Yun Nan Dian Hong Black Tea Full-Leaf

The leaves of this are long and twisted into tight strands. There’s a nice splattering of golden tips, maybe 25-30% golden tips. The dry sent smells like bread honey and a hint of smoke. Like fresh crusty straight from the oven bread that’s got a little bit of charred spots on it, drizzled with a healthy helping of honey. The wet leaf loses most of that smokey note, leaving just perfectly cooked bread and honey.

1.5tsp, 8oz water, 195F, 1,1,2,4, minute steeps. Sweetened with stevia.

Oh wow, definitely a fruity note here. I don’t always get fruity notes in black teas that other people experience fruit notes, but this really tastes like apricots. There’s also the crusty hearty bread, and honey, and some grainy notes. This is a thick slab of fresh baked 9 grain bread, smothered in apricot jam, and drizzled with honey. I should have used a longer steep time with cup two, because it’s a bit more weak, and loses the apricot jam and grain notes.

Third cup I accidentally let go cold, still good, bread and honey, but wish I tried it hot. Forth cup some cocoa comes out to play. And some sweet potato. It’s now light bodied and the texture is a touch thin, though.

Yum. Next time, I think I’ll do 1,2,3 and then maybe 5-6 minute steep. Definitely delicious. More thick slab of bread while the Golden Tip version they have is more sweet potato fries. Both delicious and I don’t think I could choose which I like more!

I ordered a sample of this tea in my last order, as I thought it would be fun to try another version of the yunnan Dian hong. I love the golden tips one so much! This version is darker, more malty, but still has some sweet potato goodness. I think I prefer the golden tips, but I wouldn’t pass this up if it was offered to me!

I could swear that I reviewed this before, but I couldn’t find it. It’s majestic. For some reason that’s the first word that came to my mind. It is strong, proud, malty and just a big old ball of yum. The second steep is as strong as the first one, and I think I will try for a third. It’s quite delicious.

Another lovely Yunnan tea from TeaVivre! I’ve learned to have very high expectations for their teas, whether they’re premium, superfine, nonpareil, or just regular. They’ve definitely become one of my top 5 favorite companies for tea. I’ve tried three of their other Dian Hong teas, and I have a sample of the last one on the way. So I was curious to see how this compared, and where it fell between the Gold Tip and “regular” Dian Hong versions. The leaves are long and straight, and quite thin. I would estimate the golden bud content to be about 40%. Dry, the leaves smell quite sweet with lots of honey and apricot, and some mild malt in the background. Did the usual 3 minute steep. :D

Wow, the aroma! This is definitely the strongest honey scent I’ve ever found in a tea, and it’s accompanied by lovely apricot and raisin notes, and the ubiquitous malt.

I was so surprised by the taste that it deserves a new paragraph… Lol. It has the lovely bread flavor that I’ve come to expect from good Yunnans, but it also tastes like creamy oatmeal and chewy raw grains. This is reminding me a lot of Shang’s red teas with their combination of white and black tea flavors. It has that grain note that borders on being a white tea-like sweet hay flavor. The honey really starts to come out near the end, along with the apricot, and these two form a lovely aftertaste with a bit of graininess still present.

I have to say, this is not at all what I expected! I was prepared for this to fall somewhere between the bready/honey/stonefruit of the Golden Tip and the earthier and more robust “regular” Dian Hong. But this definitely has a flavor profile all its own, and it’s very delicious.

Thanks Angel and Mary at Teavivre for giving me to opportunity to try so many of your teas at little to no cost to me! You have an amazing company and your service is always fantastic!

Edit: Totally forgot to mention that I took a huge mouthful of this, and then there was this pesky tingling in my throat. Of course, I ended up coughing and spewing tea everywhere… Luckily, it was mostly just all over my pajamas and not my laptop. Such a graceful moment.

This was one of the teas waiting for me when I came back from trying tea in SF Chinatown. Since I still don’t have a gaiwan, I brewed this in the Western electric kettle method.

Another new and delicious China black tea for me, the dried leaves of Yun Nan Diang Hong are probably the biggest I’ve ever seen for black tea: long and twisted, with nearly an equal number of tan as dark chocolate brown pieces. The scent is quite rich and seems to be closer to Golden Monkey than, say, to Congou. Also closer to Bailin Gongfu, which seemed to me to be related to Golden Monkey somehow as well… Golden Monkey is the sweetest, most caramelly of the three, but they all have a rich and decadent, foody quality.

The liquor brewed up orange amber, and there was so much color to the remaining drops in the glass pot, that I recognized that the apparently spent leaves were still literally oozing with flavor. A second infusion confirmed that this tea, like Golden Monkey, produces an enjoyable second glass—in fact, nearly as good as the first.

I had been focusing mainly on Teavivre’s green tea offerings, but now I see that there is just as much new terrain to be covered among the black teas! I’ll definitely be stocking a supply of this excellent tea. I noticed at the website that there are three different versions. This one is a winner for sure!

(7/29/14)

Queued post, written April 27th 2014

I received this one from Courtney and I thought it rang a bell. I know I’ve had some of Teavivre’s Yunnans before, but I couldn’t remember if it was this one. I had a look through the database, and found I was both right and wrong. I had had one before, but it was not this one.

This has an aroma of lots of grain and a good deal of cocoa. The grainy note is very close to freshly baked rye bread, actually. One baked with sourdough, I think. (How detailed is that!)

It’s got quite a sweet flavour with a smidge of chocolate-y cocoa to it. For me, cocoa and chocolate are not the same flavours at all. There is a significant difference to it sometimes. It has to do with how it feels in the mouth as well. For this particular tea, though, it seems to fall right between the two and I can’t decide if I think it’s more one or the other.

It’s thankfully free of that hay-ness that plagues Yunnan blacks for me and instead has a good deal of malty grain to it. On the aftertaste I’m getting that note that some people think is like black pepper and I don’t really think it is, but I can see why they say so.

I thought initially that I would compare this to the Teavivre Yunnan I had before, but my experience of this one was so different from the other that comparing them serves no purpose.

Tea of the morning…..

And I am now down to half of the sweetener I have been using. Luckily, a good quality tea doesn’t need much if at all in the way of additives. One of these days, I will be drinking it without additions. I just couldn’t do it cold turkey, so I decided to try to work my way down. I am not sure I would have even tackled it, but I am trying to cut out non-whole food kinds of things from my diet plus grains and sugar. Just in the week and a half I have been skipping the grains and sugar, I feel so much better. It makes me wonder if I had a wheat sensitivity.

Anyway, the tea is very good. Not as sweet potatoey as the golden tip version of this tea, not as earthy as the lower grade. I am going to refresh my memory on the other grades of this tea. I may be trading up my basic Dian Hong. Stay tuned.

Usual teapot method with a resteep at 6 minutes that is very good!

So this was one of the samples I got from Teavivre’s reviewers sample offer. This is actually the second time I’ve had this, but the first time it was kinda unexpected since the packet had split open during transit and I wanted to use some so I could tape the packet closed.
This time around I was much more prepared, though I’m not sure I used the correct amount of leaf since there was no recommendation on the packet. But it turned out nicely anyway. Lol.
It’s gota pretty strong roasty taste to it, with an added woody element, but it’s also oddly sweet. I get a small bit of maltyness but I mostly get woodsy/roasty tastes. Very little astringency which is nice. And the more I ponder each sip, I get a vague peppery sory of feeling/taste.
It’s not really to my taste at the moment, but I’m not about to pour my mug of it out because of that. Lol. I’ll probly end up either giving the remaining two packets to friends/family, or keeping them to add to the travelling tea box I’m pondering on putting together.

Unrelated note but I wanted to vent – typing this on my Ipad stinks. It deleted this at first, but I found out you can undo typing (or in this case deleting text accidentally) by shaking the ipad and it’ll give you an ‘undo typing’ prompt. I wish I had know this sooner since it would’ve saved me much frustration. Lol.