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Oh man, been a little bit since I’ve posted a tasting note. I’ve been hella busy traveling for work and stuff. I’m actually finishing off this sample in a hotel room in Northern Minnesota – super pretty up here. Glad I got to come back again this field season. I would characterize this one as a lighter puerh. I get a lot of light floral notes, along with some nice nuttiness, starting around the mid-point of the session. Very slight astringency if oversteeped, but really a more friendly one. It has a pleasantly thick, but not oily, texture, and I don’t really pick up much of any qi from this tea. I’d say it’s good, but certainly not a standout.

This tea is one of the first non-Teavana loose leaf teas I ever tried. I remember not liking it all that much, and I believe swapping it away before I finished the full 50g. This past weekend, I was working near where an online teafriend lives, so I paid him a visit. He gave me a nice goodie bag, including some teas to try and convert me to a life of hong.

This one was totally different than I remember it being. Quite possibly due to my different brewing techniques or something. I liked it quite a bit! I didn’t take particularly good notes, but I do recall liking it, which is more than I can say about it the last time I tried it. Thanks for the tea, James!

This isn’t really much of a review, but as a tasting note, I find it interesting that I had such a different experience with it now and when I first started drinking tea.

Edit Turns out this one was actually the Classic Laoshan Black from Yunnan Sourcing, but there was a labeling mixup. The Bailin actually tasted pretty similarly to how I remember, but I still enjoyed it more than I did before.

Yesterday and today I drank a 2015 Winter Alishan from Mountain Tea which I received as part of our Slackchat’s Secret Santea Exchange from Hokdor. I’m reviewing it as Random, because I didn’t feel the need to make a new entry for a previous year’s tea which is no longer listed on their site. This was a really nice oolong. The dry leaf had a slightly vegetal sweet aroma – After a rinse, a bit more sweetness and floral aroma came through, still accompanied by a green vegetal note.

The flavor started off mostly a nice and mildly sweet vegetal, but with a heady and slightly funky floral-sweet finish. As the session developed, the tea sweetened, delivering almost a sugarcane note on the finish. The texture was pleasantly thick as I expect from most gaoshan. My notes weren’t too detailed on these sessions, so that’s about the extent of what I have! Great tea for sure.

Super cheap Da Hong Pao I picked up from Dragon Tea House on Ali on 11/11 I believe. It’s…passable, but I wouldn’t give it any higher praise than that. Some decently nice mineral and roasty notes for the first few steeps, but within just three or four steeps, it starts picking up a bit of a funky note that I kind of associate with steeped out roasted oolongs. Kind of a rotting floral/wood note or something – normally it’s not bad, because it only sort of appears at the end of a session, but in this tea it showed up early and made the second half of the session a bit unpleasant. Drinkable, but definitely not very good in my opinion.

This was a pretty interesting tea. I found it to be a bit better western, but worked alright gongfu as well. The hand-tied bundles come apart pretty easily. The leaves have a slightly grapey aroma, and this flavor is pretty prominent in the flavor as well. Perhaps could be described as a muscatel note. It’s just a little bit sour at some points, but not really unpleasant. I also pick up occasional spice notes – not really cinnamon, but kind of close. I didn’t take very good notes drinking this tea, so I don’t remember a whole lot aside from those couple flavors. It interesting enough that I enjoyed drinking it, but not good enough that I need to go buy more of it or anything.

Got a sample of this tea from Hokdor as part of the slackchat Secret Santea tea exchange. The leaf didn’t have much in the way of aroma when dry, but after a rinse, it smelled wonderful. Slightly damp and musty woodiness and a touch of camphor.

I only rinsed it once, and perhaps paid for this as the first steep was a little bit funky tasting, but that went away mostly by the second steep and fully by the third. The flavor started off with some damp woody sweet notes (not dank, just a bit moist) – as it progressed, the woodiness got a little stronger and cleaner. The texture was nice and thick, as shou should be. I didn’t really taste any of the camphorous notes I detected in the aroma. This was a really solid shou, very little fermentation or funkiness to it.

Tried this yesterday as my first flavored Milk Oolong. The scent from the leaves was milky and sweet, but also had a bit of a buttery popcorn or caramel corn vibe to it. That taste came through pretty strongly for the first three steeps, after which it tapered off for a couple more. I have heard that these flavored Jin Xuan are often pretty low quality leaf, but this seemed to transition into just a pleasant and slightly creamy floral tea after the flavoring was mostly steeped out of it. Not bad, but personally I think I prefer unflavored Jin Xuan.

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.

This is the second of these Shui Xian Pillows I’ve tried from Hello Teatime. It was not as good as the “Pleasure” series one I had before. I used the whole 8g in my 100mL gaiwan with boiled water, and the flavor was pretty shockingly weak. There was some nice and sweet floral flavor, but not much else, and it wasn’t too strong. After making it through 8 or 9 steeps, I dumped the whole 8g into my 12oz mug which I use for grandpa style, hoping I could pull some more flavor out of the leaves this way, but the strength was no greater than when I was steeping it in the gaiwan. Not sure if this one just happened to be a bit old or stale or whatever, but pretty disappointing compared to the previous one I tried.

Note: This is the version W2T sent out in a recent teaclub box – I think a new version from their previous stock.

This was quite an interesting tea, and certainly different from any other Da Hong Pao I’ve tried. The dry leaves have a nutty sweet aroma, augmented by a bit of mineral and maybe chocolate. After a rinse, they smelled roasty and medicinal, with the notable stank of weed as well. I kind of thought I was imagining it, and that part of the aroma didn’t stick around for the whole session, but I’m pretty sure it’s there at least in the early-going.

Even having three sessions of this tea, I found the flavors a bit difficult to describe and pick out. I think it’s a pretty complex tea. It started out a bit lighter in texture than I expected, with a mineral note and a very sweet, slightly fruity aftertaste. It also produced some pretty immediate and strong (especially for a non-puerh tea) body feeling.

The tea smoothed out a bit as the session went on and the flavors seemed to meld together into a bit of a sweet mineral and medicinal taste. The tea also packed a solid qi punch. The longevity is not particularly impressive, but it’s also not abhorrently bad.

On my final session with this tea, some of the leaf was a bit crushed up. This, along with the fact I used just a bit more than I normally would to finish off the sample, led to a sort of oversteeped tea which I found pretty unpleasant and funky, especially in the early steeps. Other yancha, including Da Hong Pao, have been more suited to this kind of heavy brewing than this one seems to be.

While I did enjoy this tea, I can see it would not appeal to everybody, including people who are fans of a more typical Da Hong Pao. I’m not sure it’s one I’ll really consider buying more of, but I think it’s a good one to have tried, and I’m sure will really appeal to some people a lot.