Thomas Smith

Just had an unexpected journey with this tea I was haphazardly brewing to share with my neighbor and feel I ought to write something about it in spite of being strapped for time (it’s been half a year since my last entry here, for crying out loud).

Sorry for the short format and long post space.

4g in 150mL glazed pot, 95C-85C descending water temp in large kettle off the stove (relative stability over first few infusions).

Dry Fragrance:
Charcoal roast impression with caramel and spinach.

Wet Leaf Aroma:
More char with sweet finish.

Liquor Aroma:
Butter lettuce, milk, and lightly stir-fried kale/mustard greens.

1st Infusion (70sec):
Roasty Tieguanyin pleasant sour-bitter taste. Maybe a tad overbrewed but yummy. Swiss chard predominant flavor with woody notes.

2nd Infusion (45sec):
Mellowed woody taste more akin to oak and bamboo but still with milk-like pleasant sour note in finish. Very sweet caramel recession.

3rd Infusion (90sec):
Rice-like flavors dominant with mixed stir-fried veggie tastes. Light sour now more like berries… raspberry? Neither sweetness nor aroma akin to fruit but the acidity is like raspberry and apple skin. Mulched grass and saplings in aftertaste and aroma.

4th Infusion (120sec):
More caramel and cream with a recession of greenery, though less flavor intensity than in 3rd. Lingering crispness evocative of minerals, like wet granite and moss.

5th infusion (30sec – water cooled after pause):
Was NOT expecting this much flavor nor the dramatic shift in profile! Sudden switch from a fundamentally TGY wulong taste to one more stereotypical of a Gaoshan. Butter lettuce, perfumey gardenia, orchid foliage, snap peas, lingering chlorophyll-laden sweetness and refreshing crisp taste, and hints of cinnamon and anise. Kinda freaking me out a bit. Lingering cream and caramel flavors and a very pleasant light bitterness. Hint of green onion in after-aroma.

6th infusion (60sec):
Purposefully lighter to continue the crisp, refreshing taste of green beans or snap peas found in prior infusion. Water chestnut and a bit of a white bread taste appeared alongside faint honey-like sweetness.

7th infusion (120sec):
Just for the heck of it to drink with cake and whipped cream. Not much to offer aside from a lighter extension of previous infusion (I never re-heated the water). Hint of berries came back into this one, but in the aroma… shoulda payed more attention to it, but I wanted dessert.

Yummy tea and unexpected in range of flavors. I typically have this tea in a more straightforward manner, increasing my time and temp as I brew. Glad I was more wishy-washy with my parameters this time around, as I never expected Jade High Mountain Wulong flavors from this tea that normally lives in the roasted Taiwan Wulong flavor realm.

Had a round of this at the tea shop with a couple people the other day using good water in a glazed ceramic gaiwan. Slightly more crisp, but that’s about it. I’m leaving my rating higher than it might deserve, though.

Definitely not the most exciting around and it’s the sheng I’ve enjoyed the least so far of their lineup… Then why do I keep drinking it?

Chock it up to the fact I’m a sucker for gamey teas, coffees, wines, and foods. I like wooly, musk-like, leathery, earthy, mossy, and wet-wood characteristics as long as they are not completely over the top. I like bitterness to be present. I enjoy sour characteristics. This plays with all of them.
More importantly – and the saving grace from me chopping its rating down into the 50s, in spite of me liking technical defects from time to time – when brewed at different concentrations it shifts in overall expression and character. It should be expected that concentration shifts will dramatically alter a tea, but shifting between 4g/100mL and 6g/100mL gave a greater shift in fundamental expression than contrasting different types of tea in the same category. One was fairly clean, pollen-like, sweeter, gravelly, and with the mossy qualities while the other had little discernible sweetness, more tempura, wet wool, slightly singed scrambled egg, driftwood, pepper, and a slight citrus aftertaste with not much of a shift in body. Pretty much any characteristic present one way was absent brewed another (temp and time alterations mostly dealt in the same flavor sets but different expressions). Not quite as extreme a jump as many dancongs I’ve had, but I don’t expect young shengs to nearly as exciting as that group of teas… Heck, I don’t expect – only hope – that they are super drinkable in the first place.

So, excitement factor for me and my own selfish subjective preferences have tossed this tea a rope as it teetered on the edge of a cliff for me. I’ll probably be revisiting it again though I don’t expect my opinion of it to improve. Or maybe this one will just fall by the wayside for me since so many more of the offerings by Zomia are much prettier.

Ho… Ly… Schiznitbajesushotdiggitygollygoshdangdarndamnit!

New benchmark matcha. Gotta dock the Hibiki-an Pinnacle score as scale adjustment.

Brewed with 2g in about 25-30mL water just off a boil in my summer chawan to make a koicha that pours a bit slower than wall paint but faster than honey. Unreasonably delicious. Really. Consumables have no place tasting this good and offering such a rich and satisfying an aroma and flavor presenting a HUGE progression of flavor with such a wonderful balance of sweet, bitter, sour, and umami (saltiness is absent, otherwise all bases covered in taste). I have to call it intense in expression just ‘cuase it’s koicha but it’s very mellow. Intense like a rich but mild stew with egg and baked potato. No, this doesn’t taste like stew or potato (egg is very much present though far more obvious when prepared as usucha). Heavy stuff and in a very good way.

Dark Jadeite coloration makes other matcha look yellowish by comparison (Forest/Jungle Green compared to Kelly/Emerald Green). Deep color goes hand-in-hand with the heavy, rich fragrance of greenery and a touch of hothouse flowers in the dry fragrance.

Pushed through a sieve with the chashaku into the bowl.

Wetted it whisks easily and even forms a hint of a froth layer despite how thick it is. Doesn’t clump and flows well. Texture is thick and eggy and silky smooth.
All kinds of greenery characteristics come out in this ranging from Nori and Wakame Seaweeds to cucumbers to kale to steamed cauliflower and broccoli florets to edamame to heaped piles of moist freshly mown grass to celery to honeydew melon flesh and watermelon skin. Aroma feels like it leads the way into the mouth followed by the initial shock of flavor and then wave after wave of shifting masses of flavor encompassing the above and mixed with various florals that I honestly didn’t feel needed to be disseminated out from the bunch as any combination would not really mesh to give a good approximation of the impression. In general, take the smell of a warm spring day of all the smells across a field, evergreen forest ravine, and the fresh air off a seaside bluff and mix with the heady impression of a hothouse with flowers, large-foliage orchids and bromeliads, and Nepenthes and then mix with the fresh crisp smell of a cut flower shop and fresh produce stand. Then take this swirling, shifting mass and let it flow at you like a heavy ocean fog rolling over and up a hillside into you in waves of clearing then intensifying mists and breezes and vapor. Ever hike Point Reyes or Big Sur on a warm late spring – early summer day giving way to a cool evening as the fog reclaims the land? Marin Headlands north of San Francisco and the Carmel/Monterey area sort of get this too, but it’s the oceanside hills in the coniferous forest bands that really get this effect. But yeah – that. In your mouth. With added awesome levels of epicosity.

Now I need to go off and find a higher grade matcha to force my benchmark higher since I know there’s way better out there. I’ve heard good things about Way of Tea and I know a couple folks who teach Japanese Tea Ceremonies who I told I wasn’t into the full ceremony but if experiencing better tea than this is the reward than I think I can deal with some leg pain and cramping from sitting seiza.

I also took the remnant koicha, diluted it to about usucha strength and whisked for a pleasant but light matcha. Did a second round on the stronger side of usucha for a superb and more cucumber-kale focused matcha. This tea reeeeeally does best as thick tea, though.

Just had the softest expression I’ve experienced from this tea thus far. 6.6g in a gaiwan holding about 100mL using water just shy of a boil. Single rinse and untimed infusions starting around 15 seconds and building to about 45 seconds on the sixth infusion.

Not nearly as sweet as I’ve had, but very thick and very smooth. Rich, dark gold infusion with good transparency. Light pollen-like liquor aroma with just a hint of white peach. The tea itself didn’t exhibit it, but the emptied cup carried the wonderful perfumey aroma of Da Hong Pao as I have come to expect the tea to present. Alas, I was sharing this with a couple folks and it was very tasty but very different from what I’ve experienced.

Based on the brewing round we did, I wouldn’t choose this tea to age but enjoy now (okay, this is partly me easing my conscience for blasting through two cakes in such a short time). Should still be very interesting down the line, though.

Bring water to boil
Bright green in my black tea bowl
Worldly cares vanish

Great matcha that is very soothing with a wonderful balance of bitter and sweet. Pales in comparison to the Pinnacle – much more of a stark contrast between these grades than with this company’s grades of sencha, which are very different but not necessarily “better”. Still, I love this tea and am happy serving it to guests or consuming it on its own or even with food. A nice all-purpose matcha that whisks up nicely with 2g tea to 60-70mL water [Edited – I originally said 100mL… I don’t put that much water in my chawan; I’m just so used to using 100-150mL increments for my gaiwans and teapots and typed it out of habit].
I bring water just up to a boil, pour into a cha hai (I don’t have a bamboo ladle to portion water from an open pot), and transfer into a non-preheated chawan. I rinse with hot water, but with only a bit and it only makes the bowl warm, not hot. This seems to knock down the temperature right to where I like it when using one of my two heavier chawans after I whisk the tea. Comes out a bit too hot both for drinking and for holding the bowl properly in my thinner-walled, summer chawan so I do an extra cha hai transfer when using that one. This particular matcha seems to work better with water heated then cooled rather than brought up to a particular temperature, as I do for nearly all of my teas, leaving me preparing it without the impulse to use timers and thermometers – ultimately making this a far more relaxing tea experience for me than even some of my favorite relaxing teas that I can’t help but want to time or take temperature readings of.

Tasty and balanced with decent shelf life for a matcha. Still needs sifting and cool storage.

You can read the review from LiberTEAS for the 2010 harvest here: http://steepster.com/teas/kteas/21571-glenburn-autumn-oolong-darjeeling

This one was harvested November 17, 2011 and eek ghads is it good.
I nabbed a sample at the San Francisco International Tea Festival a few months ago and then got a bit more in a slightly more comprehensive sample pack that was sent to me as part of them trying to nab me as a wholesale account and then I bought a half pound with the new crop Moonshine, First Flush, and Khongea Assam Leaf Tea. Shoulda sprung for a couple pounds, as I can foresee myself blasting through this and I’m likely gonna push this on the owners at FGC (cafe I work at and select teas for – see bio) in the hopes of us maybe offering this next year… If I can persuade them that it doesn’t need to be organic certified so long as they are treating the environment and workers well and with sustainable practices (our stance on the coffee we sell). Mmmmm, yeah I want to sell this one bad.

The larger packs seem to have quite a bit more dry fragrance maintained compared to the sample packs. You could chock this up to larger volume of leaves giving off more but even after metering into my gaiwan it’s far more fragrant. Perhaps there was less interchange from container to container in the larger bags compared to samplers? Dunno, but the samplers were righteous as well. That said, there’s pretty much a singular, very dominant dry fragrance of dried apricot. Very sweet, and distinct with the smell of the dried juice, flesh, and skin – just like sticking my face into a bin of slightly moist dried apricots at the grocery store minus some of the background smells that tend to come with it. When parsed out, there are a bit of light florals to the fragrance but they are hard to pick out. These pop out in the infusion later, where they separate nicely.

I used 4g in a heavy glazed ceramic gaiwan with 125mL water at 85C for every infusion.

Aroma off the lid is citrusy (more in infusion) while the wet leaves give off the smell of carnation, marmalade, and grape skin. Presented with the wet leaves it would be easy to guess Darjeeling while I wouldn’t necessarily be able to place it from the brewed tea itself. In the fifth infusion more of a mustiness comes to the wet leaves, drawing a distinct similarity to a second flush Darjeeling and the sixth infusion becomes a tad more muted but more dull florals are obvious (star jasmine, magnolia, tulip, lily… makes me think of alstroemeria though they have barely any fragrance until they start falling apart).

1) 2min
Lighter-moderate body and intensity with a very pleasant faint acidity. Pomelo peel citrus and magnolia are very obvious and work beautifully together. Tastes a whole lot like a Phoenix Oolong but without the peach-pit tang, nuttiness or astringency. It’s like the aromatic components of a Dancong’s earlier infusions have been displaced onto the later, mellowed brews after the aggressive characteristics have fallen away. Crisp and slightly mouthwatering – about the same as a snow pea. Refreshing. I’m tempted to say this would be great iced but it may be too light… Maybe just refrigerated. Would not stand up to food and it’s the kind of tea that would raise the level of spiciness of a food [EDIT: Confirmed this in a second brew session with dinner. Even a little spice from a bit of chilies in orange chicken is brought out when trying to drink this tea next to it].

2) 2min
Very similar to first infusion. A bit more marmalade in aroma from gaiwan lid and Pomelo liquor aroma a bit greater in “volume” in the cup. Otherwise like first.

3) 2min
Like first but this time it’s the magnolia flower aroma that’s come forward in liquor aroma. The gaiwan lid and smell from the empty cup has shifted from marmalade to the Pomelo peel aroma.

4) 2min
Lighter overall in expression but still has surprising fidelity to the previous infusions. Expected this to have slackened to this level in third infusion and this one to be the intensity of something like Bai Hao Yin Zhen. Instead, this has the relative intensity of a 15 second fourth infusion on a Dancong minus any aggressiveness it may have.

5) 4min
Woah, suddenly like Yi Wu Sheng Puer but without the astringency. Bud-heavy examples are like this, but I typically get that more in Qing Bings and Mao Cha. Heavier body and ever-so-slightly darker color makes this the same color as a second flush Darjeeling (clear orange with slight lean towards yellow… Cadmium Yellow with a touch of Cad. Red and mixed down in linseed). This has gotten even tastier and it’s nice having the extra body. Next time around I may push for a three minute start from the get-go to see if I can get closer to this faster, even if it may compromise the longevity. Star Jasmine florals in the aroma and in the nose. There’s a light metallic taste similar to that of touching a stainless steel bouillon spoon to the front-center of the tongue. Crisp and kinda sweet but not as distinct as copper. Hint of river rock when taken as a draught (which is a little hard to not do – this disappeared very fast).

6) 5min
Yum. Holy hell this is good. Take the taste of a good first flush Darjeeling, mute down the intensity, and go half way between that and a mellowed Yi Wu Mao Cha or Sheng Cha. I want more but my cup is empty and my stomach is sloshing. Wonderful balance of faint crisp acidity, light cottony astringency that just hangs out at the front-center area of the tongue, light raw green bean sweetness, moderate body, and lingering floral-sweet nose. Pomelo peel is still there but with a bit of almond flower and a lot of chewed up raw almonds mixed in. Carnation and tulip do a faint interchange dance in the background while honeysuckle and Spirulina pop back and forth as light sweet accents. Lingering crisp aftertaste.

Every infusion I’ve had has been great. Really, really tasty and exceptionally easy to brew. The consistency of the first four infusions at this concentration level is still surprising to me, even in retrospect. At lower concentration and longer steep time there’s a bit more variation and character is a bit closer to a Bai Hao Oolong but I prefer this approach with its light citrus and floral tendencies over the grape/muscat, apricot, and wheat toast expressions and heavier body that come about under the Glenburn recommendations (still has a nice bit of citrus). But you can totally skew it that way for personal preference. This is a versatile tea that can give several different faces and taste like different tea types ranging from a more Darjeeling-esque profile to a Bai Hao Oolong, to a Phoenix Oolong, to a Mao Cha or White Tea. You really have to push this if you want off-flavors (oddly, it’s easier to produce these by going very light in concentration and time with 85-90C, which accents some of the algae notes… which you may like).

Yummy yumyum I’m telling all my friends and will be buying several more pounds.

Other reviews for comparable teas (or roughly same tea, different harvest) can be found by JaquelineM here [ http://steepster.com/teas/premium-steap/7032-assam-khongea-ftgfop-1 ] and Paul M Tracy here [ http://steepster.com/teas/shui-tea/14910-outta-bed ].

I’m condensing my tasting notes from a cupping I did of this one tea brewed at several different parameter sets with a couple different water hardness/purification levels. Don’t expect as in-depth a review on this guy, as I’m not doing multiple infusions on it and a couple approaches dunked this into my “unremarkable” territory, though other parameter sets were really nice compared to most Assams I’ve had over the past couple years.

Overall, this is a good, solid workhorse tea with a bit daintier impression at times than its brethren and more accommodating of brewing parameter shifts than some.

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Gah, while cleaning up for my last cupping I think I accidentally threw my sheet of notes away! Blearg I do NOT want to redo this cupping… I’ll do a small set tasting (4-10 cup parameter test) to make up for it but I’m not bothering with water sources. I’m just sticking to bottled or water machine water for a while as my tap water run through a Brita is not worth wasting tea on at the moment – a lot of decent tea that winds up as “meh”.

As a short rundown on this tea from memory, let’s see…

Dry Fragrance is biscuity with a touch of florals, dried fruit (prune/raisin) and hay; Wet Leaf Aroma has more wet hay and a tannic expression; Liquor Aroma is light, slightly woody and cupric with an acorn-like tannin hint.
Body is comparatively light for an Assam but the leaves are more intact here than many, so that’s to be expected – still in the higher-moderate to lower-full body range of the texture spectrum. Astringency isn’t sharp unless pushed beyond 4 minutes but even a 3 minute steep has a lingering astringency that builds while drinking or tasting. The level of astringency at 3:30-4:00 is perfect for adding a couple drops of 2% milk or heavier and 4:15-5:00 is good for a little more, if you are the type who enjoys adding junk to tea. Okay, I admit that I liked how this tasted a whole lot at 3:45 with 5mL whole milk and 0.5tsp raw sugar added to it, but I’d rather not screw with tea after infusion except maybe a bit of water for dilution if need be. Drunken straight there isn’t a ton going on here but it’s tasty nonetheless. Has a bit of a tannic edge and slight coppery-metallic expression but there’s a pleasant slightly overcooked scone impression I get and a hint of ginger in the aftertaste. There are light florals at lower concentration (faint, but I get something similar to California Poppy) but they are mostly overridden by base barley and raisin notes. Not much malt – more malted barley. Grape Nuts comes to mind, but it isn’t that ferrous… more like those little bran sticks mixed into the cereal Kashi makes. There is a light bitterness that I love in this tea. I rarely get bitter in red teas at all – I get astringency, acids, charred characteristics, and metallic tastes very frequently but bitter is typically the realm of aggressive oolongs and young puer or overbrewed greens and green oolongs. It’s light here, but it goes well with the base woody bran flavor. This tea would go great with either hot or cold cereal in the morning and may be fantastic with grits or a more buttery scone.

Not the best Assam around and not aggressive enough for making Masala Chai, but approachable and easy drinking. The Golden Tips offerings from Khongea are amazing and the CTC works well for Masala Chai while this is sort of a sad mid ground between the two that isn’t a shining example for unique and expansive character straight nor stable in the face of many additions. However, it is versatile and easy to prepare without the harshness of many Assams that are out there.

I may have to revise this later when/if I do another parameter set cupping on this. I should probably test its ability to handle successive steeps. When I prepare it at work with an infuser basket in a cup it handles three infusions with little shift; it seems to handle reinfusing a bit better than other Assams, likely due to smaller leaf surface area to volume.

Off to do a Taiwan Hongcha lineup.

I asked the folks at Glenburn to give me a call when they had their first flush and Moonshine available and just got word a few days ago that they have stocked their California warehouse. I had the option of air freight from India quite a while ago but this way was a lot cheaper and I was bogged with samples anyway. I guess they had already officially sold out of this one for online orders but were happy to sell me half a pound over the phone alongside the First Flush, new crop Orthodox Khongea Assam, and last autumn’s Darjeeling Oolong that I was really surprised by in the samples I tried a few months ago. Supposedly the Moonshine is superior since it employs more effort and time in plucking and production so I went ahead and bought the minimum wholesale quantity despite not having tasted it before. I ought to know better than this after being inundated with pounds and pounds of low-end Darjeelings from similar wholesale orders in the past that I really wish I nabbed samples of before sticking myself with lackluster or borderline bad quality tea. Fortunately everything I’ve gotten from Glenburn Tea Direct has been fairly tasty – even the CTC Assam and Signature Blend are decent and drinkable – and this is supposed to be their cream-of-the-crop top tier tea. Turns out it’s definitely worth the price and I’m glad I got what I did, though I personally prefer some of their easier to procure offerings.

Right off the bat when opening one of the nicely parsed and sealed 1/4lb mylar bags, I have a hard time calling this an oolong. Just smelling the dry fragrance that pushes out before I even get a look at the leaves makes me think “White Tea” and when I do get a look at the leaves I think “White Tea” with more conviction. Downy green one- to two-leaves and a bud leaf sets with a preponderance of white hair and snappy fresh green vegetal fragrance. Certainly smells like a Darjeeling or Nilgiri White Tea… The leaves are curled in a way that makes me think some light rolling or tossing occurred but you can tell they were either not rested at warm ambient temperature long enough for significant oxidation, the oxidative enzymes were denatured before browning could occur, or they were just simply really light-handed with the leaves so no obvious bruising occurred. Inspecting the infused leaves could support any of these. There are some broken leaves but the margins are not tattered at all even in partial leaves and the only browning I can find is coloration on the mid-veins and attached stems. Even though the leaf mass is a mixture of leaf sizes it is obvious that this is from shipping and packing damage rather than early production or irregularity in harvest. The leaves all appear to be from a very careful two-leaf and longer bud harvest. They are nice enough to mark on the bags when this harvest occurred, by the way – this batch was picked on March 9th, 2012 and surface-shipped. Where this departs from White Teas is in its leaf density; while very voluminous compared to most intact leaves from Darjeeling, it has the same relative density as a Bai Hao Oolong rather than a Bai Mu Dan. One teaspoon fairly consistently (odd for a tea of mixed bud sets and separate buds/leaves) comes out to 0.85g and one tablespoon comes out to just over 2.5g. Apart from that, I’d say this is differentiated from a white by only a very light rolling – there’s certainly some oxidation at play here but no more than a protracted wither would cause. Definitely not a green nor a hard-wither tea.

Dry Fragrance is vegetal and somewhat toasty. Out of the bag it’s got this sweet, dried leaf or grape skin fragrance mixed with cucumber and a touch of honeysuckle. In a warm gaiwan cucumber shares dominance with uncut Cantaloupe or Crane Melon with accents of baked wheat bread and breaded fried shrimp (somehow in a good way…).

Wet leaf aroma is tangy & musty. Very much like a wine cellar. Wood, moist granite, moss, uncut Meyer Lemon, and citron. There’s this initial oily vaporous tendril that seemed to hit me from the lid of my gaiwan I initially took as a hint of peppermint syrup, but it lacked the sweetness and intensity such a name would confer so I’m a bit reluctant to include it here. However, as it’s the very fist note I jotted down and did so with immediate confidence I guess I’d better mention it even if I don’t really feel it meshes after taking other things in.

I used a very large mass of water to try and maintain temperature as much as possible in my kettle but wound up reheating just a bit for the last couple infusions. All of these were prepared in rapid sequence and each decanted into a cha hai lineup so I could get them out as fast as possible and taste them against each-other before cooling.
Used 4g per 125mL in a heavy glazed ceramic gaiwan. No rinse but I preheated really well and sealed the leaves in the warm gaiwan with the lid on for a little over a minute to help release dry fragrance. Every infusion was brewed with water at 85C in the kettle and the cup remained hot to the touch before each brew.

1) 1min
White grape juice, honeydew melon, cotton candy liquor aroma. Light gold yellow with great transparency and a ton of suspended little hairs in spite of pouring through a very fine mesh strainer. Pervasive cotton candy and vanilla nose cause these to remain forefront of flavor character in spite of little to no supporting taste to accompany them (predominantly a lack of sweetness). Full body. Cotton dryness in rear of mouth gives way to light pinching astringency in throat. Very light in potency/intensity. Sweet impression in nose but not really sweet at all on tongue. Refreshing mouthwatering effect up front produces a fair amount of saliva but isn’t thick in texture as I’m used to. Light and a tad bit crisp like cucumber (with skin).

2) 1min 30sec
Eucalyptus and Buddha’s Hand Citrus peel in liquor aroma. Slightly deeper yellow. Pleasant light acidity strikes the center of the tongue – Citron, Kumquat, Buddha’s Hand citrus impression. Faint initial cucumber aftertaste gives way to a delayed thick but brief star jasmine vaporous aftertaste that arrives with the throat-based astringency. When taken as a draught the flavor is more fluid and consistent than the staccato series of impressions above from sipping or slurping. Comes off very much like patchouli oil with a vaporous and somewhat drying effect throughout the mouth.

3) 2min
Muscat grape juice liquor aroma. Slightly lighter yellow color like first infusion. Much more mouthwatering and less astringent, though it still presents as a prickling/pinching in the rear base of the tongue into the throat. Buddha’s Hand or Bergamot citrus peel, eucalyptus bark, cottonwood bark, white grape skin, and star jasmine. Still a sort of vaporous aromatic oil impression throughout mouth when taken as a drought, but I would associate it more in terms of a light menthol relative [White Sage] now rather than patchouli.

4) 2min 30sec
More muted muscat grape juice liquor aroma has a hint of wet table grape cluster musty-crisp aroma mixed in. Color a tad deeper, intermediate between first/third and second infusions – a nice light gold or very pale honey color (or half honey and half water mixture). Flavor and texture like third infusion, but a little lighter body. Slight acidic tang at center of the tongue is a little more distinctly woody now – like the taste from biting a stem from a cluster of table grapes. Hint of rose petal now in aromatic oil expression following a draught or big gulp.

5) 3min
Same color, less discernible aroma. Reminiscent of the smell or taste of the air walking near Chardonnay in French Oak barrels. Actually, this infusion is incredibly similar to a drier, less buttery Chardonnay in general. Lighter body, but it works well with the light crispness that has opened up away from the basic cucumber and citrus of earlier infusions. Hint of menthol and citrus oil in aftertaste but only just a touch. The afteraroma is very much like the smell of hiking up to a freshwater seep on a hot day in a denser oak woodland or stand of madrone. Ferns, moistened dry leaves and grasses, watercress, and a woody note that’s making me think of the over story oaks, madrone, or larger manzanita but really could be just as easily likened to bran (like Grape Nuts cereal). This fifth infusion is very tasty and almost worth scrapping earlier infusions just to get to it, making me rethink my initial distrust of the brewing recommendation from the manufacturers (or perhaps I ought to say Plantation Managers or tasting team, as this is being sold by the family running the farm). Darned tasty.

Flavor intensity hasn’t slackened, actually only opened up a bit. However, I want to test the other brewing parameters before I become waterlogged so I’m cutting this round here.

For the longer, more dilute round I’m using 1.88g in the same 125mL gaiwan. 85C across the board again but starting right off the bat with the scary-long 5min infusion. Hmm, a full 5 minutes with something that looks so green is sending off all kinds of bells and whistles in my head so I’m just setting my timer and looking away, trying not to fidget over the notion of severe overstepping when I was getting astringency at 1 minute. Still cooler water than I use for many oolongs or even sheng cha… I’m trying to look at these leaves like mao cha for right now.

Wet leaf aroma is very different here and smacks of lemon grass. I definitely get the citrus impression right off the bat under this preparation. With fewer leaves in the cup it also looks more like Mao Feng green tea but with just a slight orange cast to the stems.

Liquor aroma is more heady floral and a tad musty (wet table grape clusters again). Smells a lot like walking past a closed flower shop or greenhouse without going inside… After it has rained and the sun is starting to warm up the ground.

Color is about the same as the first and third infusions at higher concentration and shorter steep time… Maybe a bit paler. Looks like a gold-platinum blend for jewelry.

Wow. Way smoother and just as full bodied. Pretty mouthwatering. Lemon grass similarity in the flavor but not so much in citrus as the natural sweetness. Not much compared to many teas out there, but way more with this longer steep than with the shorter ones. There is still that back-of-tongue and into the throat astringency pucker but it’s a bit lighter and is balanced out more. There’s still a bit of citrus but it’s mostly relegated to the aroma and nose with only a light citrus oil (Buddha’s Hand, again) in the mouth. There’s that aromatic oil prickliness through the mouth after a swig like before, but it’s very light and pleasant.
Under these guidelines this tea is very much a midway in flavor between the two teas I used as a volumetric dose reference earlier. Halfway between Bai Mu Dan and Bai Hao Oolong with just a touch of white grape and carnation I associate with Darjeelings. Really nice balance without the potential abrasiveness particularly green First Flush Darjeelings can display at times.

Second infusion under the same parameters is just as flavorful and wonderful as the first. Tad less astringency in the throat, a bit less mouthwatering, and more kumquat citrus-fruity.

Simply due to the effect of making me do a double-take on brewing parameters this tea meets the qualifications of hitting the 90’s under my highly subjective scoring scheme. On top of that it’s really tasty and super drinkable (good tasting doesn’t equate capability to slug down a mug, but this is nice either way). However, in spite of it being approachable, tasty, thought-provoking, and even dynamic from cup to cup I have a hard time pushing the rating on this. It’s mildness had a great balance with the body it displays, just like a Jun Shan Yin Zhen that managed to slip into the 90’s so I can’t just say it’s a matter of low flavor “volume”… I just kind of feel the range of character isn’t great enough to justify rating this in the upper echelons of tea quality. It’s pretty difficult to pick a ton of discernible characters out of any of the infusions under either brewing approach. I love how evocative of certain places it can be and it’s frickin’ yummy but it’s not even my favorite from Glenburn. To get up to 85 or above I’d want to be able to pick out at least twice the number of characteristics I’m getting here. Definitely worth trying, though… Or buying a kilo or two next time it’s available.

Another of the Zomia Sheng Bingcha samples I picked up and the only other one I got that’s listed online – the rest are 2011 harvest and will not have a presence in the online store until the website is updated. Consequently, I will probably not post reviews of the others unless they are substantially better or worse… Supposedly they are all better, but that remains to be see- err, tasted.

This one is noticeably different from the Spring 2010 in color, compaction, and dry fragrance. This is somewhat darker with some deep green leaves (think lighter Dancong) attached to light buds with a lot of downy hair presence. I didn’t need to try nearly as hard to break this wedge down compared to the Spring cake, which required a couple insertions of my puer knife to get the material into loose form. For this one, just a little wiggling and then some lateral pressure from my fingers crumbled it into fairly intact loose leaf material. I’ll get to fragrance later, but I’ll say now that it had just as much going on as the Spring bing, but in a very different direction.

I used my trusty Duan Ni Shengcha pot with 8g of still-compressed tea per 220mL just like the last one. However, I ran out of good water. Sonoma County has some pretty darned good tasting tap water (even better than San Francisco, I feel, but heavier mineral content) and when run through a Brita filter it comes out really good. However, lately I’ve had to refrigerate and shake to produce the liveliness I’m used to getting. So since early May I’ve been using water from the machine in Oliver’s Market dispensed into large plastic jugs. I have personal reservations about storing in plastic, but I really can’t taste or smell any negative impact and the treated and somewhat aerated water from the machine is tasting a whole heck of a lot better for tea lately. Not as big of a deal with denser Shu Puer and lower elevation Indian/Sri Lankan teas or Dian Hong. But for many of the teas I love that are dependent upon crispness it is a pretty obvious difference. In the case of this tea, it fell flat. Really weird tasting a full-bodied tea with a lot of flavor and mouthwatering effect but lacking in liveliness. I had always assumed the drool-inducing effect of some teas was dependent upon the perceived acidity but tonight’s round of tea kinda scoffs at that notion.

The Dry Fragrance in my warmed pot comes as a base heady-vegetal smell. Heavy and with a menthol and hay twist. Very sweet, thick fragrance that’s very similar to sweet wheat bread rolls from the oven carries through as the most obvious character. Grape twigs and grape seeds are definitely bunched in with the vegetal mass of fragrance and accents of honey and raw cane stalk pop up. An oddly pervasive funky sour-sweet-musty characteristic had me scratching my head and sort of salivating over this very familiar smell for a little while. Pot was starting to loose heat so I put it down to start the rinse when I got a really good fleeting hit of that note and it sang Camembert cheese rind. Seriously – cheese. I laughed at the pretentiousness of picking out “a hint of cheese” in the movie Sideways, but here I am with that very familiar – though initially difficult to place – characteristic popping up in my tea. Fortunately the tea didn’t taste like it at all (though I do love Camembert and Brie).
I ought to note that while the fragrance was nice and heady in a warm pot, it is only lightly toasty-vegetal as a cake. I didn’t get “smoky” as the owner warned me. He actually was reluctant to sell me this sample in favor of the others until I said I wanted to send tome sheng puer samples to a lover of Lapsang.

Wet Leaf Aroma has a base of sorta musty old antique wood furniture. Musty wet cloth or a mop pops up. Musk like the smell from a weasel. Chewing tobacco. Sausage. Beef and seaweed jerky. Truffle Oil. Bacon. Honey Smoked Turkey… Kind of a tug-of-war between this and the sausage. Grilled onions. These gamy characters jumped out more due to their distinctness and pronounced definition more than their intensity or volume – the predominant aroma was a musty-sweet vegetal base that’s really similar to boiled/steamed cauliflower, carrots and edamame. Lighter notes of star jasmine, light maple syrup, hot mustard, and a sweet expression of black pepper like allspice or grains of paradise merge and dance about but are too heavy to call “fleeting” or to say that they “pop out”… More like swim to the surface in a current. Really has a ton going on in the wet leaf aroma after the rinse, where I’m not used to getting much in the way of distinction compared to the liquor aroma or smell from the lid.

Conversely, the Liquor Aroma is really simple across the board. Sweet, toasty grassland with oak trees and pollen. That’s mostly it until it goes in the mouth and characteristics are presented as the nose.

The rinse effectively breaks up much of the compaction and results in a very deep yellow infusion with little aroma. Kind of a difficult-to-distinguish cottony or dried out grassland smell.

All infusions shared the just about the same surface aroma and deep gold, almost-amber coloration. The pot took 20 seconds to pour each time so tack that on for the rinse time and for total contact times on top of the times I list below for when I begin to pour.

1) 83C, 1min
Buckwheat noodles, fried rice with stir-fried veggies (particularly mushrooms with a little brown sauce) and glazed barbecue pork belly. Freakin’ tastes like food. Bok choy and dried clay secondary characteristics. Very mouthwatering up front (drooly) and drying in the back of the mouth but severely lacking in crispness… Lots going on but kinda flat and I’m choosing to point fingers at the water as at least a contributing factor. Full body but the flavors are sort of muddled. I brewed this and the following three infusions in rapid sequence and decided to start at 1minute partly due to the deep color of the rinse, heady wet leaf aroma and fragrance, and the warnings by the purveyor. I feel I probably shoulda gone for 1.5-2min instead to push out the more aggressive elements and see how that potential smokiness may come to play.

2) 83C, 1min
Artichoke heart stem. More like egg noodles now instead of buckwheat. More buttery and a little less drying. Mostly the same mouth impression and dry grassland / oak woodland base character. Thistle flower afteraroma.

3) 92C, 1min
Leaves have really opened up and expanded compared to most puer. Flavor slackened but far more distinctive and the aftertaste lingers much longer. Wildflower, oak wood (plus leaves and flowers), pollen, willow, dry river rock, sand. Tannic aftertaste hangs in throat and breath with afteraromas of carnation and tulip similar to some Indian teas but there’s little crispness at all. There’s a light hint of smokiness once it’s started to cool and taken as a draught, leading me to believe a more aggressive brewing up front would bring out more of this characteristic that’s supposed to be obvious in early infusions and dissipated by the third.

4) 92C, 1min
Body and flavor thinner. Now at more of a moderate body level. Light mineral taste that I was expecting early on comes forward with a faint pleasant bitterness. Very similar to the third infusion but with more rocks and sand and less grassland and wood. This infusion sort of acts as a mid ground between the very similar first three infusions and the last two infusions I did.

5) 90C, 2min
Chicken soup with a bit of oregano and cilantro. Sandiness really comes forward a little while after swallowing. Overall smooth and comforting but lacking much distinctive character.

6) 86C, 2min
Sandy initial impression (now moved all the way from only in aftertaste to being the first characteristic tasted). Long lasting vaporous mouthfeel with little discernible quality aside from the smell of just-watered orchids that are not in bloom and a touch of raw kale. The aftertaste takes a long time to appear after swallowing and breathing deeply for a bit. Despite difficulty in picking out flavors, this infusion is markedly more crisp than the others while retaining the basic boiled veggie sweetness from the start.

Just as rich and warming as the Spring 2010 but a bit more heavy in vaporous quality in the throat. Much less in he way of snappy greenery character and closer to the impression of walking through a dry oak woodland savannah rather than freshwater marsh. I may have to keep track of my notes when I set the rest of this up in a cupping lineup against the other samples side-by-side so I may revise my score and impressions using different water, though that will be under more heavy-handed brewing parameters.

As I look over my entries on Steepster I’m noticing a lacking of Shu Cha notes that really is not representative of how much of it I drink. I gave it some thought and realized that it’s sort of taken a hit from the fact that much of the Hei Cha I drink is in accompaniment to food. I love eating all kinds of different food but I can’t handle particularly oily or fatty foods. Turkey bacon has too much grease for me and even a little butter on bread makes my belly churn – imagine how the Chinese cuisine I love makes me feel or if I were to try eating a cream sauce or French cuisine. Hei Cha really does help settle my stomach to the point where I can actually enjoy even fried food and the taste goes really well together. So much so that I tend to go and prepare food once I start drinking it (though I force myself not to if it’s a well aged Sheng Cha).

I’ve had a hard time brewing this tea for evaluation for this same reason. It’s really nice and sumptuous and simply having one cup really makes me want to have some food to go alongside it and some kinds of food leave me reaching to brew it. This time I held off until I’d had at least enough of the fifth infusion for evaluation before making some Hong Kong pan-fried noodles to accompany it… Broccoli Beef with Cha Xiao Bao and Shumai went perfectly with it the first time I made it.

I left just enough to brew in the sample Geoffrey sent me from the first time I brewed it. This time I used a slightly lighter concentration at 8g in my 220mL Zi Ni Shi Piao for large leaf and compressed Shu Puer. In retrospect, I really ought to have used a full 2min infusion from the get-go after the initial rinse but it was still very pleasant with the shorter brews.

Dry Fragrance was fishy. Very similar to uncooked catfish fillet. Leather, leaf litter, cassia, musty wood and the general smell of a pond filled with duckweed and algae that’s dried up were obvious smells when placed in the warmed pot. As it cooled a bit, the predominant fragrance was old graham cracker with a light hint of camphor or menthol.

Wet Leaf Aroma was much more simple – buttered biscuits that are slightly burned on the edges and wet cinnamon stick (again, cassia not true cinnamon).

Liquor Aroma is very light from infusion to infusion and very consistent. Kinda musty like the smell of sweat and a faint herbaceous wood character like dried willow.

Fresh water was added to the kettle after the fourth infusion – temp increases before and after that are from reheating of the same water. This pot takes 15 seconds to pour, so tack that on for total contact time.

1) 1min at 97C
Light intensity, crisp, and sweet. Full body but light overall character and that crisp and sweet primary impression makes it hard to think of this as more than a moderate-bodied tea. Light rear-of-mouth astringency is more obvious in finish and when aspirated. Overall very mouthwatering. Deep red-brown coloration and clear but the color is saturated to the point that I can’t see the bottom of a narrow cup with only 100mL in it. Just a little bit in a small cup leaves the infusion darkish orange, similar in appearance to some Dian Hong. Primary flavor is Grape Nuts or barley. As it cools to a temperature where I can actually drink rather than sip or slurp it takes on a nutty flavor leaving the overall flavor experience very, very similar to black “Forbidden Rice” in both the base and aftertaste.

2) 1min at 90C
Sweeter – Honey on wheat toast. Very mouthwatering – even more than the first infusion. Barley and Forbidden Rice are dominant. Less astringency leaves only a hint of drying towards the rear of the mouth. Extremely refreshing as it cools to barely warm. Makes me think of drinking Mugicha.

3) 1min at 98C
Lighter intensity and body and with slightly less saturated color as well. Little more astringency than second infusion but less than the first. More delicate character reveals some star jasmine and honeysuckle florals that were obscured in first two. As it cools it takes on a distinct taste like that of water that’s passed through peat… Unfortunately I know this taste well from container gardening with carnivorous plants. But yeah, very peaty.

4) 2min at 95C
Color back to the saturation of first two infusions but light flavor like the third just a little greater in presence and somewhat more crisp. Light astringency comes out more as it cools while light driftwood flavor comes out and soy character pops up in the nose.

5) 2min at 96C
Richer body but more piquant in the back of the mouth (closer to the throat now). Bit of leather, sweat, and fried tofu with soy and hoisin sauce in the nose. However, sweetness similar to last infusion mitigates any potentially negative impression from the gamy qualities. Light menthol note and mouthfeel permeates, especially as it cools, and a longer lingering crispness leaves this the most pleasant infusion up to now and the largest deviation in character. At this point I succumb to the notion of making some food to go with it so the following infusions are tasted without having a clean palate.

6) 2min at 98C
Lighter in a sort of flatter way – acidity either not as great as previous infusions or is impeded by residual oil from food. Aftertaste very similar to Dian Hong Long Zhu. Flavor is like the fourth infusion as it cools though with a slight added body so flavor somewhat different (I’d set aside small amounts of all previous infusions while drinking to compare cool). There’s a marked pinching sensation near the base of the throat near the epiglottis but astringency has left the tongue region. Most of the flavor is only really discernible as it cools a bit. Once lukewarm it is very similar to a toasted plain bagel.

7) 2min at 93C
Ever so slightly lighter intensity than the sixth infusion but still good body compared to the first four infusions. Two characters start really coming out that I sort of feel are present in earlier infusions but I hadn’t either placed or separated out from base flavor: Oleander and light pure Maple syrup. Star jasmine noticeable again and bread-like character more like a multigrain bread.

The tea was clean overall but a tad more astringency than I’d prefer from a Shu. Very smooth with lower end of Full Body when taken as a draught, but crisp and lively when either slurped or taken in a small cup. Even after the fifth infusion the nuggets were still compressed and “clunking” in my pot, just starting to break up. Still chunks mostly compressed after the seventh infusion so it’s a waste to stop here but I’m waterlogged now… Will revisit the tea in a few hours but I’m not likely to add anything tasting-note wise except a note as to when the nuggets finally break apart since the character in this is sort of just varying intensities of the same flavor set. I remember the first round I did still left some compression after thirteen infusions… I think this tea may be better off to brew in a little 60mL gaiwan (which I’m iffy on with puerh – I prefer enough volume for the leaves to settle and temp to be maintained in brewing) or shared with a bunch of people so it can fully open up. I’m interested in that opening up in this one, in particular, as the infusions up to now feel very much like adjusting the volume on the same song.

Comforting and clean, for sure. I pretty much agree with the whole synopsis Verdant writes about this except for the lack of astringency. Perhaps keeping the steep temp to 90ish C or even as low as high 80’s and pushing the steep time longer would benefit it in that regard, but I’m always reluctant to drop below 90C for a ripened tea. This is very tasty and approachable either way. Not nearly as impressive as the Xinyang, though.

Rich, smooth satisfying young sheng.

Got a 25g sample of this and five other sheng bingchas. The samples are nice, solid compacted wedges pulled from bings that were bisected lengthwise. If you are having trouble picturing what I mean by this, check out this video from “Mr. Cloud” Chan Kam Pong, the author of the book First Step to Chinese Puerh Tea, where he shows how to break down a cake for consumption once it is ready:
http://youtu.be/th86Ge4fFJs
The compaction on this is actually fairly tight for a stone-pressed cake, but you can chock a lot of that up to it being really young. After a rinse the compressed chunk I brewed showed a bit of separation uniformly around the mass and it broke up really well after just the first infusion (boy was I caught off guard when I opened my pot). I flaked the rest of the sample into loose tea so I could later taste this in a comparative lineup and so I could send some off in a box of samplers I’m putting together. Leaves are really consistent for a wedge off a bing and when the owner of Zomia was showing me various cakes I was thoroughly impressed by the consistency of the leaf material overall. No blending of young on the outside old on the inside for these cakes, they are uniform young leaves all throughout. Think about the leaf composition for a good Bai Hao Oolong or Bai Mu Dan White Tea for the leaves of most of the sheng bingchas offered by Zomia Tea.

I brewed an 8g compressed chunk in my 220mL Duan Ni Shi Piao pot for young shengcha. Only did four infusions… May revisit later. Seriously warming tea and it’s a very warm day.

Dry fragrance actually had quite a bit going on and really harkened to my days as a docent when I would lead ecology tours of the local wetlands. Smells very much of the cattails and tule when in bloom (predominant note is pollen), the breeze coming off a freshwater pond lined with willows, and just a hint of young redwood. There’s also a toasty grain note here – I’m going with millet, though sesame wouldn’t be too far off either.

Single rinse resulted in a brew for discard with only the faintest tinge of yellow-green and light sweet aroma somewhat similar to hay but really too light to point to anything for serious.
Wet Leaf aroma was rocky and toasty, as in multigrain bread being heated in a toaster oven. Vegetal blanket aroma is very hard to pin down (basic young shengcha base muted-veggie aroma) but an accent of wet moss on wet granite during a hot day pops out. As steam dissipates a tad I definitely get a bit of arugula and the smell of stir-fried noodles and bamboo shoots.

Liquor aroma for these first four brews were pretty close to one-another. Sweet, like the smell of simple syrup. Canned bamboo shoots and stir-fried water chestnuts. Fried egg. Wet lawn. Pear (particularly skin of Bartlett/William’s or D’Anjou Pears, but the flesh as well).

Each infusion had slightly different parameter sets, but not huge deviations. This pot takes 20sec to pour, so tack that on for total brew time.

1) 45sec, 85C
The first infusion had a nice, full body and a light astringency providing a pleasant itty bitty pucker that went well with the light rocky smell coming from the pot. Golden yellow, clear infusion with suspended downy hairs floating about. Predominant taste is cabbage – raw, cooked, red, white, green, whatever. Tasty cabbage, though. Toasted rice is up front but this gives way to rice pudding in the aftertaste. Mmmmm, rice pudding… Very mouthwatering (and not just from me now wanting desserts to make up my breakfast, lunch and now dinner for the day). Kinda gravelly impression – largely in the nose but also lingering a bit on the tongue as though I just hiked through a particularly rocky area.

2) 45sec, 87C
Second infusion is like the first but just a little more potent. Ever so slightly darker gold infusion (almost amber) and just as many little downy hairs – about on par with a tippy Darjeeling or Bai Hao Oolong in terms of suspended hairs making it through the fine mesh strainer and into the cup. Here’s where I figured out what kind of pear I was smelling earlier, as Bartlett Pear comes even before the cabbage in the flavor (this wasn’t present in first infusion). Also, some radish has come into the picture. Again I feel like I need to say “in a good way” since I tack a negative connotation to radish, cabbage, and Brussels Sprouts for some reason even though I like ‘em all, especially raw or pickled (um, there’s no pickled taste in this tea…). Sweet Brown Rice sweetness hangs around in this infusion, sort of making a mid-ground between the toasted rice and rice pudding expressed in the first. Slightly less mouthwatering than the first, but still up there but the pucker is ever so slightly increased. Fried egg pops up here and there as I drink this one – not quite oily, but evocative of having a whole egg cooked on a well seasoned cast iron griddle. This infusion is very warming. It would be incredibly comforting if I had this last night with the fog we got but right now it’s 30C inside my little poorly insulated cottage.

3) 45sec, 84C
Third brew has a slightly lighter yellow color and slightly lighter body. Distinct menthol quality comes up here, reminiscent of watercress. Other than that this is very similar to infusion #2 – very rich and satisfying. This is certainly brothy. Instead of egg I’m thinking closer to chicken stock for soup. Raw chunk sugar cane character in the aftertaste makes this seem slightly more refined in sweetness yet with a more protracted lingering toasty quality.

4) 60sec, 83C
Like the third, but markedly sweeter. Especially sweet and crisp in the aftertaste. Lil’ gherkin cucumber characteristic is present here as sort of an evolution of the cabbage taste. Makes for a bit more refreshing infusion, but this is still incredibly savory and warming. Gonna have to call it with this brew as I’m starting to perspire.

This is not nearly as bitter/bittersweet, minerally, or smoky as I’m kind of used to from young Bulangshan Puerh, but still very hearty and I think will do well to age based on richness in spite of slightly lower intensity of sharp characteristics. Supposedly 2011 was a better year across the board for Puerh, so we’ll see how this does against the 2011 Bulang Mountain Spring Bing I also grabbed a sample of. Overall this trended closer to the vegetal end of shengcha expression with all florals hiding in the background and mostly coming forward as pollen character. There were some wildflower and dry grassland hints to the base, but those are easily overshadowed by other characteristics.

Again, a very rich young sheng and very tasty even though it’s so young. Definitely in the running for my next full bingcha purchase, but that depends on how well I like these other samples I got. Unfortunately I don’t have the kind of expendable income I once had and have to be a little more choosy about plunking down for a bing, brick, or a full tong. Had I tasted this a few years ago I’d likely impulsively buy a tong so my indiscriminate drinking of young puerh wouldn’t dent the supply before it got some age on it.

Yummyyumyum I hope the rest are just as tasty or better.

This was an excellent introductory shou that is pretty well representative of Zomia, though the focus is more on the sheng side of things. Being served this tea in the shop pretty much spoke to the whole of the philosophy and focus of the tiny company (it was not the first tea served, but was more in line with the bulk of the flavor trends of the owner). This is essentially exactly what I hope to find to recommend to people looking to buy their first full Shou Bingcha, though samples are available both online and in the little shop. Not the best tea they offer by any stretch of the imagination but a great “House Puerh”.

I had a conversation with another buyer for a different coffee company a few months ago at the SWRBC. He pointed out what I was carrying around while watching the barista competitors and said “nice gaiwan,” naturally starting a lengthy discussion about premium tea while surrounded by some of the best coffee on the planet. When it came down to us talking about what we’d like our respective companies to move into, I said I feel any coffee shop selling tea ought to offer puerh, as it’s a terrific middle ground between coffee and tea. His nose got all crunched up and he said his company “doesn’t do earthy or muddled tasting coffee and tea.” Ah, he has not had decent puerh. I tried to hook up with him the following day to get him some of the basic shou puerh I happened to have laying about in my car, but oh well. Moral of the story: most people haven’t been exposed to clean tasting puerh. Now I’m tempted to send a bing of this down to that company with a post-it on it saying “try this” :p

Back to this thing.

Zomia Tea is only about 2 years old and they just opened a retail location right around the corner from the roastery for my work about a month ago. Well, I should say “he” not “they” – Barry Boullon is the sole proprietor, and I believe the one employee (though he has others do the website stuff, which is about to get a big face lift) so the guy you buy your tea from and chat with is the importer and owner.
Barry weighed out about 4g for his zi ni pot (looked to be about 100mL – he said he goes for 1g/25mL using a scale, which happens to be my starting point for both Shou and Sheng Puerh), dispensed hot water from an electric stainless steel samovar into a large earthenware kettle that he then set atop a hot plate to bring up to about a boil, and rinsed once.
I was caught off guard and a little disappointed at first upon taking in the aroma from the wetted leaves. Very earthy and a tad musty – very aggressive but at least it wasn’t smoky or loaded with the smell of ferment/compost. I’m okay with smokiness in young Shengs, but would rather not get that from a Shou. However, the wet leaf aroma did not carry through to the liquor.
The first five or six infusions were all around 30-60 seconds. No timer was used.
Very clean in aroma, appearance and taste. Vermillion-brown but pale and highly transparent coloration. Saigon Cinnamon (Cassia), and orchid bark with just a hint of peat moss were the dominant characteristics. Mellow and crisp. Not a ton of sweetness, which I kind of expect to find in any puerh… In the third to sixth infusions there was a slight rice-like sweetness and a hint of molasses to the aroma that sort of accentuated this, but nothing like the crazy sugar-water sweetness I get from time to time. I’m sure a longer steep or slightly higher concentration would push this while still remaining very pleasant. Very consistent from one cup to the next and always pretty light. There was one infusion that came out really dark (maybe the fifth – took a little while for the leaves to open) which was more in line with the appearance of my typical 2min initial experimental brews or 30-60sec at higher concentration but this was then diluted in the share pitcher with hot water before it was served, knocking it back down to the lighter character of the previous infusions but presenting a bit of tule and cocoa characteristics as well. While light in intensity, it had a good moderate viscosity and a hint of back-of-throat astringency in later infusions.

This wasn’t the most dynamic tea around and there were way better ones up on the shelf (this was also one of the few blended puerhs available), but it was very tasty and a good deal for the price.

I’m really pleasantly surprised by this company and will be buying a bunch of stuff from Zomia Tea in the near future. While this post is on a Shou Puerh, the focus is on Sheng Puerh and I was blown away by the consistency of the material making up the Sheng Bingchas that Zomia is offering… And then again when I saw the tiny little print on the signs indicating the very low price points. High quality with large selection at low price AND in easy driving distance? Yes please and thank you! This place is easily the highest quality shop in Sonoma County now and it is exceedingly rare for me to find a tea shop where I can walk in and actually learn stuff I was not privy to before. I have a small sense of the general character of a few isolated mountains in Yunnan due to personal tasting exploration of puerh over the course of the past seven years or so, but I’ve never been there and never had easy access to well-made isolated cakes of specific harvest periods all from the same small-scale producer who makes tea by hand. YIPPIE and pardon as I don’t bother to attempt containing my excitement!
I’ll be breaking into some of these Sheng samples in the next few days. Most of ’em are not yet available on the website because of the aforementioned update that is soon to come.

I’m really surprised there wasn’t a Long Jing entry for Imperial Tea Court on Steepster. Every year ITC features around five different incarnations of Long Jing plus LJ style tea from elsewhere sometimes from the same cultivars and they are frequently the first to bring fresh examples of this tea into California after the early harvest. Definitely doesn’t mean it’s the best, but they have good, fresh offerings for Long Jing lovers… I suppose the price tag some of them carry is enough to keep people off buying much of ‘em. This year’s early harvest produced a very small quantity and not really as good of quality as the prices would suggest (way better than last year, I feel, but nothing compared to a couple years ago). ITC featured two early harvest Long Jings this spring – the Imperial and Lotus Heart. The latter was only sold online for a brief period and wasn’t available at their physical locations unless you were part of a pre-order. I bought this alongside all the Ming Qian Long Jings offered by Red Blossom as well so it was better for my bank account that it wasn’t available anyway.

Last night I did a tasting for a few friends centered wholly upon this group of teas. Six fresh examples, six from last year stored well (eh, maybe not so well in the case of the stuff I got from Vital Leaf, which had some funky aromatics going on when I picked it up from them), three from two years ago that I’d intentionally exposed to poor conditions, and then this one featured in the fresh lineup as well as brewed five other ways side-by-side.

I prepared this as the representative of one of the more traditional versions in the tasting, so it got the special spectrum treatment even though it wasn’t the favorite of the night nor the one I had very much of.
Here’s the parameter run-down:
1) 3g/100mL for 2min in 80C
2) 1.5g/100mL for 3min in 70C
3) 1.5g/100mL for 4min in 70C
4) 1.5g/100mL for 1min in 85C
5) 1.5g/100mL for 2min in 85C
6) 0.44g/235mL for 7min in 65C
The favored order between the four of us tasting all wound up being the same or just off by one. 2-1-4-6-3-5, though #1 was most distinct in separable distinctive pleasant character and #6 drew the most surprise and acclaim.

Across the board, this had a moderate body and long-lasting crisp and sweet aftertaste with a base flavor similar to stir-fried snow peas. The really dilute preparation had a faint level of intensity but blew everything else away in terms of sweetness, which was really deceptive when the color of the water really hadn’t changed at all. The highest concentration was my personal favorite due to range of character exhibiting many floral hints and varied nut flavors/aromas but #6 is the one I wound up downing the whole remainder of the cup once everyone was done tasting.

This year’s slightly later spring harvest Long Jings are tasting a tad better to me then the Ming Qian counterparts, but they are still pretty darned good and this one, in particular, is highly versatile though light overall.

Held a tasting for some friends last night centered upon Long Jing, and this was one of the more interesting entries to the mix. I bought this right when it arrived in April 2010 and had it as part of a public tasting of fresh green teas then took what little remained and set it aside with the express intent of featuring the effects of staling in a later tasting. I left this really nice tea in an open pouch and moved it around over the course of the past two years to purposely expose it to air, humidity, heat (and hot/cold flux), and light. In the end I think I may have done a little too good of a job since I highlighted staling but prevented the development of off flavors that arise when stored with access to the aforementioned conditions in a sealed container… Made for a more pleasant experience during the tasting, I guess.

This still tasted surprisingly good, if incredibly lacking in flavor. Pretty flat, but the tactile impression remained true to well stored past-crop tea and the taste elements were not diminished tremendously. Light, moderate bodied water with a hint of nutty sweetness. Brewed at 1.5g per 100mL for 2min using 75C water was a great contrast to fresh crop brewed at really dilute conditions for a long period. Both came out at the same relative intensity but this felt as though the life had been sucked out of it whilst the fresh was wondrously sweet and crisp.

I think it’s a great testimony to a tea when you can intentionally try to screw it up yet it still tastes good. Definitely wouldn’t want to pay full price for any kind of past-crop green, but I’d say this would be almost worth it in the first 1.5 years if properly stored.

I was out for Father’s Day dinner tonight and noticed Mighty Leaf’s Hojicha on the drink list. It’s kinda hard to screw that tea up with the blasting hot water restaurants tend to use and I knew Hojicha would be good on my stomach after the inevitable overstuffing I was bound to commit. However, the server gave me this instead. I tried SO hard to give her the benefit of the doubt – it’s not like I expect a server to really care about tea like I’d expect them to know the food and wine – and tried to just go along as though it was a misprint on the menu. But I really couldn’t stand this junk.

Managed to suffer down about 70-90mL of this before the smell of the pot sitting on the table made me unable to eat my food any longer. Really it was easier to drink than just have it sitting around me… That sickly pseudo-tropical perfume aroma wafting off of it is just way to much. Reminded me of the smell of the trash area the dumpsters behind work smells like. Week old moist hibiscus flowers sitting with old used coffee grounds in a large sealed bucket would be close if some corn syrup smell was in there too. Oh, I KNOW! An old Capris Sun juice pouch left out in the sun by kids having lunch outside on a hot day.

Anyway, the smell from this leaves me unable to grant any positive score on the tea component that at least wasn’t cardboard, astringent, or bitter in spite of being brewed with water dispensed fro an espresso machine. But, hey, this made it hard for me to taste a liberally spiced meatloaf with sautéd mushrooms, garlic, and onions and made me feel a bit ill to my stomach from the liquor aroma.

Gross – I don’t wish this on anyone.

Plus note is that the Hojicha effectively obscured the remnant aroma and taste of this once I had the server swap it.

Wow, this is so incredibly different in appearance and dry fragrance from the past couple years! It is no longer a tightly balled tea with the looks of an old-style dark Tieguanyin and is no longer evocative of dried apricots prior to brewing. Now it’s a wiry, dark, twisted-leaf tea with the looks and smell of a small-leaf, charcoal roasted Wuyi Yancha or a particularly roasty Yixing Gongfu Hongcha. Now it is immediately identifiable as a red/black tea the moment the bag is opened. I really thought I got the wrong tea in the mail and even called them up to verify that this is what this year’s is like.

So why am I okay with this having the same name and not bothering to create a new entry to accommodate a different style? Well, first it’s because it’s by the same producer from the same plants. Second… I would have a hard time telling the two versions apart by taste. Color is a bit more crimson in the first infusion but back to the red-orange brown coloration of its previous incarnations in subsequent infusions. Aroma, taste, tactile impression, nose… they are all right in line with tasting notes I’ve made before. Sweet, perfumey with ripe apricot and prune qualities, and lingering woody spice notes. Charcoal fragrance does not appear in the cup at all. Won’t change the score since this is still really good. I’m impressed that the flavor isn’t obviously different after the rolling style has changed so much.
Brewed 4g/100mL with 95C water for 1min-1min-1min.

After the hype around this tea I was a bit let down. It is, indeed, a very nice dancong but it seems a bit… safe.
I’ve grown accustomed to a sort of tug in two directions from Phoenix Oolongs. On one side we have fresher, lighter tasting contenders that seem jubilant and crisp – really reminiscent of champagne to me. On the other side we have two teams pulling the same direction towards potent, mulling, and lingering tendencies with either a brooding mob-boss air (woody, cedary, cigar-tinged, with afteraroma that sits in yer throat for days) or a gruff fifties dad character (heavy fruits and a bit of pipe tobacco with a background of smells akin to a sawdust-littered garage workshop). Ultimately this side is more like port or brandy to me. This tea is coming off to me as some kid who sits in the middle of this tug of war and cries “Can’t we all just get along?”

Again, I mean no offense here and the rating I give is only representative of my personal preferences for character expression among Fenghuang Dancongs and excitement level when drinking this. It’s darned tasty, clean, and has definitive dancong character in spades. What catches me off-guard here is the lack of necessity of praying to the great caffeine overlords on high that you won’t screw the thing up by missing your mark by a second or two while brewing. The astringency is muted even when using boiling water. A variance of 4g per 100mL hardly put a dent in its character. Using 85C versus 100C made little difference. Tactile impression for nearly every infusion has been well-balanced throughout the mouth. And, unlike the description led me to believe, every cup up to the 9th infusion of second round was very consistent in base character.

It’s that consistency and balance that puts me a tad at odds with this tea. A tea that’s a pain in the arse to brew and jumps hither and thither whether you want it to or not is neigh impossible to replicate results with at times but it keeps it interesting. I love aggressive dancongs and yanchas that throw that at me. I like when every cup is a new adventure more than a steady flow from one character to another over the course of infusions. I definitely look for that in some (hmm, actually most) of my teas, but for dancongs I want a bit more excitement. Cup size matters here – when poured into a small gongfu serving cup there is far more deviation in character than in my cup that holds a whole 200mL, so this tea would be far more exciting when sharing amongst a bunch of people from a small pot compared to pouring it all into one for a single person. Now, I essentially got what I was looking for in my initial brewing round with this tea, where I approached cautiously – it’s my freakishly aggressive brew round that left me puzzled as to why I wan’t getting jumps and twists of fate in my cup.

First Round: Tommy’s Pussy Little Babysteps Approach.
This is my baseline method when I first meet a new Phoenix Oolong and the way I tell most people to start in on ‘em if they haven’t screwed around with these teas before. Even really aggressive, broken leaf dancongs can be easily approachable under these parameters, so it’s about the least risky brewing method I know for bringing out good flavor without producing overbrewed characteristics.
4g/100mL in a heavy glazed ceramic gaiwan
85C
Rinse
30sec-30sec-30sec-45sec-60sec-1min15sec-1min30sec-1min45sec-2min-3min-4min
Typically I’d progress in 30sec intervals at the 2min point but the tea started dying fast on me at that point and the 4min infusion was severely lacking (3 min wasn’t much with it either).
While there were ebbs and swells of flavor intensity and aromatic expression, this was overall very mild and kinda buttery. Not Taiwanese Oolong creamy-buttery, o’course, but still smooth and “soft” feeling. The overarching base characteristics remained really consistent through each infusion. Gardenia and African Violet florals, Vanilla and Crème brûlée toasty-sweet nose/afteraroma, and a blanket lightly-toasted sesame seed nutty flavor foremost above everything in every brew. ‘Round the third-fourth infusion a secondary set of floral-vegetal characteristics akin to spices came through but they were not obvious enough to pick out and identify until I encountered them in the next brewing round when a touch of astringency helped key them out.
Highly approachable when brewed this way. Very consistent and clean. Sesame seeds really took the bulk of the flavor stage.

Second Round: Pack As Much Tea Into The Pot As You Can Approach.
This is how I generally prefer to brew these (well, with somewhat cooler water and without the break), but it requires a basic understanding of a particular dancong’s habits beforehand. There’s typically a risk to overbrew with this approach and it’s less likely to preserve light floral and fruity aromatics but it usually garners the greatest diversity of flavor for me. I’m using water just off a boil in the hopes of pushing the tactile impression on this tea since the safer brewing method produced such a light mouthfeel.
Used my 180mL Zi Ni Rong Tian pot for Fenghuang Dancongs in this round.
Using this level of concentration, leaves have a real tendency to displace water over time (more so with rolled oolongs), so later infusions are inadvertently brewed a tad bit stronger while more leaf surface is available to brew as well. However, pouring from the kettle into the pot with high velocity is sort of necessary to churn the leaves a bit.
Water shortly off a boil
Rinse
9g leaf / 155g water
13sec-10sec-10sec-12sec-15sec-20sec-20sec-20sec

[break]
Rinse
9g leaf / 135g water
30sec-30sec-45sec-1min30sec-2min-2min30sec-3min-3min30sec-4min-4min30sec-5min-7min
Final infusion measured at 9g leaf / 120g water

Flavor smoothly progressed from one infusion to the next, sometimes with hardly a change at all. Probably the most consistent Huang Zhi Xiang cup-to-cup I’ve had. I suspect I could easily replicate the flavor sets I got out of these without much effort even if I push the first few infusions a bit harder.
Very first infusion probably shoulda gone for around 20sec and second-third infusions around 15sec. Mild. Little perceivable astringency. Most teas and most brewing methods I’d go for I hope to limit astringency, but in dancongs I feel it makes for a vital component that helps add mouthfeel since they have relatively little taste and rely predominantly upon aroma and nose. The 12sec and 15sec infusions were the most pleasant of all the expressions I’ve gotten from this tea and I strongly believe it’s more a byproduct of them being the fourth and fifth steeps at high concentration than the duration of the steep time. Greenhouse florals and faint mustiness come through nicely in the afteraroma and work well with the light acidity and faint astringency though the body could be thicker (again-longer brew time).
When I reached the 20sec infusions, I finally got those secondary florals again. I’m reluctant to say “smell” since the aroma was so light and you don’t get these from the liquor aroma – it’s going back through the nose from the mouth (the “nose” of the tea). So I’m going to say it’s the “taste” of the air when walking through an almond orchard mixed with that of an orange orchard (neither in bloom). Xing Ren Xiang frequently comes off as very much like the aroma of an almond orchard in bloom and You Hua Xiang has the aroma of a lemon orchard in bloom while this has more the leafy character of these from summer – essentially the taste of the air around a few street vendors I stop at when driving through the Central Valley. Faint Rosemary and Thyme spice notes fleet into this one. Later it is more of a shadow of spearmint, but really not obvious to me at all in the larger cup (only picked it out ‘cause I’m pouring ~10mL into a little cup on the side).

After the several hour break, infusions started moving towards a more mineral expression. Really not much flavor until it cools down and then the aromatic characteristics come back into play within the mouth. Soft and crisp with a light lingering afteraroma similar to tulips and violets in a greenhouse. Once the cup goes lukewarm, more gardenia, vanilla, and citrus orchard characteristics come out and I finally get some of the woody notes mentioned in the company description. Sweet, creamy taste very similar to sweet brown rice is noticeable once cooled in the second 30sec infusion and a tad more astringency helps promote a pleasant twiggy taste. The 45sec infusion is about the same as the previous one but with a bit more citrus peel and overall starting to fall a little flat so I ramped up the time a bit faster than I normally would (I prefer to progress in 10-15 second intervals at this concentration). Rice and sesame seed share dominance from this point on and the astringency provides a pleasant balance to the moderate body and vanilla-floral nose. Few characteristics are present in the liquor aroma – almost all identifiable aroma keys are from the mouth leading back up through the nose. The liquor aroma at this point is faint and kinda similar to “honey and cream” scented moisturizing hand soap… which isn’t really like honey nor cream in any way unless you boil the hell out of them. For the long infusions (2+min) the flavor is all cooking rice and lightly toasted sesame with some stir-fried bamboo shoots hiding underneath. It’s possible to get a wider range of character by pouring into a little gongfu serving cup since it cools down so rapidly, but inside a cup holding ~100mL the range of character is significantly truncated unless allowed to sit to a barely-warm temperature. Once cool, the long infusions are pretty uniform with a creamy-sweet nose, moderate body, very slight mouthwatering effect towards the front from light crisp acidity, lingering parching astringency across the tongue, faint sesame flavor and gardenia nose. Slurped from a small cup showcases some nice woody tones at this phase.
Flavor seeeeriously slacked off and started going pool-waterish at the 4min30sec infusion and the following 5min infusion wasn’t much worth drinking in spite of the tactile impression and taste not really changing… Loss of aromatics. Honestly, the final 7min infusion was more to weigh the pot than for taste, just ‘cause I was curious what the displacement wound up coming to by the end. Really it had little discernible flavor, the body was really light, and the astringency parched the tongue and throat uncomfortably so I just set it aside and used it to wash down some rice I went and made (so much tea with the character of sweet brown rice, I figured why not make some).

Very pleasant overall. If I had more I would screw around with a 9g/100mL concentration and a full minute initial infusion using 95C water right off the get-go. It’s good enough that I feel inclined to buy some to experiment with, though I’d feel guilty choosing this over the other teas I got in this package of samples from Geoffrey at Verdant.

Glad so many folks took so many comprehensive notes I happen to agree with ‘cause I just sat there and brewed this over and over with the attitude of a little kid blithely playing with a new toy. Okay, maybe I also rambled on and on about the merits of well-done puerh and the sad state of poorly made wo-dui teas or wet-stored teas for a little over an hour while sharing this with a neighbor, then proceeding to brew nine very different teas back-to-back into the night before returning to this, once again. When all was said and done, we’d been tasting tea for about four hours and only one tea out of the ten we tasted was capable of blowing this one away. But, hey, this tea was a highly effective springboard to drag an unsuspecting Matcha drinker into the realm of puerh and take him on a trip of different processing styles and techniques. Come to think of it, he’s one lucky duck having this be his first puerh!

I got this beauty as a roughly 11g sample from Geoffrey (THANK YOU!) and used it ALL in my 200mL Zi Ni Shi Piao pot for Shou Puerh using water brought up to 98C and occasionally drifting down to 87C before being refilled and heated. Last pot was the 11th infusion and I’m sure I could’ve milked a few long brews out of it to finish it off but it was competing admirably with one of my favorite teas of all time and I was running out of purified water. All infusions were around 30-45 seconds except for maybe one cooler steep I let go a little while. Color had great clarity and swung from deep yellow-orange to red-orange and lingered in the red-tinged range but overall had the appearance of Port only once really venturing into the range of red wine coloration.

Exceptionally clean yet very full bodied. First couple infusions had a nice resinous tang and softwood sweetness but it really started to shine ‘round the third and fourth brews. Fourth infusion was a big, fat, teddy bear hug over my tongue. Oh so warm and cuddly. Infusions 4-7 were graceful and borderline sensuous. Mouthwatering, brandy-like (neighbor said it was like a good whiskey) and with a comforting flavor and aroma reminiscent of wet river rock and antique wood.
Okay, that’s not good enough… “Antique Wood” doesn’t carry the weight this did for me, as it carried a very particular scene.
There’s this “World Goods” place a few blocks from me that just went out of business that had a terrific but frighteningly expensive range of furniture and various wood and paper goods produced by tribes from the Indo-Pacific and Africa. They had several massive solid teak four-poster beds placed intermittently among sandalwood trays sitting atop carved hardwood cabinets. A few years back, my then-girlfriend and I laid down together on one of these beds to see if $20,000 was really worth it for a frame. The comfortable feeling of laying in each others arms on that warm afternoon in the loft above that store filled with the smells of teak, bamboo, sandalwood, hand-pressed papyrus paper, dried lotus leaves, and the faint hint of coconut oil in her silky hair accentuated with the all-too-appropriate sounds of bamboo wind chimes and a trickling fountain wrapping all together in one of the sole truly pleasant memories from an otherwise not-so-good relationship… This tea dragged that whole sensation and memory back up from the depths of my mind where I’d intentionally kicked it.

This is probably the second best (maybe tied for second) of any Shu Pu’er I’ve had. At roughly $1/gram I’d say this is a good deal for even 1.5x the price – 2x would be the norm for the range and durability of flavor I got from this. The only issue I have with the tea at all is the description relating to “mustiness”, of which there is only a tad in the wet leaf aroma alongside the smell of a riparian cave. I’d say replace that signifier with the word “Humus” or “Moist Bark” and it would be much more accurate and less suggestive of your average pile fermented tea.

I’ll be singing the praises of this pretty little thing of a tea for a fair while to come and just hope I can buy some more before stock runs out.

And as for the tea capable of knocking this and my socks off and halfway to the moon… I might consider writing about it if it finally makes it onto the online catalogue of the company it’s from and then I get time to attempt doing it justice. Knowing me, that’ll be after hell thaws from a deep freeze, but here’s hoping…

I got a few Verdant samplers from Geoffrey and this has been my second favorite so far. Unfortunately, I didn’t write notes when tasting the lovely Xingyang Golden Leaf ’98 Shu so I will only be able to write about that based on memory. It’s great sharing tea you feel needs to be appreciated by more than one person, but it leaves one wanting to enjoy conversing and talking about tea rather than writing stuff down.
I have just enough left to take another stab at this one and am tempted to incorporate tasting that with the archived notes I’m cutting and pasting now, but would kinda prefer to hold the remainder of the sample for a few months and taste again at the end of summer. I have just enough to brew in the same pot at lower concentration but still within my typical young sheng cha range. It’s a nice tea and I’d normally jump and buy it so I could experiment and draw a better impression (or, more importantly, put some age on it and see how it does) but really don’t have the money for it right now. So here’s my tasting notes transcribed from May 20th – been busy and haven’t really had the time to post ’em til now.

8g leaf per 200mL in my Duan Ni Shi Piao pot for young Sheng Cha utilizing a single rinse at 89C.

Infusion 1: 85C, 15sec. Toasty, edamame-like wet leaf aroma. Liquor aroma and initial impression very much akin to pure, light maple syrup. Crisp, light flavor with a sweetness that takes a moment to appear. Sweetness is similar to Basmati white rice. Faint green bean and edamame toasty-vegetal flavor with a juniper accent (halfway between berries and leaves). Moderate body. Clear, amber liquor.

Infusion 2: 85C, 15sec. Rich, raw sugar cane (whole cane) aroma and a hint of molasses now present in rice-like sweetness. Crisp mouthfeel lingers. More woody, with a pine bark characteristic balanced against a light longan fruit taste.

Infusion 3: 85C, 15sec. Less sweet. More wood (cherry tree twigs). Light back-of-throat astringency. Lingering light green onion note. Hint of soy sauce hiding in edamame skin base.

Infusion 4: 85C, 15sec with new water. Less sweetness (now like long grain brown rice). Still crisp, but more astringent (still light and towards rear of tongue and throat). Wet cotton taste. Very much like stir-fried water chestnuts and bamboo shoots with a slight cedar-spiciness. Alfalfa in base when gulped. Next infusion will be longer and cooler.

Infusion 5: 75C, 1min. Nearly same as last but now with a dry grass component (more like a dry field – not straw or hay). A bit of a clay flavor has taken on the roll of the base when sipped but alfalfa and dry leaves are evident when gulped. Somewhat pithy sour wash when cool.

Infusion 6: 75C, 2min. Sedges and bamboo shoots. Much more lingering nose and vaporous quality in the throat, but also more back-of-mouth astringency. Alfalfa still in base flavor. Viscosity still kinda low for Puerh but more evident in these longer infusions.
Watercress in back of throat provides odd juxtaposition to more dry earth and grass primary flavors.

Infusion 7: 70C, 2min. Color has suddenly shifted from an orangey-yellow amber hue to a muted gold with a hint of green. Color blends in well against my bamboo tea table. More crisp up front and quickly dies over much of the tongue with just a lingering snow pea crisp and sweet taste along the sides. Reminds me of staling Zhu Ye Qing green tea. Stark contrast to prior infusion has me thinking I’ll start with cooler water next round. Faint browned butter flavor in middle of tongue and nose sticks around for a while. The majority of noticeable flavor presents after swallowing – the initial impression is akin to heavy bodied water. Hmm, those were my first thoughts when having Yin Zhen white tea for the first time and this is drawing that memory from around 10 years ago… This lacks the honeysuckle and nutty notes and has that slight sour quality (now reminding me of white plum) but as it cools I’m noticing a similarity to Bai Mu Dan in a cucumber-like base that’s developing. Funny that this dying infusion is easier to discern these characteristics on – maybe a lower concentration, longer, cooler approach throughout next round will reveal more.

Out of the tasting notes suggested by Verdant, I only got cedar and juniper as obvious ones. If I’d read the description before tasting and writing all this out I’m sure melon and citrus would have plagued my tasting notes like soot in a house with a wood stove. In retrospect, many of the characteristics I wrote are the same I write about medium-oxidation Tieguanyins but I really didn’t think of that group of teas at all when drinking this, in spite of the company description. Similar in what elements you may find in those teas, but not similar in flavor to one-another.

Pretty darned tasty as a whole. Had two other 2006 shengs since taking these notes and this one’s a tad more approachable but less diverse in character to either (a Pasha Shan Haiwan Factory cake and a Mao Cha I’ve reviewed here before). I think this tea is great for enjoying right now but probably doesn’t have much to offer in the way of aging.

Wow, did not think this would hold up so long while the Pinnacle has deteriorated so much. Both are still very good, but this still tastes freakin’ awesome.

This has been vacuum-sealed (after flushing with a mix of N2, CO2, and Argon) since June and kept around 13C this whole time with very little temperature flux, so I kinda hoped it would still be good. I opened up the Pinnacle about a month ago (nearly the same storage conditions apart from a wider temp range from 13-21C) and was really disappointed with the quality drop, though I wasn’t surprised. Still good, just not wondrous.

I bought this in May and it has actually changed very little since June – especially considering Hibiki-an makes a point of selling Shincha with slightly higher moisture content. Even after vacuum-sealing, most of ‘em decline sharply around 6 months.

Brewed 7g leaf per 200g 75C water in a non-porous Kyusu with about 2cm headspace. Three back-to-back 1 minute infusions with water 92-89C in the kettle weighed out into a glass Chahai to settle down to 80C for pouring onto the tea, which evenly knocked down to 74-76C in the Kyusu.

This still smells and tastes great. Mellowed out from the potent vibrancy it once had, but it’s more approachable this way. Also, the bitterness is a tad lighter and sweetness a little higher (particularly in third infusion).

Leaves are bright “radioactive” green with stripes of green-yellow and folds closer to hunter green. Looks a lot like strips of grass cut lengthwise into quarter-widths. Somewhat lower percentage of small broken bits than most Senchas… Actually a little less than my bag of Pinnacle, which may be a part of why one staled a bit more.

Dry fragrance is like a watered lawn in spring. Wet leaf aroma is the smell from the mulch bag after mowing that lawn. Liquor aroma is the smell of an overgrown yard after a shower or heavy watering on a warm day (about the same smell from a rice field) and a tinge of hay or the smell that comes off a tatami mat.

Really good body for Sencha. Right at the higher end of what I’d call medium body for the first infusion. Light, crisp acidity and faint astringency are both evocative of Jade Rice. There’s this rich pollen character in the first infusion that drops to coyote bush flower notes in the second and light carnation notes in the third infusion. Very refreshing, lightly grassy-floral with a lingering vegetal sweetness. Second infusion has a light tartness like a bing cherry, but it’s just an accent note. The third infusion’s finish is surprisingly evocative of the finish left by peanut butter on wheat toast… Now that’s a characteristic I’ve never gotten nor expected of a Japanese green! Just a light accent in the third infusion’s aftertaste, but really pleasant and interesting. It sticks around for several minutes, too. Yummy and unexpected.

This is an excellent tea that is a great call-out to spring. It’s kind of uncomfortably warm out today, so I’m in summer-tea mode. Yesterday was 26C out! I guess California’s skipping straight from Autumn to Summer with only a couple weeks of spring-like winter between. As a foul weather outdoorsperson, I’m a little at a loss for my usual birding, hiking and kayaking season, but it is certainly helping me burn through my holdout green teas that are hiding about.

Got this in a trade with Auggie a little while back and am pretty happy with it. First Japanese red tea I’ve had.

2g/100mL with 95C water at 3-4-5 minutes followed up with 9g/450mL at 95C and three infusions of 3 minutes each.

I was honestly a bit off-put when checking out the leaves. Very irregular in size and shape (think poorly graded FOP Nilgiri or mid- to high-elevation Sri Lanka) with some disconnected yellow twigs. Dry fragrance is hay like, creating this unshakable thought of those twigs being bits of straw. The leaves are a nice glossy black, though.

In a larger pot (9g/450mL) the brewed leaves in the first infusion smack of Douglas-fir tips. I actually wish some of that came through in the flavor or liquor aroma, as I love Douglas-fir tips as a tea alternative. Citrusy, refreshing and laced with resinous piney aromatics. None of this comes through in the cup, neither in a smaller cup nor larger one.

Liquor is bright red-orange (Qimen-like) in the first infusion and much lighter orange (Second Flush Darjeeling-like) in the second and third brews. Aroma is very similar to orchids in the second and third while the first is more like the smell of multiple cherry trees in bloom.

Very sweet, very smooth.

Woody with a bit of underripe fruit. At this concentration I’m not getting the tartness I would if I bumped it a little higher, and I feel this is a bit more approachable. Rather than cherry, I get not-quite-ripe white peach. The first and second infusions are laden with cinnamon when brewed in a larger pot at the same concentration, while more flowery expressions come out in a smaller pot/gaiwan. The florals are a comforting mix of tulip, cherry blossom, and (especially in the second infusion) a resounding Cymbidium orchid aroma. Each subsequent brew is sweeter than the last. Light citrus notes come out as it cools and also are more obvious in the secondary brews. I want to say the third brew is like lemonade, but it’s much lighter than that – more like citron-laced water with a sprinkle of white sugar, a drop of honey, and some orchid petals stirred with a stick of Saigon Cinnamon. There is a woody-malty undercurrent shared by all, but it is only a light base flavor that sort of turns to a sweet barley tea aftertaste.

Overall, this does have some similarity to a mellow Second Flush Darjeeling or a very good and lighter Autumnal Darjeeling or Medium Elevation Ceylon with very little astringency at all, but the body and smooth mouthfeel is more akin to a Taiwanese red… The closest tea to this that I’ve had would actually be Sun Moon Lake Assam-cultivar Taiwanese red. Mouthwatering, smooth, full-bodied goodness with a definite sweet side.

Not the most spectacular tea around, but very tasty. I’ll be looking to buy more of this next time I see it offered.

4g/100mL 85C water with three back-to-back 30sec infusions following a rinse. More oomph with a 2min infusion, but it doesn’t really improve it to brew it longer in this case.

Very mild – lost most of the high florals it once had but this has always been a soft Wuyi Yancha anyway. Very difficult to distinguish discrete aromatic or flavor characteristics but tasty nonetheless. There’s a wet cinnamon characteristic in the dry fragrance, wet leaf aroma, and in the flavor but absent in the liquor aroma.
Round mouthfeel – good body and a light mouthwatering effect. Barely a touch of astringency… reminiscent of Huang Guanyin or a medium roast & oxidation Tie Guanyin or Rou Gui, but minus any kind of bite in terms of either acidity or astringency – carries that light hay-clay-milk-cassia-pluot mixture of flavors but in a far smoother package. The hay-like character is actually more akin to the smell of an untouched kiwi in the wet leaf and like muted yellow plum in the flavor.

This is the last of this tea that I had laying about and, though it is good, it never much prompted me to write about it (largely since it’s hard to pick flavors apart in it). It’s really lost a goodly amount of the high notes it used to present in the dry fragrance but that’s all it’s really lost since 2009. This is surprising, considering how mild it’s always been, but I guess it follows suit with most Wuyi Yancha in steadfastness over time.
Easy drinking fare, just not terribly exciting. I’m leaving the rating where it was ‘cause I shouldn’t ding a tea for sitting around for three years.

Honestly, I’m just reviewing this tonight because this happened to be the first oolong from Imperial Tea Court I could find whilst rummaging through my bin of miscellaneous 10g and less bags and tins. Okay, I passed a few up until I hit a cliff oolong ‘cause I was in the mood… ITC specifically not because I’m adamant to plug the company (only really feel that way for Tillerman Tea, since it’s my favorite alongside Jing Teashop), but for the occasion of an upcoming event.
The San Francisco International Tea Festival is this upcoming Saturday at Imperial Tea Court’s Ferry Building location. Dunno how the heck an event is to be squeezed into that relatively small space, but hey – it’s a NorCal festival about tea so I just need to shut up and be happy. Here’s a cozy little link for all to share and gush over:

http://sfinternationalteafestival.com/

I bought two tickets but will probably be going alone, so if anyone happens to read this and is in the region and interested, I’ve got an extra seat reserved for the taking. Anyone around San Francisco and want to go?

Inspired by Angrboda, I felt the need to try something smokey today. Buuuut, as it turns out, my Lapsang-exclusionist practices combined with the worst organization of 20+Kg of tea you ever did see has left me scratching my head over where I had Lapsangish teas hiding about. It may seem a silly question to some, but why so little in my collection when I’ve reviewed more of that kind of tea than some of my favorites? Well, while I’m happy to taste samples and screw with brewing parameters to the extreme to challenge my prejudices on tea types, this is how I think of most Lapsang Souchong:

http://youtu.be/buZdqMP4Tuo

Yeah, a little smoke is nice… Just not enough to beat my senses to a pulp. And definitely not that chemically-tasting junk that has liquid smoke added to it.

Anywho, I gave up looking and just went with a particularly smokey Keemun-style tea instead.
I got a pound of this from ITI last April and it’s as potent as ever. I do take issue with the labeling as being “the finest Keemun” when it’s from Sichuan, but am glad they list the origin prominently in the title (unlike some of the resellers). In terms of fine-ness, or whathaveyou, it tastes good but the “finest” thing about it is the grading. There are so few leaves in here that are not the same approximate length, width, color, and degree of rolling. That translates into this being one of the most consistent teas per pot if other parameters are held in check when simply measuring volumetrically. I was having a real doozy of a time trying to brew tea this past week when I forgot my centigram balance at work several times (personal control issues – not difficulty getting good results), but with this tea it doesn’t much matter. A level tablespoon comes out being within 0.07g over the course of 25 samples… Yeah, there’s some variance and I ought to take more samples than that for significance and such but I’m lazy and how many people really feel a crushing need for 0.01g resolution or greater every time they brew tea?

This time ’round I went for a couple big mugs of tea rather than my usual smaller service with more infusions.
8.5g tea in water brought just to a boil so in the 30sec gap between preheating and pouring on tea the temp in my 1.5L kettle had dropped to 99C. Reheated same water to like temperature for second infusion. Water mass was 357g first round and 348g for the second infusion using 4min and then 5min steep times.

Dry leaves are wee lil’ black needles coiled tightly lengthwise with a smooth curve making most of the bag sort of resemble cartoony eyebrows. This tea would actually work well in combination with a couple dots to make all sorts of little smiley or frowny faces… I’d better keep that idea for later…
Dry fragrance is a mix of hardwood smoke, burned pine wood (not pine smoke), dried and live cone bearing horsetail ferns, and a sort of shifting fruit characteristic. Bugs me when fragrance shifts, ‘cause unlike aroma and flavor it’s most likely due to desensitizing to the smell. Opening the bag, this goes from woodsmoke and a bit of tar to burned wood, to the smell of an area a grassfire razed a week or so prior, to the smell of peaches then oranges then apples. Lesson of the story – if you want smoke to be perceivable in your cup, don’t stick your face in the bag more than a couple times over the course of a minute (here, I am evaluating fragrance mostly after drinking a full mug, before my second cup).

Wet aroma is like wet burned conifer. Something like redwood with that sort of fibrous moist bark aroma, but more of a Bishop Pine “snappier” woodiness tossed in. Wet leaves are wet leaves, though, and don’t tell tons about the flavor compared to the other indicators – seems to alter the experience more when preparing smaller quantities back-to-back, smelling the rising aroma upon pouring fresh water each time. A bigger pot captures more liquor aroma on the walls, though, and the mixture can be intriguing. In this case, the mix is surprisingly Nilgiri-like (especially following the second infusion) in a moist squashy and light tulip aroma.

Liquor aroma is oak and moss smoke in equal parts with rose petals. Shifts to the smell of oranges in a bowl after it starts cooling. Not much more to it, but I suspect it’s largely due to certain aromas obscuring others since I can get crazy nectarine, carnation, black pepper, raisin, tomato sauce, jack/mozzarella cheese, ocean water, leather, cardboard, or even the smell from inside my boots after a long hike from this depending on how I brew it. In general, sticking to around 2g/100mL and above 85C will avoid the funkier aromatics.

Body is at the light end of full-bodied or high end of moderate-body. While there is a light sharpness to it, it’s more in terms of acidity rather than astringency; overall it’s pretty smooth in that regard. This tea is potent, but not with any particular characteristic as most discernible flavors pop in and out with relatively light tones on par with the intensity of a Wuyi Yancha prepared under gongfu prep guidelines. Overall base is like charred hardwood (or driftwood) but other characteristics override it in sequence. Flavor starts off appley. And pie crusty. Toss in some raisins with a bit of those little grape seeds in ’em as it progresses. Fair amount of light cassia in the aftertaste. Light bite starting mid-draught and carrying onward mixed with afteraroma conjures up a heatless similarity to black Tellicherry Peppercorns. There is a vegetal undercurrent (more obvious in second infusion) with a good similarity to Brussels Sprouts but it remains in the background as a vegetal accent so no worries to you haters of all things Brassica. Aftertaste leaves lingering reminder of unflavored oatmeal and grilled veggies – kinda sweet, kinda snappy, kinda chary, and ultimately satisfyingly heavy.

I mentioned before that there lies the potential for funkiness in this guy. It doesn’t reward high-concentration-short-brew methods well, though you can produce interesting flavors from it. It winds up with off-balance body to liveliness and the potency of aroma doesn’t match to taste intensity at all. Likewise, it can come off wussy in taste when knocked below 1.5g/100mL and/or 3min steep. The period between 2:30 and 3:15 shows a pretty big difference in brewing this using near-boiling water. Beyond 4:30 at 2.5g/100mL or greater pushes tannic acidity, but it’s still approachable at 6min below 3g/100mL, if a little tart and monochromatic.

Great alternative to Lapsang. Doesn’t hold a candle to some Qimen Hongcha out there at all. Goes great with a wide variety of food – especially carby foods. Drink this on a cold winter night with some bread pudding and you’re in heaven. Have with oatmeal in the morning and you may be satiated ’til dinnertime. Gotta be in the mood for it, though.

I didn’t feel much compelled to revisit the Golden Monkey from earlier today and want something I’ll drink a full 200mL per serving of. That generally means puerh for me unless I’m testing something out for work. I’m glad to see someone happened to have this guy already in the system. Scott is still selling the 2006 bingcha that he listed alongside this little guy, but ran out of the mini-bings quite a while ago.

I bought this mini-bingcha right at the start of 2009 and have pretty much left it alone since that summer. I haven’t been moving it around like I should have – it’s been sitting in its wrapper, inside the box, inside an open nylon mesh bag, in the coolest corner of the coolest room in the house since mid-2009 when I should’ve introduced it to a bit more warmth at least once by now. Sitting raw puerh in cool, dry conditions really does nothing for it but allow the outside to stale a bit if it has any breathing room. The innards are still able to shift for the positive a tad in terms of mitigating bitterness, but that’s about it.

Three back-to-back infusions at 85C and 30sec each following a rinse. I used flakes pulled from the top portion of the cake, penetrating to the center depression on the other side, further separated (wriggled, not snapped) into portions .5-1.5cm in diameter and shaken free of any dust. 8g/200mL in my duan ni shi piao pot for young sheng puerh and mao cha.

This is a very green cake with a lot of silvery buds across the top. Underside has a bit more twigs, but the leaf composition is pretty young overall. Steeped leaves are slightly muddy yellow with a greenish tinge (in-between olive and a cooler ochre). Infusion color is gold and very clear.

Dry fragrance is very much like old Bai Mu Dan… Dry fallen leaves, a touch of hay, a hint of carnation and muscat grape. Wet leaf aroma is crazy-scary-smoky. Very potent right after a rinse and diminished to a more approachable mix of burned driftwood, gravelly sand, and juniper after three short infusions. Liquor aroma carries these notes in a milder aspect and accompanied by a distinct pollen characteristic. Combines wonderfully with the taste, which is lacking any smokiness.

First infusion is very crisp, high end of moderate body, and lightly mouthwatering. Mineral impression makes up bulk of flavor. Mixed with liquor aroma it is highly reminiscent of the taste and smell of the air on a cold foggy summer morning on a beach on Mendocino’s coast. I suppose Monterey is similar, but the beaches tend to be a tad coarser sand and the combined smell of cyprus and redwood is a bit more prevalent farther north.
Second Infusion brings pollen characteristics to the tongue in a big way. Pleasant, light bitterness and almost-yolk, slightly cottony flavor pops in a second or two after swallowing with a resurgence a few more seconds later. Leaves the mineral taste (gravelly) lingering afterwards… Comes off as a rocky crisp-sweetness. When cooled, the rocky and polleny flavors merge to form sort of a warm, dry hardwood flavor.
Third infusion has a much more evident crispness to it – I hesitate to say “snap”, as that has more of a vegetal connotation to me and “zing” a tannic connotation, but it is a very refreshing and lasting crispness. Walk up to a waterfall on a warm day ‘til the cold mist is soaking your clothes, open wide and breathe deep. Lotsa oaky leafy-acorny-woody-polleny goodness… Kinda tastes like Yosemite’s Mist Trail smells in late spring or early summer. As it cools, it takes on a sort of cattail characteristic in the nose – this is helped by a somewhat starchy aftertaste. More evidently woody as it cools, too. Body is a tad thicker now, but still just the low end of what I’d call full-bodied… about on par with 20% by volume sugar water. Speaking of sugar – about a minute after finishing my cup the back quarter of my tongue and throat are hit with the same encompassing sweetness I get when emptying a packet of Stevia or Splenda into a paper cup and forget to hold my breath. Certainly not the sweetest tea around, but with this late aftertaste I’ve gotta categorize it as a sweet tea for me.

Very tasty and easy drinking, whereas it was a tad more aggressive than I preferred right when I got it. There’s enough potency that I feel I can let it rest in its cool hiding spot another year without adverse effects, but I do think it’s time that this summer I’ll expose it to a bit more warmth and humidity. Kind of a joke to attempt any aging on a mini-bing, but if I can succeed in not finishing this off super fast I’ll be happy.