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2006 Xiaguan Te Ji Sheng Tuo through Teasenz

This morning I set out to cure an odd, single-beer hangover with my freshly received Xiaguan tuo. Yesterday I picked up its parcel from the tobacco shop, so that means I can first-handedly confirm that this tea indeed smells of… well, maybe not so much of tobacco as of tobacco shop. (Not that it had picked up its smell at all; this is just the Xiaguan tobacco profile that has aged out for a good while.)

Both the dry, warm and wet leaves say ‘tobacco shop’. Only in the first wet leaves you get ‘orchid buried in tobacco shop under shou’. Shou-like (obviously fermented) scent returned around the 4th steeping, but later on became distinctively sheng (obviously pu, not so obviously fermented, and somehow you can smell its sheng bitterness as well). Even at its 10th-or-so steep, the leaves still smell richly and warmly of tobacco.

Flavour-wise, that sheng bitterness, which in this case may even be likened to the sharpness experienced when smoking tobacco, was very present only in the first few steeps, likely caused by the tea dust from prying the tuo, all of which I simply left in.

The fourth steeping suddenly missed these bitters, and was subsequently less interesting. Greater steeping times quickly rectified this, with the bitter turning to dry wood. The tobacco smell now also turned into a flavour, and this not too complicated profile persisted for an almost endless amount of later steepings.

As I started this tea to cure my hangover, I happened to take most of it on an empty stomach, which could take it pretty well. Qi-wise I think it must be OK, but for now all of it went towards the hangover :) Later I supplemented it with a bit of whole-bread toast with butter and linden honey. Me like!

Highly recommended for people who want to quit smoking and cure a hangover at the same time (a great combination!) or replace their coffee with something of equal or greater character.

Maybe a bit uncomplicated, wondering what remains in 10+ years after the sheng bitters are completely aged out, but that’s really all just downplaying it for being cheap and bold-flavoured, which I feel are important qualities to aim for these days.

I really didn’t know what to expect from this tea until after the leaves were warmed.

My familiarity with (good) Oolongs at this point is limited mainly to a very good Jade Tieguanyin that I have since run out of. Currently I am awaiting a shipment which includes various rock oolong samples, which wil give me something of a broader spectrum.

Having said that, I am pretty certain this tea is best described in its relation to Jade Tieguanyin. Both are oolongs pushing their boundaries towards the green side, the Jade Tieguanyin going so far that it evokes laments from people more familiar with the traditional roasted Tieguanyin, and the Pouchong going so far that it is said to lie between green and oolong tea.

The smell of the leaves is richly buttery and reminds me of all that I had forgotten about the Jade Tieguanyin. It remains consistent over multiple steepings. Unfortunately flavour and mouthfeel are both thin in comparison. Instead the Pouchong can invoke an array of green tea sentiments, like an aged sheng can where a shou can’t. For me that doesn’t really make up for advertising as a Jade Tieguanyin first.

Qi-wise I feel also slightly watered down and confused, and definitely more energized than calming.

All that being said, I think in its category this tea must be of a good quality, and the price is not too bad as well.

Another generic-brand tea that I’m surpised I have to add. Then again it seems that Sea Dyke et al. have a way of producing all kinds of different packaging that may or may not contain the same tea. Looking at existing entries and their reviews, I feel that this might be a different (lower!) quality than the others. The article number seems to be a good differentiator; this one is AT202.

I have taken the name Tikuanyin ad litteram from the packaging, realizing that Tie Guan Yin is a more oft-occuring spelling.

That’s about all the interesting things to be said for this tea.

It is a roasted tieguanyin by the way. I still have to get a proper reference for what they should taste like, but it cannot be this. I’ve had one before (not reviewed) which I hoped was a production fluke, but this appears to be its long-lost brother.

The dry leaf aroma is dull, slightly chemical and somehow reminding me of the stock room of IKEA, where incidentally they also sell highly processed plant particles. The wet-leaf aroma properly warns of the burnt flavours to come. Only somewhere in the proverbial top left corner there’s a promising caramel fragrance, but that is a promise of other teas to come, not this one, as the flavour is all dull and toasty.

I have tried learning to love its predecessor but when I had some decent pouchong in-between I was reminded of just everything that it was not. So now that I take another stab in the dark and end up with the same basic thing, I can only express my disappointment when rating. Sorry!

At the moment I cannot even see myself keeping both teas in the cupboard for too long. On the other hand I can see myself having another blind stab at a Sea Dyke product. If the flavour were even slightly different, like the tease present in the smell, it would be worth knowing where to find a cheap everyday household oolong. But given the present contrast with the quality product, I’m not even sure if such a thing even exists.

I was a bit surprised that this oriental-supermarket Pu-erh didn’t yet have a proper generic entry in Steepster, so I added it. I bought this together with a Sea Dyke Tie Guan Yin to get some baselines into my research.

This is a tea that screams ‘tea egg’: very choppy leaf parts that don’t really expand and instantly give off their content. So after a messy gaiwan attempt I made a pot instead. As I approach this from a previous experience with some even grainier mini tuo’s, I was surprised that the water didn’t turn to mud instantly, and I might have brewed a bit too light. Inspection of the infuser confirms that this is true: again, these leaf parts hardly expand at all, so in this case, more is more.

I set out to hack my brew by refilling the infuser and returning it to the same water. The problem is, there is so little to these teas that they really need a full body for anything to be experienced at all. In doing so, for instance, a slight camphor note can be teased out of the mini tuo’s I mentioned before.

I don’t think I can honestly say that it is the same for this tea. There is dry wood in there, which basically is just the tea itself. Beyond that I can only call this a ‘black tea flavoured pu-erh tea’. What it does well: it puts a decent tea buzz in your throat, nose and mind. Of course, this the cumulative effect of all my attempts to appreciate this tea.

I won’t call this tea awful or even a waste of money, but it is certainly nothing beyond a daily household tea. Perhaps good to have at home for the cheapness and the reference, but not something you miss out on at all, so no recommendation.

This is my first review on Steepster, my first black tea of any proper lineage and my first close encounter with a tea cake. All that being said, I think I am capable of making at least a decent story out of this.

(NOTE: I did actually manage to screw things up. The search function sometimes doesn’t seem to produce this particular tea so I accidentally created a duplicate. Any help removing it will be appreciated!)

I got this one from my local supplier but managed to trace down its lineage as being a product of Yunnan Sourcing. (That’s 1UP for my local supplier!)

It is a warm sunny day here, but our indoors are cool. Left to my own devices for the afternoon, I set out to taste this tea, deliberately postponing lunch to see if it turns out true to its title.

Using a blunt little wine opener knife, I could easily follow the weaker points in the cake, taking out just enough larger pieces to complement the fannings already falling off. Using the lot in my 120ml (4oz) pre-heated gaiwan, having no strainer, I expected having to do a lot of teeth filtering, but no actual problems there. I used local tap water (~8.5 hardness degrees) right off the boil, but the water for steeps 3-6 was actually saved in an insulated stainless steel tea pot. To me, the dry leaves had no smell. My girlfriend, always the better nose, said it fondly reminded her of straw roofs.

First steep

I did not rinse. In retrospective it may have taken some of the initial dry woody astringency out, but I am not sure if I would have wanted that.

The wet smell after and before the brew was that of cherry sweets. Or strawberry sweets for all I care, but definitely an overpowering candy-like sweetness. Luckily I already knew from the other reviews that the taste would be in high contrast, so I wasn’t too surprised when it turned out to be a cured wood slash black tea astringency, with those resin and honey qualities I once used to search for in pipe tobacco. (These days I feel tempted to summarize resin + honey as ‘propolis’, but I’d have to re-check whether or not that’s accurate for this tea.)

Second steep

This brew produced a slight bit of oil on top. The candy sweetness mixed itself with a new smell to produce a dried plum experience. The flavour, initially just a lighter experience of the same, left me guessing for a bit before I recognized that bodily orchid quality that I previously made acquaintance with in Jade Tieguanyin; fuller and sweeter than the famous, perfumy Biluochun fragrance. Maybe that’s what I was already searching for when I wrote down ‘resin and honey’ earlier.

Subsequent steeps

At steep 3 the smell completely turned to orchids, but the flavour had already fallen back to a lighter version of its original resin-like astringency, which by steep 4 turned the experience into that of an ordinary, but still slightly more vibrant black tea.

So I decided to reboot the experience with fresh hot water. Annoyingly, from steep 5 onwards the leaves gave off more and more of their lovely sweet orchid fragrance, but the cup was already watered down. Finally around steep 8 the leaves toned down as well, or I would never have given up on them. Then again, I miss having my tea already. Maybe just one more wring yet…

Conclusions and learning points

Part of me used to think that you had to turn to raw pu’erh to find that combination of floral and dark fruit aroma’s, that it would somehow get lost during oxidation. Well, that turns out false.

Somehow I felt it was promising that this tea is also from Yunnan, and it might well have been helpful, but ‘ironically’ (get it?) I associate its most exciting aspect with a tea from the other side of the country. So in terms of geography and cultivars I still have some more homework to do.

At the first steep I already noticed this tea’s potential as an iced tea. I also think that this tea would serve well when totally exhausted in one single brew, for instance in a thermos or travel mug. Maybe then some of the orchid fragrance makes it into the brew.

As far as tea drunkenness is concerned, I have to confirm what others have already written. I will not say that this tea is completely without effects, but there is nothing really worthy of a description. In the end I just set out to have my lunch because it was getting late, and certainly not because I had to balance out my tea session.