Huang Jin Bolero

Many many thanks to Michelle for this and many other samples I’m about to make my way through! I do believe that this is my first Anxi oolong that is medium roasted, I have been meaning to try one and Michelle included two! It smelled dark and appealing, though I think all of the packets smell kinda similarly delicious, due to there being bags of caramel, hazelnut, bon bon and lapsang that left me salivating when I opened the box, this girl is certainly not complaining!

I’m glad I brewed this gonfu, though I hadn’t read any tasting notes yesterday. It is nice and woodsy and nutty and actually stood up well to the seasame honey almond I was snacking on last night. It does have a little bit of orchid and green notes as well. My one complaint is how quickly this turns bitter when it cools.

I did revive it this morning and brewed western at the recommended 3 mins, it tolerated the time well, perhaps because I started with shorter steeps last night. In the afternoon I switched to a roasted Tie Guan Yin which I’m reviewing next and I think I find I’m preferring it, though this was a very nice introduction. Thanks Michelle!

I got a giant order from Adagio yesterday. Yay! This is the first one I’ve tried. Steeped gong fu in the tasting cup. I’m not scientific with this method; I just kind of toss in a pinch of leaf and steep until I feel like stopping. But it works alright for me.

I like this. The first few steeps were a bit blah, but then it started to get creamy and sweet and smooth. It’s a great oolong.

Um…not sure about this one. I don’t want to give it a thumbs down yet…but I will say this…

Not much for scent – maybe that of a pale gunpowder prior to steeping. The leaves of this blend are hardcore! OMG! The leaves expand much more than ANY tea I have ever seen! WOW! So…beware…you certainly don’t need much. Having said that…I could have very well oversteeped this with too much from the start…another reason I don’t want to give it a thumbs down yet.

After steeping it smells kind of like dirty socks. I know…NOT cool, eh!? Well, it does calm down a bit as it sits in the cup.

It’s light brown in color.

The taste is a choir of bitter, woodsy/bark, and pepper. At first taste a real turn off. The aftertaste is NOT pleasant either. I am really hoping my next attempt at this is more successful. Next time I will have to remember…less…is more…

Super short steep time. Easy to oversteep and completely ruin. I can’t believe the tin says 3 minutes. That amount of time makes it taste like dirty rotten tree bark that’s been soaking in urine. However, with a 15-30 second steep max, this tea yields a smooth yet slightly bitter flavor. The hints of flowers in the Adagio description means that it taste like eating flowers, not a floral smell. So if you don’t like the edible variety of flowers, then you won’t like this tea. The hints of honey are an outright lie. Not a sweet tea by any means.

I didn’t use anything in this tea.
The taste up front is a dark-astringent oolong which fades into a sweet finish that also fades quickly. Very weak mouth and no lasting impressions what so ever.
Meh.

I need to write more. Boo.

So after the leaves from a mystery-origin (Protip: don’t label tea tins with post-its) TKY were spent, I brewed up some of this, and in contrast to the TKY, this tasted much bolder and very fruity….the fruitiness especially got my attention… golden raisins and white peaches come to mind. I actually enjoyed it more than the TKY, which I found strange, since this tea is much older and lower-quality than the TKY I was drinking. This leads me to a few possible conclusions:

- The mystery TKY I was enjoying before this is actually older/lower grade than I believed, and was just a bad comparison. I’ll be honest in that I was very passively enjoying the TKY while working on a project and wasn’t especially paying a lot of attention to it.
- I have had so much TKY lately that I am burned out on it or it just tastes standard to me, and it was nice to have something different in an oolong.
- This tea has been sitting around so long (seriously, I think I’ve had this little tin for three years) that it magically developed new flavor characteristics with time. Kind of unlikely, I think (at least, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of green oolongs aging well), but I won’t rule it out.

I mean, I’ll be honest, I never thought of this as an amazing tea. I’m pretty sure that this is leftover from a sampler from years ago when I was beginning my tea-tasting journey; I guess in that early phase of trying every tea possible this one fell by the wayside in that awkward category of, “good, but there are better”. So it became a “mixer,” something I would occasionally add a few leaves of to my morning mug-worthy blacks for some extra richness, but not something I considered taking the time to gaiwan-brew. Once I lumped it into that category, it kind of stayed there for years, and I think my tastes have since changed. Honestly, the only reason I decided to brew it is because I only had a tiny bit left, and I’m trying to finish off all my little bits. But this tea really surprised me. I’m a little sad it’s gone.

I don’t think I will order this again (I might, just to settle the nagging theory that it was the age that brought out the best of it), sadly the flavor faded after only a few short steeps but I definitely want to investigate other huang jin oolongs now.

When I was first exploring the tea-world, I guess I latched onto TKY as “BEST OOLONG EVER” and made the mistake of shunning other perfectly good oolongs such as this. Discoveries like this kind of make me kick myself over missed opportunities, but at the same time are pretty exciting; I feel like a tea-newbie all over again!

Slightly roasted oolong with earthy flavor. I really hoped for promised flowery and honey notes but they never showed up. All I could taste was woodiness and a subtle sweet finish. Aroma was so fleeting that it felt almost non-existant. Falls into “drink and forget” category for me.

I have tried this a few times now at different temps and steep times. I just do not like it at all. It was my first oolong so there is a chance that I just don’t care for them. The dry leaves smelled unappealing. The flavor reminds me of malt and over-stewed greens. I like mild green teas and this oolong reminded me of an extremely vegetatal green. Not for me.

I steeped for 5 minutes. The color is very pale yellow. I do smell a faint “tea smell” but there is almost no taste. As the cup started to cool off, I began to taste a little tea. Slightly earthy with a faint musty smell and taste. Maybe I needed more leaves despite being careful about the portion due to TeaEqualsBliss’s review. Not good…not bad. This one is just blah.

This is my fourth attempt at this tea. First few times I foolishly steeped it too long hoping it would blossom into something more palatable. In the end, however, it keeps on tasting like soggy smelly wood, almost like driftwood. A minute thirty steep time helps make it a little better but I do not taste any honey or “floral” hints. It’s a very blah oolong.

Hrm. Not sure where the negative reviews of this tea are coming from. I’m sipping it again after a long while, and enjoying it greatly. Very sweet, clean and refreshing.

I quite liked this tea: it’s smooth and sweet and not overpowering. It’s also a great value in my opinion. The only downside is that I could re-steep this tea only twice. But then again I like my tea on the strong side.

Great taste, sweet and smooth and a little earthy. I feel the flavor palate is a bit complex. Reminds me of a hot summer day at sunset. Don’t ask me why or how I can’t explain either.

I’m not sure what to think about this tea. Maybe I used too little leaf, but it really unwound when I added the hot water to it. Honey-colored and very light, I’m into more robust teas such as darker oolongs and blacks. A pleasant enough mouth-feel that I always get when drinking oolongs.

It reminds me a lot of Chinese greens, which is probably the closest thing to this tea. I don’t get the intense florals in it, although I do taste floral. I suspect my palate is no where near refined enough to pick out all the subtle flavors, but I do use thrice-filtered well water which probably kills those right off along with my constant sinus stuff.

I’m glad I have a sample as I would probably pass on buying this tea. It’s not extraordinary but it was nice to try.

I love the look of this tea as it steeps. It starts out as tiny little BBs of green tea that expand (explode would actually be a better description) into giant tea leaves. The leaves have a woodsy, earthy smell that brews into a lighter colored tea with a subtle green tea taste. Hard to describe the taste, but it’s a little bit earthy, with almost a mineral-like quality to it. Not bad for a green tea, just not knock your socks off good.

I guess the sample I got was a much lighter roast than many of the other reviews, because the floral tone and sweetness were much more overt in my cup. I was not doing gongfu, but I did use fairly short steepings, and got a pale green infusion with a strong floral scent. The taste had a brief woody body that gave way to a very sweet taste and floral finish. Hotter water and longer infusions yielded a stronger, darker body (though certainly not the bitter woody taste some others have described). A solid light-oxidation oolong for casual drinking, though it seems Adagio is a bit inconsistent with this one.

First time tasting an oolong and it was…interesting. The leaves smelled good, a bit grassy but good. The tea itself was ok, a bit of sweetness which was good but I just didn’t warm up to grassyness of the flavor. I may try it again with less leaves but I don’t know.

Brad – pretty good, very similar to a green. Not special, but very good for the price.
Sarah agrees. 

This brewed up pretty musky… reminds me of over-ripe cantaloupe and alfalfa hay. There’s something weird and tropical in the scent… papaya maybe? A weird sticky sweetness. And it has a hint of grassiness like a green tea. The other comments on here make me think I may have oversteeped this… I’ll play around with the rest of my sample, but thus far this is not my favorite oolong I’ve tried.

Golden Flower or Huang Jin Bolero is a very interesting light green oolong. When brewed very lightly with little leaf it comes out tasting a bit like Pouchong. When brewed with more leaf it comes out as having some light floral and maybe honey notes. I can understand the honey from how it is described but quite honestly if it was not suggested I would not have noticed. The only problem that I have with this tea is that it is really hard to brew right even as one that is reasonably experienced of gaiwan gongfu brewing oolongs and it is way too hit or miss for me. I’ve brewed it several times with multiple infusions and while the few cups that turned out well were excellent the others were not so good.