinct and entertaining experience.

This little sample came to me packed as King Tut: first it was sealed in plastic, then placed in a vacuumed-sealed and richly decorated copper-colored foil package, which, in its turn, was inside a larger gray-colored foil package. After I finally extracted the tea from all of its layers of protection I had to admit that they worked well and preserved the aroma and flavor quite nicely.

The dry leaves smell of ocean, lilac, orchids and spice – a very distinct smell. That smell is preserved in the wet leaves , accompanied by leafy greens and grass. The mouthfeel is very creamy , while the taste is robust, complex and evolves in your mouth: grass, sweet flowers, seaweed, umami, butter, asparagus, broccoli, spice on the end. It has a long-lasting calming and vibrant aftertaste. This tea is very good Western and well-suited for multiple gaiwan steeps.

Overall, this is a very good, balanced and complex Tie Guan Yin. I had a great experience.

It is a very smooth oolong with an understated but pleasant taste. The dry leaf and wet leaf smell is nothing remarkable: faint notes of grass, hay and roast. The appearance is rater interesting with a variety of colors in not-particularly-tightly rolled balls.

The taste is very smooth and understated. Grass, hay, roasted nuts, grain. Not very complex but quite pleasing. It is good Western style, good as gongfu and VERY good cold-brewed. Actually, this is one of the few teas that if you forget your cup and want to finish it later when the tea goes completely cold the drink is still satisfying. It is hard to mess this tea up with even the most inattentive and lazy preparation.

There is nothing wrong with this tea but nothing special either. Personally, I prefer teas with a more pronounced and/or more unique taste.

I am continue to make my way through a large collection of oolong samples from Teavivre I had recently received. This particlular tea has been reviewed to death on Steepster and this tea being my first encounter with Dong Ding oolongs makes this review totally irrelevant for other people so I am doing it for myself to keep tracks of my likes and dislikes.

Surpisingly, there was not much of fragrance coming out out of pouch when I opened it. Which is rare for oolongs in my admittedly limited experience. Just some spinach/grass and spice. The wet leaf smell was essentially the same plus some butter and a touch of lilac.

The taste was unexpectedly green and vibrant, with spinach, butter, spice, grass, mineral and a touch of berry sweetness. This is certainly not one of those languid , luxuriously sweet oolongs but instead gives an impression of a young full of stored vibrant energy. And a nice dynamic aftertaste.This tea is good to have at work as an additional burst of energy and motivation, it is an I-can-help-to-get-things-done tea. All about business and concentration.

This tea has an intoxicating dry leaf smell of meadow hay and light honey. The wet leaf adds to that aroma some blueberry notes. I steeped it first for 3 minutes (250 g/3g/205 degrees), and followed it with the second steep of 5 minutes.

The taste was simple, with the strong notes of blueberry and somewhat lighter notes of hay, honeyed sweetness reminiscent of Yunnan reds, and baked goods. Like drinking a blueberry pie. In the second steep the tea became very sweet, as if you added water to some berry preserves and now slurping up all of this overpowering sweetness.

It was more robust than many white teas that I had and did possess the requisite great white tea aroma but the taste was really not that interesting. On the other hand, people that enjoy fruity tea blends and, especially, fans of blueberry pies may find it very much to their liking.

In a free sample graciously sent to me by AprTea there was a pouch simply called Cooked Puerh that contained two mini-tuochas with the explanation that they represent two random tuochas out of the four that they offered. So, I decided to figure out what the heck am I drinking and reviewing. The rappers looked different (good!) but when I unwrapped them both tuochas looked really similar (bad!). And they smelled identical too (awful! am I that bad at telling puerhs apart? – apparently I am).

Nevertheless, after trying it I am pretty sure I am drinking the sticky rice puerh. As bad as I am I think I would be able not to confuse it with the pure puerh and jasmine and rose puerhs: those are three other possibilities. As a side not it seems that the company uses the same exact kind of puerh for all of their tuochas and only the additives differ.

Now, tuochas in my opinion are typically made for a casual drinking, so I skipped the gaiwan and prepared this tea Western style, 300 ml and about 2 minutes for the first steep. It came out quite decent. The sticky rice part is not overdone, the tea smells strongly of rice, mushrooms and dark damp soil. The taste is cheerful, energetic and simple, with Chanterelle mushrooms, dark honey, apricot and rice. Unfortunately it does not hold that well and the subsequent steeps were way less dynamic and even simpler, with sticky rice and languid decay notes dominating.

It’s not bad by any means and the first steep is rather enjoyable, especially in comparison with typical puerh tuochas and not judged against puerh cakes. I would rate it even higher if this tea could retain its vitality beyond the first steep.