Rich select Send Message

I ordered chawangshop’s Wu Yi lineup, and I must say all of them are at least very good. This one is top notch. It is the smoothest Wu Yi oolong I’ve had. It’s a deep baked handmade oolong, done exceedingly well. The roast is deep but not upfront in the flavor profile. It is spicy and zesty, with hints of fruit. The broth is silky. Great stuff. Chawangshop is an underrated gem. Don’t be put off by what appears to be high shipping costs, once you place your order and they send you an invoice, the shipping is usually much less than it first appears.

I’m drinking the 2016 Spring version. I really like this tea. It has a wild flavor to it. It is sturdy and can be brewed multiple times. Hard to describe the flavor, it is not too roasty, kind of wild and mildly sweet. An excellent everyday oolong.

This is an outstanding tea. The vendor, Tealife Hong Kong, is one of our own in the Steepster community, who is making some unique Hong Kong teas available to us. I purchased 4 oolongs. Today I sampled the first, the Hong Kong-Roasted High Fire Three Stamp Shuixian. I am a big fan of roasty oolongs, so I was excited to try this. On the website, the picture of the brewed tea looked like shu, and it was described as having an uber roast. All of this made me very interested…

The website description of this tea is spot on. The first steep was like thick chocolate soup, with a touch of astringency that was perfectly balanced. It tasted of raisins and cinnamon. Velvety smooth. The roast is all about bringing out new and interesting flavors rather than creating a roasty flavor. You can tell this tea was roasted by a craftsman, it is a deep dark brew. Very complex flavor profile, it already tastes almost like an aged oolong in some respects. This is going to be an excellent tea to store for aging. The tea energy was popping – I am so wired right now after only two steeps that I had to put it down and wait until I calm down a bit. I’m posting this in the meantime so I don’t know how this will steep out, but the description says I should get maybe 4 good steeps. This is a big tea…

Liquid Proust, I bet you will enjoy this one…

I will be purchasing more to age. I’m in love…

I found this tea to be good, though not great. It is a zippy and zesty young sheng, with lemony undertones and light bitterness. The flavor on the whole fell kind of flat. Very strong in the caffeine department.

This is an excellent oolong from Yunnan Sourcing. It is very smooth, with a medium roast. No off roast flavors, it is quite velvety. Later steeps have that defining orchid flavor, just a touch. Well balanced astringency. This is one of the best oolongs I’ve had in a while, and it’s not expensive. I found that short steeps with lots of leaf worked well.

A bread and butter Dayi ripe. Solid little plantation cake that you can’t go wrong with.

I purchased this in hopes of finding a substitute for Verdant’s, since I won’t purchase from them anymore due to their deceptive marketing. This was quite similar to theirs – tiny curled leaves, and a rich malty chocolate type brew. I found this to be a bit lighter and fruitier than what I recall from Verdant. It is quite good.

Thanks, unnamed tea trader, for sending me this sample. I found this tea really interesting. It is older than me! Not by much, though. It brews like a cross between shu pu-erh, hei cha, and aged oolong. The broth is thick, with notes of must, tang, and a strong astringency that works well. Big tea buzz. Very unique, and close to a dollar a gram, so not an everyday pleasure for most of us. But well worth trying to experience such an old and unique gem.

Dug this one out of my shu bin today. Wow, it is really good. The first couple steeps had some fermentation funk, but that gave way quickly to a deep bittersweet chocolate flavor. An excellent shu.

I don’t know whether I got a bad batch of this, but this tea fell totally flat for me. It had none of the typical Taiwan oolong aroma, or flavor for that matter. The leaves looked fine, but it tasted extremely bland.