We are drinking this at work now, my boss and me. We just polished of the Da Hong Pao yesterday and she’s like me and loving the cocoa-y notes. (Also, Fujian Province. I knew it) So we decided to get another oolong to have at work. I don’t really have anything at home that would be work-suitable at the moment, so I went to this tea shop in the city where I work and bought this.
I am not a fan of said shop and I only use it when in dire need, like for example not having any tea to drink at work the next day and not being able to make it back to own city and proper tea shop before they close. So I didn’t really have a choice!
And that’s when it happened, that incident I wrote about the other day and I made a random choice of this one over the supposedly wildly different Formosa oolong that looked and smelled exactly the same. Cause… you know… Formosa and Taiwan? Totally not the same thing. Apparently.
That shop disappoints me every. Single. Time.
And the tea itself, I’m afraid isn’t really that much of a change.
It seems to be less fermented than the Da Hong Pao and the dry leaves didn’t have any of that cocoa-y quality that I’m beginning to suspect is a more or less uniquely Fujian-y quality (what do you think?), a freak coincidense when it shows up in other teas. This was more vegetative and grassy, which made it smell a bit more perky, but I really missed that cocoa note.
After steeping I thought I got a small under-note of cocoa, but the aroma was more or less the same as before. A little difficult to pick up though. My boss said she mainly just got nose-fulls of steam.
In the flavour the cocoa was still absent. As was most other flavour. It had a grassy taste at first, but no aftertaste to speak off. It was like, at first you got the grass note and then expected some more body and got a mouthful of nothing. Not even a hint of an aftertaste. Not one little bit. It was just gone. Very fleety.
As it got nearer to lukewarm, a weak weak weak cocoa note appeared, but not enough to satisfy. Especially because it took the tea getting lukewarm to get it in the first place. It’s the same with the aftertaste. It put in an appearance in a sort of oolong-y wooden note, but it still took the tea getting lukewarm.
We’re going to experiment some with longer steeping times, but other than that, we’ve got about 250g of boring tea to get through. Not bad tea. Just boring. I think I’ll suggest we get a strong black the next time we need to stock up…
