240 Tasting Notes
This is a decent green-style example of Ti Quan Yin. It’s fresh, has a strong floral breath, and holds ginger, ginseng, and lychee throughout. Towards the throat, this tea brings a slightly sour tang and then finishes clean. I think it would benefit from a little roasting, but in this form it works well as something bright and smooth.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had this and the 50% roasted teas at the Fang Tea Expo and at home, having purchased 50 grams of this tea. It may be the most surprisingly delicious tea I’ve ever had. I’ve long been disinterested in TGY, largely due to the fact that most of the green stuff to be found throughout the states is incredibly stale and of poor quality (if it’s even TGY). After enjoying this tea at a tasting in Flushing, I have a new mind about TGY. This tea is incredibly floral and does a wonderful job of balancing the complexity of the green leaf with the added flavor of the roasting. What comes out is a plentiful bouquet of deep honey, light caramel, lychee, chestnuts, and camphor. It leaves a long lingering cooling sensation on the tongue and smacks of ginger and ginseng. A real trooper, it steeps way out into the teens. Beautiful leaves, incredible quality, wonderful tea.
I feel a little bad comparing Teavana’s sencha to vacuum-sealed, air-freighted, direct-from-Japan examples, but it’s hard not too. Once you’ve put your lips to that buttery, silken, kelpy, fishy delight, it makes more wholesale Japanese teas seem stale, weak, and poorly processed. Such is the case, with this one, I suppose. It came across as flat, a touch old and dusty right out of the bag.
I’ve been drinking my way through two ounces of this over the past two months. It’s a great winter cup. There’s an awful lot of fractured pieces in the batch I received, but it still yields a juicy, fresh cup. Strawberries, honey, and oats. Soft and sweet. Steeps many times longer than I expected it to.
This may have been one of my least favorite sheng pu-erhs. The iron compression was dense, but easily extractable. Numerous small, dark leaves. My favorite part of this tea was the initial aroma from the first steeping. It had the intensity of warm beeswax, oozing honey and just glowing. A dingy orange soup made for a less inviting experience. Flavors were all over the place, damp moss, rough tobacco (not the elegant, floral pipe or aged wrapper, but maybe wet cigarette or old burnt cigar), and tree bark. The most noticeable sensation was a parching “cooked” bitterness, as if it were blended with some hongcha. The finish was thin, with little viscosity or sweetness. Unbalanced.
Xiaguan sheng puerhs are famous (or imfamous?) for their heavy tobacco (yeah, not even smokey, but as you said, tobacco!) taste when being young. Many people say when Xiaguan sheng gets older, it will out-perform many other sheng puerh. I haven’t yet stored a sheng for that long time to see, but plan to open my 2004 xiaguan tuo in probably 2012 :D
Interesting. I’m not in an hurry to get back to this sample, so we’ll see how it is down the road a ways.
Three steeps down the road this tea gradually heads for a ditch of generic sweetness. It loses any of that funky complexity and just gives a plain, sweet graininess that’s not bad, but not that much fun and not really worth it. Too bad, because the sour and spice play was rather enjoyable.
After a two weeks hiatus from sheng, this tea proved to be a unique reintroduction. Leaves were well compressed, but flaked relatively easy, throwing off nice big curls. The sheen and mottled appearance of the cake was satisfying to the eye. The first two steeps gave an even clean soup, with very low astringency and a slick oily character. A breath of morning dawn cool mint camphor exhaled in the smack of the tea. The third and fourth steeps got a little funky, with palpable sourness (which I enjoyed) and some almost wheat-like, chewy bread notes. Light on the smoke, tobacco, and musk. Minerals and sandy soil. I like the eclectic blend of characters in this beeng, as they’re all pleasant, if a bit odd. Darker soup, with some oranger leaves present, but not so many as to give a hongcha character to the flavor.
As the first tea brewed in my new yixing, this sheng puerh was a wondeful opener. Rather tight build, with small, dense leaves. Opening quickly, it released gentle sweet yellow plum, hot afternoon rain, and camphor. The soup a dense, even clear dark yellow. Further steeps gave a distinct aged and musky golden tobacco, a bit sticky. This tea knows no bitterness. Only intense, wonderful sweetness, despite a rather fine chop. The only downside of this tea is that I thought it gave out a little quickly, becoming a bit thin on the ninth steep. Otherwise, a fresh, juicy cup that is already well-married and will probably age beautifully.
