Jim Marks

Backlogging…

Used up the last of this earlier in the week. This also makes a great iced tea – even the later steeps. I could very much see combining this with one of the golden teas to get a great toasted but sweet iced tea without having to add sweetener or citrus to it.

This is definitely my favorite of the goldens, for now.

And this is the last of it. sob

OK my wang chun practice gets even more extreme. We are down from 1 minute steeps to nearly instantaneous steepings! At least for the first couple cups.

Astonishingly, the first cup is still black coffee dark. I’m finding that if I start with a generous mound of dry leaf, and do the first 3 steeps at more or less no time whatsoever, I can easily get seven cups of tea from one set of leaves (stretching the later steeps up from 15 seconds to a minute, to 3 and to 5).

If nothing else, this means I’ll be using up less tea over the same frame of time.

Today I learned that this makes an absolutely AMAZING iced tea. No sweetener, no lemon, no additives except ice cubes in the midst of a strong brew (that I let countertop cool).

So this gets a tasting rating bump up.

This one is just a bit sweeter, I think, than the Golden Needles Imperial. The more I drink them, the more I think that the other is better as a stand alone and that this one really needs to be part of a blend. Unless you’re into sweet, then, give this a try by itself. It is surprisingly so for a completely untreated tea.

I did finally do it, a week or so ago. I blended the Wang pu-erh, the Black Dragon lapsang, the Choicest Formosa oolong and this Yunan Golden Tippy Imperial. It was AMAZING. But there was no way to make an entry about it. But wow, how brilliant it was.

I’ve actually started to radically change how I brew this tea. I used to brew fermented pu-erh for long stretches of time (10, 15 minutes, sometimes longer). Based on some reading, and mostly on a whim, I started doing 1 minute steeps.

I still don’t hold to this business of throwing away steeps (rinsing). If you’re entertaining guests, I could see doing a rinse for a few seconds just to ensure you don’t serve dusty tea. But I’ve read about people doing 5 minute steeps and then chucking it. I just don’t get the point of something like that. Especially now that I’m doing these shorter steeps.

The first steep, even at this short time frame, is still very dark and strong. One thing I do notice with this approach is that some favors begin to emerge that are more familiar with a raw pu-erh and which I hadn’t found in a fermented before. Those “construction site” or “cabin in the sun” flavors I’ve talked about in the past.

One interesting development is that I believe this infamous impact on one’s “chi” is a lot more in evidence with these shorter steeping times.

At least for this particular tea, I would strongly recommend making 5-7 steepings of very short duration for best results. (This explains why so many traditional pu-erh pots are so tiny.)

Spring in Texas is kind of odd. My garden already has blushing tomatoes, but the lawn won’t grow. When I go throw disc I always need a shower, but driving home from vespers I have to turn the heat on in the car.

Weird.

The good news is, this oolong tea can fix ANYTHING.

Lightening flashed at 3:15AM. The dog awoke and went into her usual multi-hours long frenzy. At 5 I gave up, got up, and took her out into the living space so that Liz could try to get some sleep. I decided to make a pot of pu-erh and try to polish off “The Last Chinese Chef”.

I really don’t like this book at all. The parts of this book that are about the food and the history of the places (and the history of the food) read as though they were written by someone else entirely. The actual narrative story is incredibly trite, obvious and badly in need of a stern faced editor. But the food parts were worth the rest. I will now forever be obsessed with a cuisine I will probably never get to eat. Part of me feels like reading books that aren’t very good is a sinful waste of time. But a bigger part of me feels like I need to read bad writing sometimes in order to fully appreciate the writing that is so good it makes me laugh out loud with joy just from the mere structure of the sentences, let alone the content. I need to read Nicole Mones in order to truly love Neal Stephenson.

I was supposed to go throw disc this morning at Tom Bass park, but the rain has picked up again, and so that’s not going to happen. Now I’m just alone with the dawn listening to Gabriela Montero do terrible things to Bach on a piano (which upsets me intellectually, but makes great background music) drinking absolutely transcendent tea, listening to the dogs snore and realizing that the ringing in my ears is almost exclusively on the right side, now, not both.

The dry leaf here smells almost like malted milk balls. Sharply sweet. For someone like me, this is what initially put me off golden needle teas and had me skeptical about the final cup.

The wet leaf is less sharply sweet, but still has a powerful, vague fruitiness to it. I know I know what this smells like, but I cannot find the noun, right now.

Thankfully, the liqueur in the cup is unexpectedly dark, rich, toasted and malty with only a lingering hint of all that sweetness.

The dry leaf here smells a lot like a fine darjeeling or an oolong that isn’t darkly roasted. But the scent is very soft. The cut and color of the dry leaf makes it look for all the world like pipe shag.

The 4-5 minute recommended steep time is your first clue, however, that this is no fragile and retiring leaf of the South Continent mountains. No, this is the hearty leaf of the Eastern Chinese heartland.

The wet leaf scent prepares you for something like an Assam, strong and sharp. Like molasses and ginger. But the liqueur is neither, being more like honeyed cashews.

I want to be poetic about this tea, but it is 8am.

Surprise cold(ish) snap over night made me crave a roasty toasty tea for this morning.

We even had to turn the heat back on!

I had this yesterday.

Still yummy.

Can be steeped twice, but no more.

I keep forgetting it is winter. My younger brother’s first born joined the world late Tuesday and everyone’s been complaining about the weather getting them two and from the hospital and this and that and I keep thinking “but it was 80 and sunny yesterday” and then I remember that it is late February and they live 1500 miles away to the Northeast.

sip

Pu-erh fixes EVERYTHING.

Truth be told, right now, I’m drinking this Black Dragon cut about half and half with the Wang Celestial pu-erh.

This is really my favorite way to drink tea, this strong mix of smokey and earthy. Maybe that’s because it comes the closest to replacing the coffee I used to drink so much of, but no longer do.

I’m on my third steeping of these leaves and it is holding up well, which is one of the great things about Formosan oolongs.

I did 5 minutes on the second steep and 7 on the third.

Is the Twitter connect working for anyone ?

Boy howdy do I love Formosan oolongs.

Roasty, toasty, with no sharpness, bitterness, astringency or anything to slow you down. This is the stuff you gulp in a dim sum house and then leave the pot with the lid up on the edge of the table and make dagger eyes at people until they fill it again because you just can’t stop drinking it.

I have this pipe dream of creating the ultimate tea blend with some subtle balance of fermented pu-erh, lapsang, Formosan oolong and Yunnan golden.

Maybe someday.

Interesting.

This golden tips the balance. Less sweet, more astringent. Still that same soft, covers your whole mouth kind of flavor, big aroma that lingers long after you swallow, but not an actual sense of sugar. Many of the others actually almost convince me they’re treated with sweetener they’re so sweet. This one is just shy of that.

I’d almost talk about this in terms of a roasted oolong that has a big finish and some sweetness, rather than as a soft, sweet tea that has some bite, which would be my short description of the other golden teas I’ve had.

This appeals to my tastes, because I’m not big on sweet. If you like sweet, go with the Yunnan golds.

Initially, I was skeptical of these golden teas.

But they are rapidly becoming one of my favorites and this selection from Upton is right up the fairway (I’ve been playing a lot of disc golf) with that disarming combination of astringency and sweetness.

Second steeping:

Mostly I just want to see if the Twitter and FB thing will work. The twitter one doesn’t seem to be.

Well, I’ve done it again. I ordered something I thought was new to me, only to discover I already have tasting notes for it on Steepster which means I’ve had it before.

I need to start doing that in the other order.

If I haven’t already gushed about this tea more than anyone cares to read, that’s an oversight.

Over the past year or so I have tried many other lapsangs because I was convinced it couldn’t just be this one which was so utterly perfect.

Well I was wrong. They’re all either too sharp or too smokey or too bitter or just plain crap. This tea is an absolutely shockingly well balanced cup.

ESPECIALLY if you think you don’t like smokey teas, try this one. I’m so glad to have 200 grams of it back in my pantry.

I have this right between the two Yunan/Hunan golden teas I have rated because this tastes far more like a golden needle than a pu-erh. I suspect this is because the aging time is very short.

I really like this tea, and the heart shaped packs are very cute. Just don’t expect it to taste much like a truly aged, fermented pu-erh.

PS: THANK YOU to Chi of Tea for the free samples of this and a few other teas!

Finishing off this, as well. Much as it is a truly great tea, I will be glad to get away from a tea with such an identity crisis. This is a green tea, no matter what it says.

I am finishing off this tea now, and I’m bumping down my rating a bit. Most of the pots of it I made came out very thin. When it was on, it was good. But it was hard to get it on.