A Week of Tea Exploration

I will be joining you. :) I will probably be doing

Sunday: What-Cha’s Nepal Silver Needle White Tea
The loose tea smells like dry tea leaves and like the inside of a store that sells high end furniture and home décor. The leaves are thin and small, they look like rosemary (no herb or rosemary flavour though) but are light silvery green and have short white hairs.

First steep: 2 minutes, 450 mL of fairly hot water (not boiling)
Steeps very light , almost clear
Smells very sweet and fruity
Tastes like candy and apricot, absolutely delicious and very sweet. I taste light tannins so it does taste like a tea, but it has a natural fruity sweetness I love.

Second steep: 3 minutes, hotish water (not boiling)
Smells a bit floral and like white tea
I taste raspberry and apricot, very subtle sweetness, light tannins, delicate and clear tea taste. This is a phenomenal tea, probably the best unflavoured white tea I own.

Monday: Various greens and a matcha

Stash’s Sushi Bar Green
Anyway, other than a bit of bitterness and the astringency , I really like the light rice flavour. I’m not a fan of the green tea base used in cheaper grocery store teas, but I knew that before I bought it. I definitely taste grain and rice, maybe lightly toasted. I would not buy it again, but brewed correctly it would be enjoyable for those who like bagged green teas.
Flavors: Astringent, Grain, Green, Rice, Vegetal

Stash’s Blend of Greens
Very basic and generic grocery store quality bagged tea. I do find this a bit astringent and a tad bitter. The green tea is fairly mild, not really vegetal or grassy, but it tastes like a green tea.
Flavours: Astringent, Bitter, Green

Unknown matcha from Japan
You can go read the full story on my page, but the short of it is that I don’t like straight matchas and found this one to be very bitter, but not vetegal or grassy like many green teas. I will probably use the rest for milkshakes/smoothies or baking.

Throwing in a flavoured green too, because I just drank
Blackberry Custard Tart Green Tea by 52teas
Flavors: Blackberry, Creamy, Floral, Green, Milk, Sweet, Tannin

Tuesday: What-Cha’s Huangshan ‘Yellow Sun’ Yellow Tea
I just love this tea so much.

First steep: 2 minutes, 500 mL almost boiling water.
Steeps a very pretty gold colour and smells like straw and tannins.
Tastes mild and lightly roasted, no bitterness or astringency. I really like how light the flavour is, more like a white tea than a green.Slightly sweet in a toasted grain kind of way.

Second steep 3.5 minutes 500 mL hotish water
Slightly stronger tea flavour but less toasty. Slightly sweet but there is also a tiny bit of cardboard or paper taste. Still not bitter or astringent.

In the future I will make this using more leaves but much less water and much shorter steeps. I could see this giving 10 or so steeps if I was using less water.
Flavours: Grain, Rice, Sweet, Tannin, Tea, Toasty

Wednesday: A Quarter to Tea – Chocolate cherry oolong
mmmm cocoa and oxidized oolong. It’s like drinking a latte, very complex and creamy. The cocoa is a bit bittersweet but in a good way. I taste no cherry, but the cocoa is enough for me.

I think this blend tastes like a coffee shop in Paris. There is the coffee/espresso that tastes very urban to me, but then the sophisticated mix of dark chocolate and cream are in there too.
Flavours: Cocoa, Dark Chocolate, Roasted Barley, Bittersweet, Toasted, Toasted Rice, roasted coffee beans, street/paved road, coffee shop, bittersweet espresso shots

Thursday: Granville Island Tea Company’s Monk’s Blend
I drank the decaf version last night with milk and it was quite tasty., the milk offset the bitterness and overly tannic flavour that this black tea often has. I recommend trying this at least once as a latte. The creaminess from the milk also mixes really well with the undertone of stonefruits (peach and apricot most notably)
Flavors: Apricot, Bitter, Fruity, Peach, Stonefruits, Sweet, Tannic, Tannin

Friday: English Toffee Pu’erh from DAVIDs TEA
Steep 1: 350 mL boiling water 1.5 minutes
Very chocolately, I can really taste the toffee. Overall it is a bit earthy, but also sweet with hints of vanilla and caramel. Steeps a dark amber colour and smells AMAZING. It really reminds me of chocolate liqueur like Baileys.

Steep 2: 450 mL hotish water, 10 minutes
More of a bittersweet cocoa flavour, very light sweetness from the toffee, less flavourful and creamy. Strong clay and cocoa tastes from the tea base

Flavours: Caramel, Clay, Cocoa, Creamy, Dark Bittersweet, Dark Chocolate, Earth, Milk, Mineral, Sweet, Toffee, Vanilla, Wood

Saturday: Murchie’s Decaf Black Current (black)
I’m drinking the decaf version I received in a 10 teabag taster size at Christmas.
Smells very sweet and fruity, tastes quite tannic with a noticeable creamy black current taste.
Pretty basic black tea base, a bit astringent. Steeps dark amber in about 4 minutes. I find it too astringent for my tastes, but the creamy and fruity tastes are nice. I think it would be excellent with milk because it steeps quite strong.
Flavours: Astringent, Bitter, Black Currant, Creamy, Fruity, Sweet, Tannic, Tea

This is also a good chance for me to use up a lot of my older teas that will be losing flavour soon. I will be posting my reviews on my page and as updates to this reply. :)

Sounds like fun. I also have the What-Cha Yellow sun as my only yellow tea, but may drink a lot of young sheng as well.

My tea drinking is usually all about spur of the moment craving. That said, I am interested in how this goes. It sounds like fun. Thanks for suggesting it, Lion.

This is what I was doing every week while I was on unemployment after my job shut down. Now I have found a new job and only have time for tea two or three days a week. I hope you have a good time at this.

I can’t not do this.

Sunday: https://www.instagram.com/p/BFtaK_sxYFs/
Monday: https://www.instagram.com/p/BFw2wgCRYKW/ I drank the smooch… got my days mixed up
Tuesday: https://www.instagram.com/p/BFzcLs3xYLO/
Wednesday: https://www.instagram.com/p/BF1mbXkxYHe/
Thursday:Arya Darjeeling, Golden Tips
Friday: 2007 White Lotus Golden Needle
Saturday: Rummy Pu

Due to Monday, I have failed Lion and this community.

Ooh schedules, I like schedules! I need to look at my stash and figure out what to do…I want to do new teas but not sure if I have any yellows I have not tried. Will edit when I have my list!

Sunday- 2011 Fuding from White2Tea club https://www.instagram.com/p/BFu2iwBDu3U/

Monday-Lu Shan Yu Wu 2016 From Teavivre- I didn’t get pictures because I was lazy, but I might have to give this one another drink later, it didn’t really impress me like last year’s did. But I will give the caveat that I was exhausted and cranky yesterday so maybe that is why. I will taste again today and revise my opinion.

Tuesday- Yellow Brick from Shang Tea’s tea club https://www.instagram.com/p/BFzU-lXju5E/

Wednesday-Teamaster’s Jin Xuan (changed my mind, wanted something green rather than a Dancong) https://www.instagram.com/p/BF0srJvju5D/

Thursday- Imperial Mojiang Golden Bud Black from Yunnan Sourcing https://www.instagram.com/p/BF3BjeTDu2X/ (holy crap this tea was outstanding, I need more!)

Friday-2006 Yang Qing Hao ‘Qingxiang’ Gushu from Chawang I ended up skipping this day, my stomach has been full of crankiness and drinking Sheng on an already fussy stomach is not a good call for me. I might give this a go today though, we shall see. It smells good and I want to drink it! Ha! I did get around to it: https://www.instagram.com/p/BF_3c4yju73/

Saturday- You know, I have been wanting to blend osmanthus with silver needle for a while, so let’s say that unless something else inspires me before then.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BF9zOE1ju88/

Woo, looking forward to starting tomorrow! I’ll probably decide which teas to do each day rather than ahead of time. I’m excited to see your impressions.

I’m trying to sip through my entire collection of white tea. So far I’ve had Upton Pai Mu Tan, Kenya Silver Needle from What-cha, and Art of Tea Butterscotch. Now trying Upton Mao Feng.

Sunday – White Tea
Time to drink some white tea. I’m going to share impressions here.

I decided to go with my all-time favorite tea to start the week off right, so I’m drinking Kenyan Silver Needle white tea from What-Cha. I also did something a little uncharacteristic of my enjoyment of white tea and decided to add a lot more leaves than I usually do to my gaiwan, to see how the flavor is if I brew it really thick. When it comes to white tea, I think what I love most about it is that it is delicate and fresh. It requires your attention to really take in all the nuances, as they can be rather gossamer-like in their presence, so I generally tend to brew white teas rather light to highlight these qualities. Picking a favorite type of tea is torture, but if I had to, I would say it is white. If I could only drink one type of tea from now on, it’d be white. I enjoy the simplicity of processing, the lightness of flavor, and of course the extra-furry white buds are beautiful to behold, and fit my biases like a glove since I have a deep affinity for white lions and would jump at the opportunity to be one, if only switching bodies was a real possibility. Furry white tea for the furry white lion!

Today’s tea has a very prominent sweet corn flavor, and brewing it more strongly today, I am noticing a bit of mashed potato and mild cocoa notes that I haven’t really brought out in this tea before. It is also very sweet with some mild, dewy floral undertones. Actually this tea tastes incredible brewed with extra leaf. It is so sweet and flavorful that swishing it around in my mouth brings out many nuances I hadn’t noticed before. When this tea is brewed thick it is really sweet. It’s giving me a cotton candy vibe, or at least kettle corn. It tastes better as it cools. The sweeter notes come out more.

As for white tea as a type, I tend to enjoy it the most in spring and summer. I love the flavor of freshly harvested spring white tea, arguably the best season for it, and while some white teas definitely have an autumn-like flavor and aroma to them, it’s the ones with dewy notes like melon, corn, and cucumber that are my true favorites and just bring me to bliss in the warmer months. If I drink white tea in winter, it tends to usually be Ya Bao with it’s cedary notes, or aged white teas with their dried fruit notes.

What a great start to this week.

Monday – Green Tea

Today I’m drinking Moonshine from Tealet, which is a Nepalese green tea produced last October. It’s really clean, lightly grassy and vegetal on the first infusion, and by the second it just releases a burst of amazing vegetal flavors. It reminds me a lot of the taste of arugula, and has a really nice sweetness to accompany.

As for green teas, it’s such an interesting type to me because I always want to say it is one of my absolute favorite types, but I actually find that I don’t buy green tea very often at all. I guess I’m pickier about it than other types of tea. In fact I really try to avoid drinking green teas that aren’t within a year of their harvest, and really aim to drink them within 6 months. The freshness of a recently harvested green tea is just something you can’t duplicate with other tea types. It makes me swoon, and in my few years of tea enthusiasm I’ve begun to notice that depending on the processing, some stay fresh tasting for only a very brief time after harvest, or after opening the bag. Refrigeration definitely helps them maintain good flavor longer.

I guess it goes without saying that I mostly only drink green teas in the spring and summer. There are a few fall harvested ones that I will enjoy in the later part of the year, but the lush vegetal flavors really complement the warm seasons for me, and green tea harvest is a treat I always look forward to each year, usually having run dry of my green tea supply at home by autumn or winter time.

Tuesday – Yellow Tea
Yellow tea is so peculiar, and I’ve only tried just a small handful of them. I was talking to Shang of Shang Tea recently about why they haven’t gained much popularity with the recent years of booming interest in specialty tea, and he suggested that a lot of this has to do with marketing. It just isn’t a well-known type, there aren’t huge marketing campaigns (in China or the US) going into it, and it’s more labor intensive and expensive to produce than green tea, so it remains a niche interest. Makes sense.

I’ll be drinking Shang’s Yellow Tea today, but rather than share my full impressions here, I’ll go ahead and leave a proper review for it, as I haven’t done so yet.

http://steepster.com/Lion/posts/336063

As for this type of tea in general, it’s a rare one for me, so I don’t tend to drink it often. It’s really nice, but not particularly unique enough for me to often buy it, especially since it often is more expensive. It is created to take the grassy green flavors out of green tea and make it more mellow, and I love the grassy flavors of green tea, so I’m a bit more green tea biased. Yellow tea seems best to me in summer time.

Wednesday – Oolong Tea

Well, it’s hump day, sort of. I’m actually doing this tasting on Thursday and will do the red/black tea later today. I had a really nice day out playing mini golf with a friend yesterday and came home with a killer headache that put me in bed much earlier than planned, so I didn’t manage to get my tasting done. Today we’ve had tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, and sirens going off, but it has all calmed to a nice rolling thunderstorm and heavy rain. I’m feeling like some Tie Guanyin will complement the weather well as the misty breeze comes through my office window.

I’m drinking the Tie Guanyin from Verdant Tea that I got in their sampler pack right before all the weird controversial stuff started happening around them this year. It’s a pretty good tea. Classic Tie Guanyin flavor. Oolong is a peculiar type of tea, since it is the broadest classification of tea types spanning from roughly 5%-90% oxidized. There are so many varietals, growing regions, and processing methods, I had trouble deciding which one to drink today for this exploration of tea. I settled on TGY because it is probably the most well-known oolong tea and one of the most classic teas. It has qualities that most oolongs have, some floral and mountainous fragrances and flavors. This one’s not too highly roasted, and is rather green tasting. It leaves a minty cooling feeling in the mouth after drinking.

Oolong tea, being such a diverse type, is one that I buy a lot of and drink pretty much all year round. There always seems to be something to fit the mood. I often default to oolong when introducing new people to high quality teas and Gongfu Cha because the flavors are usually universally enjoyable, complex, and seem to differ the most from the bagged black, green, and white teas most Americans are used to. It usually intrigues my friends enough that they give my fancy little tea hobby a chance and let me serve them some others. Then they get hooked. :P

This Tie Guanyin is really smelling lovely intermingled with the scent of rain and plants wafting in from outside. It’s making me feel very fresh and relaxed.

Thursday – Red/Black Tea

I’m drinking Nepal 2nd Flush Golden Tips Black Tea 2014 from What-Cha today. This really hits the spot, as it’s a nice cool thundery, windy, rainy day. I tend to enjoy the darker flavored teas on colder days because I find them more warming than lighter “greener” tasting teas, which tend to have a more cooling effect on me.

This tea is really dark chocolatey with a little bitterness, some malt, and some honey sweetness. It’s rich.

I’ll admit, red and black tea are not a type of tea that I typically profess to love. Oddly enough, I drink quite a lot of them and find that some of my favorite teas are of this type. I think the reason I don’t love them out loud as much as other types is that their flavor profile is the most similar to the poor quality bagged and bottled teas I grew up drinking. That’s not to say the teas I drink now are poor quality. They just have the tannic profile in common with cheapo bagged black teas, and I think there’s just this part of me that associates even the good red and black teas with that, especially assamica varietal ones. Those really tend to remind me of it.

Still, some red teas have amazing complexity. Red Jades are one of my favovrites with their frequent minty cherry notes, and I’ve been trying some of these new experiments in making black teas from high-mountain Taiwanese tea trees. Jin Xuan and Alishan varietals make for some interesting milky and floral notes in the black tea.

I think when it comes to the types of red and black teas used in Gongfu Cha, there are two main types… ones with more fruity and floral notes and ones with more malty and cocoa notes. Of course there are plenty that have both qualities, but I tend to find that one is usually more prominent than the other and characterizes the tea. I tend to be more impressed by the fruitier type. This tea I’m drinking today is of the type I’m less inclined to, but I enjoy it nonetheless. Sometimes I feel like I have trouble not overbrewing a red or black tea when I’m doing Gongfu Cha, and even watering them down or using a lower temperature, some just have a bitter note that’s hard to get rid of. This is probably the biggest reason why I don’t often consider it one of my favorite types, even though it may actually be one. :P

Friday – Dark Tea

Today I’m drinking Special Dark Ripe Puerh from Mandala Tea. This one is pretty chocolatey in particular and has that delicious pastry dough smell and taste that I love in shou puerh.

Dark teas are such an interesting type of tea, and possibly one of the most frustrating to seek out if you’re a real enthusiast, since nicely aged ones can cost a pretty penny and nicely aging them yourself involves a great deal of experimentation and risk. I’ve been toying with a simple self-made pumidor setup here at home over the last half a year and have had no problem keeping my Sheng collection at a high humidity level between 60-80% with no signs of mold. On the other hand, I recently created a pumidor of the same type for my Shou collection (just one cake, lol) and it got ransacked with greenish fuzzy mold. Into the trash it goes, and thankfully it was a cheap 12 dollar cake. Sadly, it was one I liked a lot, but I can buy another sometime.

Then there is the debate over which mold is “good” mold, since mold is basically the main mechanism of aging dark teas into the delicacy that they are. I’m no expert on it, but from what I’ve read and seen, I know that my cakes shouldn’t really be turning blue-green. Hahah.

Today it’s been thundering and rainy again, and I noticed the sky is still blue at 9pm. It’s really summer already! Wow. Admittedly, I enjoy shou puerh and heicha more in the colder months of the year. This is kind of odd since I tend to appreciate teas most in the seasons that their flavors and aromas remind me of. For example, I like teas with coniferous tree aromas in winter, floral aromas in spring, grassy and fruity in summer, etc. You’d think I’d be all about shou puerh in the spring and summer since the fresh growth and rain are always kicking up heavy smells of earth, soil, and fungus. I guess it’s just a rather heavy and warming type of tea to me, so better suited for colder times of year. I tend to like sheng with its woody and leafy qualities more in spring and summer. Reminds me of the fresh growth and foresty smell.

One more day to go!

Saturday – Flavored or Scented Tea

This should be interesting. I am about to drink some Ginseng Oolong that’s been sitting in my cupboard for about 3 years now. I have no idea how it’ll be. It’s been vacuum sealed and never opened, and is just a little sample size one. I’ve been saving it for just the right occasion, for some reason, I guess since I don’t usually crave ginseng oolong tea. Well this seems to be the occasion because now I’m really craving it.

The dry scent reminds me of sunflower seeds with these teas, but oddly this one has a very strange and familiar smell that I didn’t expect. It smells just like strawberry rhubarb pie! What in the world? I’m really excited to see how it tastes now.

The taste is pretty much what I remember and expect from ginseng oolong though, sort of like sunflower seeds, or tea biscuits, or pie crust, a bit sweet as well, a bit tangy. The long lingering sweetness is so good. I should find a good source of this tea and buy some. I’m not really sure where this sample is from, it’s been so long. It’s in one of those little generic foil pouches with no label, the cheapo ones that teaware vendors on AliExpress send you as a freebie.

On the second infusion (gongfu style) the flavor is really similar to an apple turnover. I’m surprised how much flavor is in this, and how well it has maintained over the years on my shelf. I’m really enjoying this. Perfect finish to the week.

As for flavored and scented teas, it’s such an odd creature for me. These are the types of tea that drew me to tea, back in college when I was buying Celestial Seasonings and Teavana, even further back in to childhood when I had a Bigelow teabag assortment and kept them under my meditation altar to use for various moods and meditations. Once I found out about whole-leaf, unadultered teas and really tried some good quality ones (Shang Tea was my entry point) there was no turning back for me. I fell down the rabbit hole and wanted to try everything I could.

So, after experiencing the very nuanced and impressive world of straight whole leaf teas I have this weird sort of bias about flavored teas, where I tend to think they are a lesser quality thing, or meant to cover the taste of bad tea. Most of them are, but of course it is not always the case. Many are crafted well from very good tea and ingredients and come together for a really nice taste that you just can’t get from unflavored tea… so while I may seem to talk like they aren’t my thing, I definitely still enjoy them and dip into them somewhat often, especially floral scented teas. And there’s always something interesting and new if you keep your eyes open, like that awesome rum-barrel aged Puerh from Liquid Proust this year.

This has been a fun week. Thanks to all who joined and shared their thoughts!

I’ll be joining in on this late since I just got back from a trip. I’ll start tomorrow with the same schedule as everyone else and add the missing white and green days to the end :)