Yunnan Sourcing US

Still drinking tea, just a little busy these days. REALLY wish my orders from November would get here :(

First tea in 2017 that i had yesterday. I wanted to start the year out with something i knew that i’d love. Smooth, chocolatey deliciousness. Totally fit the bill.

Final Count: 58

when your stash of classic LB is low..what to do? drink your stash of imperial version! haha I pulled this one out today because i just want easy, simple and nothing i have to think about. I also really enjoy that this one handles over steeping if i get distracted.

My only tea today so i made it a good one. Woke up early after a late night and walked 10 km to get to the don valley meeting point to then spend another 3 hours walking and raking leaves in the valley to prep the trails for winter. It was exhausting but TOTALLY worth it. Made myself a travel mug full of this one to enjoy through the day. delicious chocolatey goodness. So glad i still have a bunch of this.

had this one as well today. Received a great package from dexter today that i’ll dive in to tomorrow…but for today i end at 82. Suspect i’ll be back over 100 tomorrow.

much love to all.

longest day in a long time. Glad i had this tea to keep me company but man, work needs to just go away for a while. Can’t wait for vacation in uh… a week? ish?

we. are. finally. done. This was one of the last cups i had to get me through the last of things…still some minor clean up as always, but i can now think about dinner and early bed lol.

Can’t wait for bed…this was another one from last night.

Love this tea. Seriously will be picking up more once i get through the large-ish order i already have of this one and the classic grade. this year’s harvest at least, is a substitute for verdant’s version imo.

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.

Bought 50g of this a while back and am just now getting around to trying it. It is relatively good. There is a slight malt note. There are some chocolate notes. Also, I’d swear I’m getting a roast note. I don’t think this tea was roasted so maybe I’m misinterpreting something else. Overall I like the tea. As to is it as good as Verdant’s? I don’t think I’ve ever tried Verdant’s so I don’t know.

Steeped this one time in a 16oz Teavana Glass Perfect Tea Maker/Gravity Steeper with 3 tsp leaf and 200 degree water for 3 min.

This is my last session with this tea, about which I said someplace else that I don’t see myself spending $190/bing on it.

I had a single chunk of beenghole material that clocked in at exactly 8g, I was able to slip in the pick and separate it into a half-dozen or so flakes pretty easily. When I warmed these by putting them in a heated gaiwan, I didn’t get much smell. Sort of generic maturing raw puer, with a bit of sweet hay or grass. I rinsed with boiling water for about 20s while pressing the leaf flakes with the edge of a teaspoon.

The first five or so steeps are mostly a sort of light-fruit sweetness, like white grape or apple. There is a nice enough mouth feel but not a real coating effect for me. I’m steeping with 208F water like 5, 10, 15s… and it takes until the 6th one before the leaves are really unfolded/unstuck from one another. A little bit of aged (OK, partially matured) flavor starts to show up at this point.

My previous couple of sessions with this portend that it’ll last 10+ steeps of gradually downhill from here. It’s nice tea, but does not have any special power that I feel, or taste that knocks my socks off. If I hoped to find why people rave about LBZ by drinking this tea, it was not successful. Maybe a Spring pressing of the same material would be more impressive.

It’s rare that I drink flower infusions, but this one really intrigued me, so I purchased from the Chinese site (not the US one despite title here).

Firstly, the cake itself is beautiful; I’d be happy to have this on display..but drinking is even better.
Steeped aroma is of milk chocolate, dried strawberries and musty earth (the mustiness is not unpleasant nor a fault).

Very rich on the palate, coating all parts of the mouth with honeyed sweetness, chamomile. Long finish.

quite delicious

I make this in a gaiwan. It requires a bit of coaxing to get a thick liquor on the first steep.

The Trails of LBZ, Case 8 of 6
(Liquid Proust search for his favorite laser beam zensheng)

So… I got on Steepster and looked around to see if anyone owned some of this because the samples were and are sold out. Being that it is $190 a cake, it’d be a gamble that if good would be a steal for what it could cost but if not it would be a whole $190 out; or just saying an opportunity cost of possibly 2 Dong Ding cakes and a Jingmai cake.
So, I found someone and tempted them with the now sold out 2009 LBZ that YS had which was at $240 but I doubt that is what it would be sold for now. That tea set the bar for everything else period. As the best sheng I ever had, I’m still upset I cannot buy it as it’s the first cake I’d pay a few hundred for: http://steepster.com/Proust614/posts/335389

The leaf looks like nothing special and has a scent of old tobacco and whorish storage; it’s been places :P
The first few sips were odd because it was like a tea that was made from wood and then aged in a tobacco jar that wasn’t fully cleaned. With those thoughts aside, and being authentic on my experience, I found that the storage notes faded at around steep 3ish. Now it was time to play with this : )
So… this is darker than I would like it to be, which has something to do with being 11 years old and the storage that it has gone through, but I was able to push through multiple steepings of this because of those feels. Taste wise it stays with that grandpas old tobacco that grandma hid 30 years ago so he couldn’t have it and then someone stored some sheng in it not knowing that it needed to be cleaned.
So why are those feels what am I talking through keyboard? Yes, something as if that sentence you read correctly and now I recollect thyself.
breathe
Okay: This tea did a few things for me. Number one, my eyelids are heavy and I look like I fell asleep in a hotboxed car and just woke up. My arms are really light feelings so I can be one of those outdoor floats if I wanted to be right now. This is a calming tea for me, like a … relax and let time continue on slower than it really is passing by; I could talk about the perception of time and the time that Data encountered this complex issues in The Next Generation, but now is not the time.
So the taste of this is not what I prefer but this feeling of just floating on a cloud and letting the cotton candy caress me is quite enjoyable as well is the clarity of my imagination that I’m trying to hold back on while I write this up.

I hope that the same that I sent to my friend ends up being favored over this as well so I can find more confidence in myself in evaluating tea. As the world of evaluating tea is very scary when it comes to pu’erh, I want to establish myself as a laid back dude who knows taste accommodation with people who will vouch for me as I start to bring people in and make recommendations.
Wait did I begin blogging on this tasting note? Okay, so back to watching the end of The Flash and Arrow; wish these shows didn’t have to take a whole year to start watching again, I’ve really enjoyed the nightly discussions my dad and I have while watching them.

I mean, it was good, but I didn’t see the point of buying this brick when I could’ve gotten better quality loose black tea material that didn’t have to be broken apart. Meh.

Inky and rich. This is a delicious and aromatic Yunnan black tea that oozes light brown liquor. The fragrance is full of malt and caramel with allusions to cocoa or carob. This isn’t super complex, but the richness does pull me in more so than other similar Yunnan teas (like pure bud bi luo chun).

Here’s Hoping Traveling Teabox – Round #5 – Tea #50
Three teas today that were the last servings in the teabox that I removed. For two teaspoons of leaves, this brewed up quite light. Though there was a chewy breadiness to it. I didn’t think to classify it like the Fujian it is (not really caramel to me). I also thought it would be smokier but it isn’t at all. This one is a bit of mystery. Happy to have tried it, but I’d rather have something in stock that actually seems like a Fujian tea to me.