derk Send Message

Received as a 50g mystery tea.

Gone western. 2 tsp, 205F, 3/5/8min then 10min simmer.

Dry leaf is fragrant, smelling of cacao, caraway seed, roast, wood. Wet leaf after first steep smelled like raspberry, red cherry, roast, caraway seed and green pickle.

A stable and consistent, smooth tea brewed western. Liquor smelled of red fruit, malt, cocoa and orange? and produced a very clear light amber cup, turning to dark amber then light again. The taste had notes of nuts (closest I could get was roasted pecan, maybe brazil nut?), roast, wood, red fruit, cocoa and light mineral with a light sweetness and lingering pleasant aftertaste. The mouthfeel moved from glassy and milky (skim) to thinner and a tad drying, then thicker and slick in the third steep.

Simmering the leaves produced a brilliant and dark orange-red cup smelling of lactose, brown sugar, honey and roasted grains and/or nuts. Hard to say but I couldn’t stop sniffing it. It tasted and felt a lot like boiled milk with the addition of honey and roasted nuts, a hint of cacao and sweet citrus making an appearance in the back of the mouth. No hint of bitterness or astringency. Very comforting. Taste hung around for a long time and my tongue was left tingling. Really interesting! I’m glad I decided to experiment with simmering the leaves of a roasted jin xuan.

I’m pretty impressed with this tea! Check it out. I saw it’s on sale, too. I wish I wasn’t so stocked up at the moment with other teas (plus 2 big pu’er orders coming) or I’d buy more for the winter.

Tea #2 from teaswap with Mastress Alita.

I’ve never brewed sencha, so I have no idea what I’m doing. Lupicia says 2.5-3 grams, boiling water, 1.5-2 minutes. Boiling water seemed like an unfair treatment to green tea, so I’m a Woman Going My Own Way. Whole 6 gram sample in uncovered 150mL glass gaiwan, 170F, 1min.

Dry leaf smells floral, cherry, with an earthy basic (as opposed to acidic) pungency and finally some grass. Lots of activity going on in the gaiwan. Saponins, bunch of leaves sitting on the bottom and a layer floating on top with lots of movement of leaf up and down in between. Never seen such a stratified brew. Almost neon green-yellow in color and cloudy with a chance of butt. Smells like some weird medicinal red/orange/green butt. Oh, it smells like chewable vitamins and butt. HA! Tastes repulsive going across my tongue. Weird lightly salty thickslick with soapy floral cherry green butt. Persistent aftertaste. The smell wafting from the empty glass a foot away makes my stomach retch. What tea got on my hands from pouring through a strainer made my fingers smell like butt. Smell my finger!

This is literally the first tea ever that has left me incapable of doing a second steep.
I’m glad I got to try something so offensive! Gotta set the low bar somewhere.

Thanks Mastress Alita :)

Lol. Some random purchase from the corner store. Who knows how old it is. I knew it wasn’t going to taste like much but damn, it barely tastes like leaf. I’d rather drink stinky-feet valerian over this. Going to leave it on the communal share table in the lobby. Somebody will pick it up.

Flavors: {}

Tossed my craptastic thermos that I got for free. Cheap material, didn’t hold heat, had a push button pouring mechanism that is impossible to clean so probably had mold in it anyway, especially since some loose leaf got stuck in it over time.

Today: 1 tsp in a teaball steeped in 20oz unknown temp water, 5 minutes.

I think the kind of red fruit taste comes out more with 2tsp to 8oz. With today’s steeping method, it smelled like hot cocoa. Taste was still very chocolatey and sweet with some woodiness, faint bitterness and malt and a slick mouthfeel. It’s very tasty but I’m not looking for black tea that’s predominantly chocolate, so my rating reflects that. If you’re a chocolate or caffeinated dessert tea lover, you’ll probably really like this one.

Brewed the last 5g this morning western style at slightly lower temp and untimed steeps. It became a little more medicinal in taste with a less drying mouthfeel, more silky. I figured western would not allow some of the nuances to develop, which was the case, but I didn’t expect the cheap perfume to completely overtake the liquor for all three steeps, just the first. It was a very mediocre cup.

I did some searching around last night and it looks like this is probably a 2014 harvest from Goe Tea farm, so not exactly fresh. Grown at low elevation. I’d like to try a fresher version, so I’ll be on the lookout for teas from this farm.

I chose this as the first tea to try from a tea swap with Mastress Alita (thanks!) based on her disdain for the perfume aroma (which is totally understandable).

Man, this tea has so much going for it but it really needs just a slight touch of creaminess to add to the experience and temper the forward florals. It’s very 3-dimensional. Like I can pick out distinct stacks of flavor and sensation in my mouth. I bet a lot of snobs might think this tea is unrefined and clunky. I concluded if I could find more of this tea, I’d like to use it as an instructional experience for people who are wanting to move past the beginners Taiwanese oolong and are comfortable with adventuring.

The dry leaves are super tiny nuggets that smell kind of like cheap white floral perfume, woody and floral sweet cinnamon, green wood, wet wood and woody peach. The majority of the nuggets opened quickly and fully after the second steep, revealing some of the most beautiful leaves I’ve ever seen. Most of them are pretty small with shades of copper, olive green, bronze, and brown. Looked damn fine in my purple clay gaiwan. This oolong is not picked as 2-4 leaf and a bud. It’s all pretty robust and small leaf with only 1 or 2 buds attached to the few stems present. Looks machine harvested.

The first steep started out thick leading into a pleasantly drying but not thin mouthfeel in the following steeps. I don’t know how else to describe it. At first, the aroma of the wet leaves really put me off because it smelled so strongly of cheap floral perfume. The liquor was thankfully not as strong in smell but stood in its own right throughout the whole session. By the time I got to the third steep, the perfume scent of the wet leaves separated into very distinct tastes in my mouth. The woody, floral cinnamon and woody peach of the dry leaf lined my whole mouth. Some mineral produced a tingling side-tongue and my saliva glands felt active but not producing. A light, bitter medicinal elderberry and black cherry went down my tongue. Florals stacked on top of my tongue and hit the roof of my mouth. It started with a base of bittersweet violet blanketing my tongue. Going up there was a penetrating orchid and at the top it was some kind of earthy base-y white floral with a very high note. Above that was a cooling sensation that opened my sinuses and allowed the white floral to float higher.

The cooling sensation eventually sat at the back of the tongue, along with that medicinal black cherry and elderberry. A very faint butteriness turned up mid-session at the top back of the mouth. The florals eventually mellowed. The bitterness was never overwhelming and despite oversteeping here and there, the liquor never became offensive. Toward the end, a light sweetness presented and salivation finally became noticeable. I ate a few cilantro leaves and that really amplified some wonderful flavors between tea and herb. The session faded away smoothly with 10 steeps.

I can’t wait to try the remaining 5 grams in a long-steep/higher-water-volume western style brew. I get a feeling that might produce something quite interesting and much more medicinal. For me, this isn’t an everyday tea. I was going to say I can’t figure out where it would fit in my life beyond an instructional tea but it’s certainly perking me up on this dreadful, um, cramping day. Warming and lightly relaxing.

Thanks again, Mastress Alita. It’s always nice for a tea to find a good home.

Overnight cold brew was overwhelmingly whipped cream in aroma. Very whipped cream and green in taste. Meh for me.

What’s so dangerous about this tea? :P The bell tolls loud and clear in apricot taste then fades away in dampened waves. Mellow. Nice.

Easy to break off a chunk or peel off layers of leaves that smell of apricot and tobacco and… pu’er. Rinsed leaves smelled pretty good: strong apricot and smokey green bean. The first steep was all thick apricot and it exploded into juicy ripe apricot up front in the second steep with a quick unfurling of the leaves. Bitterness presented mid-mouth and sour in the back with slight astringency all around. The third steep stayed thick with the addition of a light creamy taste.

Cha qi kicked in around the fourth steep. Muscles relaxed, especially in my shoulders, arms and face. Droopy the Dog. Aftertaste of apricot and light creaminess was most pronounced in fourth steep then moved to sour. From there, the tea presented itself in muted, cyclical peaks and valleys in taste, mouthfeel and energy, going from apricot to lightly floral to sour unripe pineapple and mineral and back until the end. Sour to lightly bitter and astringent to a persisting pleasant sour again. Thick to thin and back, with final steeps leaving the back of my tongue feeling plump and a nice fullness in the throat. Light relaxation to mild pep and back again over the course of the next 6 steeps. The caffeine is present but nothing I couldn’t fall asleep to, which is a perk for the caffeine-sensitive derk.

Aroma never caught me. Spent leaves are still very green with no hint yet of fermentation.

Nothing in particular stood out to me about this tea but I do have a fondness for bold pu’er. Its qualities seem to make it a good lazy-day drinker or de-stresser. In fact, I think it facilitated an ease of conversation that by nature of the subject could’ve turned out ugly.

I revisited this tea with the same brewing parameters as yesterday: grandpa style with 1tsp/10oz mug/175F/2 top-offs.

Paying closer attention to the dry leaf and noting Verdant’s description, the scent is mostly super sweet whipped cream (from the grocery, not homemade) cloaking a vegetal base. Initial steep was pretty grassy and lightly sweet in aroma and taste, notably sweetgrass with sweet edamame. First top-off produced stronger aroma and flavor, with the aroma gaining some chestnut and maintaining the taste of sweetgrass and edamame plus slight minerality. In the second-top off, the tea was rather unimpressive.

The off umami in the back of the mouth I experienced yesterday wasn’t present today. After reflection on yesterday’s weird taste, it reminded me of beef tongue which I don’t like. The mouthfeel doesn’t have much substance and is drying. I think this tea is too light in flavor to drink with breakfast but food in the belly is necessary. This one does give me some burps and gurgling on an empty stomach.

Overall, this tea just doesn’t hit the marks for me. The dry leaf smells amazing but for that, it lacks in strength of energy and liquor aroma, taste, mouthfeel and longevity. I think I’ll attempt the remaining teaspoon in a modest cold brew or maybe I’ll bump up the temperature, though I suspect that would just increase the drying mouthfeel. It’s out of stock now and I bought only one 5g sample for $1.xx, so I don’t know how the price compares to my favorite Laoshan green.

What’s with the headaches lately? I need a sleep-hard tea and this is one of the better ones I’ve had. It’s well-balanced in flavor when brewed 1tsp to 10oz. Light and sweet.
None of the herbs stand out which is nice and what I look for in nighttime blends. I bought this at the San Francisco Ferry Building which is total money pit. $15 for an herbal blend. I’d buy it again if it weren’t for SF storefront/tourist inflated pricing. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was probably drunk and dopey from spending $12 on a gongfu oolong session at the Imperial Tea Court. At least I have a nice tin when it’s gone. But yeah, it’s good and makes me sleep hard.