I will not give this tea a numerical score because I am selling it on EBay. I took a chance on this tea. I could have been terrible. Luckily could have did not translate into was terrible. It started off with three distinct notes, fermentation taste, a dark bittersweet taste, not sure if I would go as far as to say bittersweet chocolate however, and a spicy or camphor note. This tea was fairly well compressed and took two steeps to open up. For the first five or six steeps the bittersweet note and the earthy note was strong. It is worth noting that I didn’t taste any fishy taste or off taste in the fermentation taste. Somewhere around the eighth steep it turned into a pure sweet tea but the camphor or spicy note continued. By the tenth steep the spicy note was gone and all that was left was a sweet note. I would say a note of dried fruit, the kind without any sugar and a variety of fruit that only has a mild sweetness not a strong sweet note that a pineapple would give. But a sweet note it was in the finish.
I steeped this tea thirteen times in a 120ml gaiwan with 8.8g leaf and boiling water. I gave it a 10 second rinse. I steeped it for 5 sec, 5 sec, 7 sec, 10 sec, 15 sec, 20 sec, 25 sec, 30 sec, 45 sec, 1 min, 1.5 min, 2 min, and 2.5 minutes.
