The famous Zhu Rong! I’m excited to add my say to this much loved tea,
Dry leaf aroma of.. lots of spices, flowers and fruit but they’re so jumbled I don’t know where to begin.. Although it does definitely remind me of vitamins that had when I was a kid.
I’ve kinda been only drinking red teas for the past few weeks, it’s all I ever seem to want.
Dry leaf is beautiful, twisty, big whole leaf mixture of maybe 70/30 black/gold leaves:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BME3hdxD8QH/
In the warmed gaiwan, I get a very distinctly s’mores aroma, with caramel and vanilla and it’s just like every dessert ever, with some very nice subtle florals.
From the rinse, I get a very burnt chocolate aroma, maybe some toast or graham crackers, some vanilla.
It’s a very strange tasting tea. Definitely graham crackers, and whipped cream, a sort of blueberry or strawberry tartness, dark chocolate, it has a crackery texture. It has a bit of a purple tea taste to it, that thick blueberry-ness. The aroma is much darker and more burnt than the taste.
It’s more strawberry in the second steep, it’s very thick and coats the roof of the mouth, tongue and throat. leaves a syrupy feeling in the throat,
Sour peach entering in the third, even thicker and more syrupy, a salty lime flavour, still with the strawberry and blueberries, but much less, if any, of the chocolate and graham cracker, that was a dramatic change over 2 steeps, it lost somr of the berries and gained a more floral prominence, even some grassiness and a bit of cream, there’s really fruits that I can’t place in this.
The fifth is more grassy, thinner, berries, its got a sour patch kids thing going on, but it’s darkened, like a dark roast oolong, with a thick astringency and a bitterness of a low quality pu’erh.
6: even more of that dark, roasty .. darkness, maybe some raspberry, sourness, loses most of its complexity after that, I normally don’t write about every individual steep but it kept shifting so much, (which I love that it does), it fades to a bitter, dry, woody black hinting at berries and florals and chocolate, but it’s grown thin and it’s not very satisfying past steep 8 or 9. This is really tasty, really quite unique, I really really like this. I think this is the Spring 2016 harvest
