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Black Tea by Upton Tea Imports
This fully oxidized Shan tea (or Mountain Tea) is produced from ancient tea trees from the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. The dark leaves are decorated with a modest amount of tips. The liquor is a rich amber color with a smooth, clean taste and a lightly sweet finish.
Origin:
Vietnam
A lighter black tea from Vietnam…semi-sweet, clean, and pleasing. I’m enjoying it quite a bit actually.
The aroma was a little different at first – somewhat like a mellow pu-erh but that faded away quickly. It ended up being more of an old book type smell.
Yup! I like the sweetness especially when it gets cooler.
Decent!
Hrmm… kind of light, with a somewhat musty aftertaste to it. I jokingly referred to it as ‘attic tea’, because it kind of gives me that feeling of rummaging through old, dusty boxes of forgotten stuff.
Missy and I bought this sample from Upton because we’re very fond of the Vietnamese tea that SerendipiTea uses as the base for their Colonille vanilla flavored black. This one isn’t terrible, but I don’t think it’s something we’re going to want to keep around. As a straight black, there are just too many good choices that it would be competing with.
I read the description when I put this on the wishlist and thought OH EM GEE! I can get the base that my Colonille uses. It’s one of my favorite teas because it’s very smooth and I love vanilla. I was expecting some thing different so this probably isn’t a very fair review.
I’m not sure I’d ever label this one as clean. I get why Dylan said attic tea because it has a taste that reminds of dust or old things. Other than that, it is smooth. I have this metallic after taste in my mouth that reminds me of sticking my tongue on a 9 volt batteries when I was little. It’s just a little strange.
This is only tea that I have had from Vietnam. This is also the only tea that I’ve drank that comes off exactly as advertised. The tea has beautiful leaves and steeps up amber in color. The tea has a refreshing clean taste with a slightly sweet finish. This is not a heavy or breakfast tea. I really enjoyed this tea and it is one I may reorder.
This is the first Vietnamese tea I’ve had in years and only my second overall.
Maybe I got a little overexuberant in buying this tea-only one review here (over a year ago) and none on Upton’s site in the past year. The dry leaves are short, tightly rolled and dark brown with a just a few golden tips. Can’t really describe the leaf aroma-just kinda a generic woods-ey type smell. It brews a coppery liquor and tastes very similar to Assam (which I was kinda expecting). However, this tea is off. Seems stale to me. I assume the tea hasn’t been sitting in a foil sample pouch all this time waiting for someone to order it. This is why I have started to gravitate toward companies that can give me a harvest date on their teas. Hope this is just an aberration. Too bad-it was a promising tea.
The description the company gives is pretty accurate on this one; I don’t have much to add. Refreshing, a very good version of what I think of when I think of the classic tea taste. This would also make a great iced tea no doubt.
