White 2 Tea

F*ck what you smelled would be a more accurate description to me. After smelling the dry leaves (obviously of top shelf quality) I was expecting a fruit bomb but instead got flavors of quinine and slate…I was reminded of some Lao Man E sheng I’ve tasted…not really my bag but I expect this to change dramatically in coming months. I expect this to age into a monster but being this young I can’t give an accurate rating. It is attitudinal and has potent energy…gonna set the rest of this sample back and try it again on a cold February morning. I’m going by memory but this reminds me of the Hao Lang Hao Lao Man E I sampled from Yunnan Sourcing only less expensive.

Bought a cake of this last winter and after trying many other high end sheng began to agree with the ho hum reviews on this site. I then let it age a few months and broke it out with some cranberry scones recently. Lo and behold this tea came to life. Big cranberry, nice menthol and evergreen. The qi is pleasant but subtle. There are much better recent shengs in the same price range but I think this one is evolving into something special so you may want to revisit it especially when consuming cranberries. The flavors that were a semi interesting backdrop to this tea have now come to the forefront and are quite distinctive.

very good flavor, decent huigan, aftertaste left me wanting…it fell off pretty early. no qi. except someone mentioned feeling “happy” – I read this review during my session and thought to myself “am I feeling happy?” if I was any happier because of this tea it was most likely placebo, otherwise it wasn’t apparent.

It was VERY easy to drink, chuggable, I couldn’t steep it fast enough to keep up with my drinking. Went down smooth, no throat catch. Not so much oily, just smooth.

decent longevity, around 10 steeps it faded and I didn’t feel like to pushing the session. A little astringent when pushed, but this is a good drinking tea. smooth, thick, goes down easy. Not sure how it will develop, but I’m considering it as a “drink now” tea. Very gentle on stomach too. Just the smoothness, flavor, and drinkability are not enough, without qi or activity I have a hard time justifying price. I’ll need to spend more time to see if it changes my mind. For now, its priced me out of buying a cake, which I regret, since I like it a lot.

WHOA dirt! or is that ‘earth’…Either way, not much sweetness.

95ml F1 shuiping yixing, 6g

It started to make me tea drunk so I backed off. But otherwise, not much kuwei or chaqi, and the taste I just couldn’t get past. all-in-all this wasn’t my cup of tea. I just didn’t enjoy it. But if earth is your profile this is a decent tea…but its sold out…so this review is kind of useless and I could say blah blah blah here and it wouldn’t matter anyway. I guess I’ll hang onto the remaining sample as a good reference tea of HK storage.

Malt, smoke and caffeine…pretty simple. Reminds me of a German rauchbier or perhaps Alaskan smoked porter not peat smoky like a scotch but wood smoke. If you are the type who likes to eat burnt ends from leftover barbecue for breakfast whilst getting wired on cheap coffee, get you a cake of this.

While quite aromatic with little to no astringency, I did not find this tea satisfying to my palate. I didn’t understand the name of this tea because it showed neither of the characteristics of milk or cream. Perhaps alcohol but there wasn’t much of a promise. I can see this as a daily drinker but it just wasn’t for me.

this tea comes off as mild in astringency/bitterness. its creamy/buttery i find; i often like teas like this, but sometimes i want the hard “sour-ish” taste. i went into this wanting the sour but got soft flavor.. which i dont mind at all.

the liquor is a nice deep amber color on the 2nd steep. some astringency appears, but not much, just enough to feel activity on the tongue. im feeling surprisingly lit up with qi already- right behind the eyes and in my face. it smells similar to what the inside of a ping-pong ball smells like. my nose is starting to run.

3rd steep and yea theres something medicinal about this one, chemical and milk combined, and probably some sort of dry dry hay or pale grass where it hasnt rained in almost a month in the dead of summer and the heat seems to radiate up from the ground. take that and add some dandelions for florals and you have 2004 Yangpinhao.

good enough but i dont expect to buy this one again.

-nycoma

100 gram brick and 9 squares are huge portion sizes for white tea! This brick is also hard to break due to the big leaf and tight pressing. Excercise caution!

I got 13 infusions, and likely more if I stove boiled it to finish. I got notes of linen, aloe, tulips, wood, honey, and a bit medicinal in the end. It is not as sweet as other white teas. I plan to let this brick age, otherwise right now it is pretty daily drinker like.

Full review on Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/2016-chocobrick-white-black-tea-white2tea/

The squares in this brick are pretty big, considering it is a 100g brick and only 9 squares.

Chocobrick black was easy to break. The notes are mineral, malt, bittersweet chocolate, sweet, and bit of a brisk quality to it. I got 9 infusions, with the final ones being quite dry and bitter. Overall, a pretty good daily drinker.

Full review on Oolong Owl http://oolongowl.com/2016-chocobrick-white-black-tea-white2tea/

This is the first extended session I have been fortunate enough to experience with someone else at the helm. The cake proved pliable, with a selection of leaves being removed by hand in a single intact chunk, with only minimal amounts of broken pieces left from the severing.  The rinse was longer than my usual standard, and produced both a rinse of most enticing color as well as one of the most inviting odors from a pot of wet leaves I have ever enjoyed.

The water we used was around 200 – slightly under to start, and closer to 205 in the midbrews. I recommend the slightly higher temp – the leaves are large and healthy, and respond very, very well to the heat. I suspect that it would have been best to have operating there from the get-go. I will try to remind to edit in a postscript when I try it.

This tea had all the things I read about in other people’s better young pu sessions, some of which I had never experienced before. Mouth coating, lasting flavors, returning sweetness – they were certainly present, and very fine, but at that price point I’d expect it. What really bowled me over was the penetrating quality of the tea on the swallow. This party wasn’t content to stay constrained in the mouth – oh no. It led a parade down the throat and stopped to set up shop in the gut, selling unbelievably cheap and delicious pastry and tying wondrous balloon animals for kids and parents alike.

It was also incredibly easy to drink. Smooth as your favorite proverb, with only enough bitterness to keep things lively. Harder brewing in later steeps did not produce any astringent nature, and while the bitterness could be forced to the fore it was never jarring or any more than another element in a beautiful panoply of flavors I’ll never manage to describe. You might as well ask a small child to describe the dancing in the Bolshoi’s production of Swan Lake.

The energy was real as well, but settled in like an old friend you hadn’t seen for a while and soon enough it was like they’d never left.  It did not make me uncomfortable, foolish, or lazy (any more so than I already possess those attributes). Additionally, despite the fact that we’ve been having some tremendously muggy scorchers of late, it did not lead to any overheated feelings. Extraordinarily well played, DJ Doublemutt.

Quite astringent the first few steeps but after maybe the 4th or 5th steep it dies down a bit. It definitely has a smokey finish and quite dry on the tongue while smelling the wet leaves smell like stone fruit, perhaps an apricot or something like dates? Made me salivate intensely which I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not. Overall it was an interesting experience to try.

5g to 100ml, 205F, preheated with a rinse. Got this in a club box from forever ago, just now cracking into it. Starts off with an intense smell of clover honey with a little bit of something dark and juicy, whoo, smells good. Overall, the taste is also very close to clover honey, but without the sweetness and quite savory which threw my brain for a spin. It does have a bit of something I’d call dank at the start, but it quickly goes away as it opens up into some mild sweetness that matches the honey profile (although never becoming what I’d actually call sweet). As you brew it out, more mineral notes come to the fore, but surprisingly quite a subtle rock flavor for yancha.

I thought it was very enjoyable and solid, with some nice ticklish energy, but a bit short lived at around 7 steeps. Does make me wonder what Clover Patch tastes like if the Qilan tastes so much like clover, though!

As advertised, this is a solid daily drinker at an extremely reasonable price-point. It’s a tea you can brew up mindlessly and not feel guilty about it, while at the same time still find hidden complexities in a focused solo-session. In the two years since I purchased this cake, the flavors have already evolved quite a bit. I do not remember the saliva-inducing acidity, nor do I remember the leaves’ endurance, which is impressive for $22.00USD. This tea should be a first choice for beginners, and also should not be overlooked by more experienced drinkers…

Read the full review at: https://shenggut.wixsite.com/shenggut/single-post/2017/07/25/White2Tea-Little-Walk-Spring-2015

The 2016 brick of Brown Sugar I received is less compressed than the 2015.

Breaking it up produced small bits which feel dry and brittle, one has to be careful not to create dust.

The soup is dark and very earthy with a little cloudiness which should clear with longer storage. I enjoyed the sweet notes.

Well, it was about time I finished off these samples. I tend to stash samples of nice tea because I feel guilty if I don’t spend the “time” on them.

Mostly playing fast and loose with steeps; it’s sweet and leathery on the front of the tongue, aftertaste sort of like peat. Lingering sweetness when you breathe out.

Was brewing it a bit strong, but it mellowed with subsequent steeps; otherwise, I don’t tend to notice a big shift in profile.

I think I gravitate more to the smell of this. Warm, woodsy, sweet, like molasses. Used 2.5g in a 50ml gaiwan.

The first few steeps changed the most, but I find it hard to describe. I did two rinses before I started brewing, ten second steeps. It was mostly tobacco, woody peat, and not sweet. Later steeps, around the third one onward, at 15 seconds are sweet on the tip of the tongue with something harsher at the back; not bitter, I’ve been thinking ‘camphor’ only because I don’t have a reference for what ‘camphor’ is supposed to be, but I’m told something closer to mint. This is more resinous, pine. I thought maybe bitter chocolate.

Up’d to thirty seconds around steep ssss…ix? When I visited Silver Crescent, they were steeping shous starting at a minute, I noticed. I figured it was likely so that they could use a bit less leaf and save money. The result was still a really nice, well-rounded brew, so it’s something I’ve considered doing myself. Next time maybe.

I ended up immediately upping it to a minute, which brought back the peat. The sweetness sort of retreated to the back of the throat.

The tea overall didn’t last super long, but I think I’d be more generous with it if I had more than a sample; I do definitely like it of the samples I got, it’s gentle and pleasant compared to the small sampling of other shous I’ve tried. I wouldn’t mind getting a full brick of this. I should have checked steepster on Canada Day to see if they had any deals; or at least free shipping.

As a Canadian, shipping prices are what hold me back on MOST purchases.

An interesting tea for sure. I picked up a sample of this and some of W2T’s other really high end stuff to see how it was. I’m really not sure how I feel about this one. It definitely wasn’t a flavor powerhouse, but as he has said, flavor isn’t necessarily what Paul is going for on some of his teas. This one has a reputation of being a bit of a face-melter, and while I didn’t quite have that experience, I definitely picked up on some qi from it.

The dry leaf had a greenish and pungent smell to it – there may have been some florals in there, but it really just smelled powerful to me. It didn’t change much after a rinse. It mostly just smelled “shengy” to me.

I found the flavor to be simple but pleasant. Certainly some bitterness involved, but not enough to chase me away. Grassy at times, but mostly a buttery vegetal flavor in the first half of the session. The flavor started moving in a sweeter, fruity direction around 8 or 9 steeps in, most notably in the finish. By the time I was squeezing the last bits of life out of it, the flavor was slightly syrupy and a bit fruity.

The texture of the liquid was incredibly thick and sat heavily in my stomach. In the first session I did with this tea, I didn’t feel the qi starting to build until I was about four or five steeps in, and it sort of just flowed through me in a relaxing way. Not too face-melty, but nice feeling. The second session was more notable and…weird I guess. Starting very early on in the session, it was distracting me from whatever I was trying to do at the time. I kept hearing music in my head, but not any songs which I knew…strange hip hop beats or something. I don’t usually listen to that kind of music or anything. Maybe it was the Kendrick Lamar song which this tea is named after (which I have never heard). I pretty much couldn’t get anything done as I drank the tea this second time around.

I like this one, and it had a weird qi effect to it. That said, it hasn’t inspired me to buy a full cake of it for the price it goes for. I have enough left to do one more little session with it, so I’ll probably try that with 200F water like Oolong Owl did on her blog review. Glad to experience this one. That second session was sorta surreal.

june 22/17 this tea was all about the apricot, at some points it almost made me feel like i was actually eating the dried fruit. very astringent, but only a very slight bitterness until i went in for the 10+ minute kill shot, which suited me very well as im not the hugest fan of bitterness. qi left me feeling calm, and a bit detatched. this is my favourite of the w2t samples i got so far, but now im going to be going in on repave.