This is one of the teas I brought back from China. I had a tasting of this tea in the shop in the Jingmin Tea City, and as I understood it, this is the highest of the three grades of Tan Yang Gongfu (Panyang Congou) black tea in the shop. We tried all three and this one was, not shockingly, my favorite. The leaf is long and squiggly, with tons of golden leaves in the mix, which is why I ended up calling it “Golden Tips” here.
I tried this one gong fu style in the shop, but I’m brewing it western style here just to see how it works this way. I used the steeping parameters from Teavivre’s Bailin Gongfu black tea, since that is the most similar tea I have to this one. It steeped to a dark amber color, and it has a great aroma of chocolate, honey, caramel and malty black tea. I remember this tea as smooth and sweet and lovely, and that’s what I’m getting here as well. I’m getting better than I remember, actually. At the shop it was hard to truly appreciate it because by the time I had this one my taste buds were getting a bit overwhelmed by Tan Yangs, but this is really a delicious tea. So so sweet! It’s amazing. With all those lovely chocolatey, malty, caramel, honey, raisin, wheaty notes. Of course I wish I had bought more, and I curse the luggage restrictions that made me buy what will not last very long for me. Shoulda coulda woulda, but I should have tried it while I was still in China (I didn’t want to break the airtight seal until I got home) because I might have realized that I needed way more of this. Sigh.
Gah I am almost angry about how much I like this tea. The funny thing is, I’m sure that this is not super special Tan Yang, it’s probably just your standard high-level commercial grade tea you can probably pick up in lots of those shops in Maliandao, but it’s still so good!
I paid about the same price for this as Teaspring’s Tan Yang Te Ji sells for. I am interested to see how they compare (and it is all I can do not to immediately order Tan Yangs from Teaspring right now! :P)
