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I had a very strange few sessions with a tea I received in some reddit swap a few months ago over the weekend and into today. The tea was an oolong which the person I swapped with told me came from a friend of his in Taiwan – it was labeled only as “Floral Oolong Green Tea.” It was a green rolled oolong – no roasting involved. When I first smelled the leaf, I instantly though “Jin Xuan.” It had a floral, slightly milky and almond sweet scent. I had enough for three sessions. The first two were very different from the last one – a testament to samples which are large enough to get multiple attempts at a tea, though this was a drastic example.

My first two sessions used 5.5g of leaf/100mL with water at 200F and 185F respectively. In both these sessions, the leaf had a strangely mariney, seaweed aroma after the rinse, with a touch of floral remaining. This carried on into the flavor as well. It tasted quite a bit like seaweed, and it was a savory flavor as well, with a bit of saltiness to it. During some parts of the session, a nice floral sweetness would poke its way through, but it seemed to last only a couple steeps before the marine flavors returned.

Today’s session, in which I used 6g and boiled water, was COMPLETELY different. The tea had a more familiar notes for green taiwanese oolongs in my experience. Very sweet floral with a bit of honey in the taste as well. The only thing at all like the seaweed of the previous sessions was a bit of a vegetal note that popped up here and there, but did not have a marine character.

This tea confused the crap out of me. If it hadn’t been two sessions on two different days, I would have totally written off the whole seaweed thing as an off-tasting day for me, but it doesn’t seem that was the case. I almost wish I had more of this so I could find out which profile was enigmatic and which I could bring out consistently. Did the boiled water make that much of a difference? I feel like I’ll never know. Definitely a funny tea to spend the weekend with.