Tea Joint

[Spring 2020 harvest]

This green tea is really solid with no obvious drawbacks and may be my favourite tea from the Tea Joint samples I ordered. 

Already the dry leaf aroma is quite complex with a floral sweetness base and notes of nuts, corn, apple juice, flax seeds, and semolina flour. On the other hand, wet leaves smell quite different. I get notes like thistles, butter, brussel sprouts, garden peas, spinach there. 

The taste profile then follows the latter fairly closely. It is actually somewhat bitter for a green tea, which I definitely don’t mind. There is also a lot of umami and a sort of vegetal tartness. I could detect flavours of olives, sea holly, kale and pepper among other ones.

The mouthfeel is soft and numbing, but not overly thick or heavy.

This is a loosely Mao Feng style green tea (although it seems like a bit later picking), which is nevertheless quite unique. The dry leaf aroma especially is most unusual. Notes such as sawdust, tobacco, fish sauce, seaweed, dill, pulled pork, roasted pumpkin seeds, and courgette flowers all appear in the mix. Wet leaves throw in green bell pepper scent too, but the overall complexity is dialed down.

The taste is predominately vegetal, as well as savoury and bitter with a touch of earthiness. Flavours of sand, anchovies, clean smoke and cheese again show that this is not an average green tea. The more standard ones include spinach and cream. The aftertaste is mostly sweet and buttery. 

I also like the mouthfeel a fair bit – the liquor is oily and full bodied and definitely above average in that regard.

This tea has a pleasant floral and creamy start but something kept bugging me. I felt it wasn’t clean enough, with a pronounced astringency and sourness that was detracting me from enjoying it.

This is a strange tea. It is very green for a Dan Cong, in that regard it is somewhat reminiscent of YS’s Wu Dong Chou Shi. Otherwise, it is very different though – more vegetal as opposed to floral, light bodied and not too complex. I found the taste to be quite muted as well. There are notes of fermented fruits and a hint of dungeon (a bit like what you get from some, especially wet stored shou), which makes me think that maybe this tea only went through a partial kill green. I wonder what would happen if I stored it with my pu’er, lol. I may actually do it, I didn’t get all that much from any of the three sessions I’ve had with it.

As for other notes, the dry leaf aroma is mostly a mix of honey, cream or steamed milk, and stewed fruits. After the rinse, it is a more herbal and vegetal smell with notes of courgette and peach among others. As I alluded to, the taste is kind of unremarkable, but there is a nice cooling grassy finish to it. I also noticed a strong warming and defocusing cha qi every time I drunk this tea, which I didn’t like at all.

This Long Jing was among the teas I ordered from a new Canadian company Tea Joint. Overall, I found it somewhat average and not really reflective of the price, as it often happens with famed teas. In particular, the main flaw as I see it is its light body and a boring, watery mouthfeel.

Other than that, the aroma is decent. I could smell toasted nuts, sesame, chicken meat, and brownies in the preheated pot, and mostly sweet florals during the session. The first infusion was notably more tart and savoury rather than sweet and nutty as one might expect. It was slightly reminiscent of fresh Mengku area raw pu’er and lightly steamed sencha in its profile. The refreshing profile also included notes of milk, lime zest, bread crust, and green beans. Later steeps were then much more sweet, but still not very nutty. Some additional flavours include butter and kiwi. The aftertaste was slightly sweet and floral with a light tingling and cooling sensation present. I also noticed a mild chest warming during the session, but the cha qi was not strong in any way.